You seem to be doing that extreme-libertarian thing where you call taxes "robbery" while ignoring the negative economic effects of the general lack of safety nets in the US.
You may want to read up on the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" first.
> our human intelligence performs far more sophisticated operations than are possible given the number of neurons that exist in our brains
This only holds if you presume those operations are being performed in the same way as a computer, rather than the incredibly imprecise rule-of-thumb heuristics they actually use.
My high school was an interesting experience. It was a poor area and they expected few of the students to go to further education - but rather than use that as an excuse to treat the students like losers, the school tried to include some of the spread of college and vocational-school classes. I ended up taking lessons on archery, welding, video editing, and Latin, among other things.
> just so you are dependent on yet another Apple product
The hardware requirements of a headphone jack put some very real limitations on phone design (waterproofing, interior space taken up by the digital -> analog hardware, etc).
Whether that was the driving cause or not is in the air, but "getting people to buy Lightning stuff" isn't the only reason to do it.
What I'm wondering is if you can charge just one earbud at a time while using the other.
For a lot of uses (for example: podcasts, casual movie watching on a long flight, getting driving directions on a road trip), it'd be entirely practical to use one earbud at a time and so have effectively 24+ hours battery life.
The only other company putting up a serious effort in the same niche is aiming at $150 (and releasing a month later than the AirPods) [1], so there's probably some lower bound here set by the complications of the hardware/R&D to seamlessly connect two separate earbuds through your head and to the phone.
There are plenty of first-party Nintendo virtual titles, though, and most likely plenty of people (like me!) who now refuse to buy them because they have to be bought over and over and over again for any new hardware.
> isn't evolution as we currently understand it computationally too expensive?
What? This question doesn't even really make sense to me in the first place.
Natural selection isn't a computational process. It's the consistent but basically coincidental result of constant subtle mutations and genetic inheritance.
> Now making a big jump from e.g. fish to a bird seems to me impossible in polynomial time (even in billion years)
It obviously isn't impossible, since it happened. If you believe otherwise, your perceptions and/or assumptions are wrong.
From what I understand, the encryption is done client-side per individual item (e.g. if you use a cloud provider, unencrypted data never touches them), but there's some generally questionable stuff in how it handles secure things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9727297
One of the more persistent annoyances of the modern web for the tech-savvy is the experience of putting a long, randomly generated password into a site and getting an "invalid characters" error.
You may want to read up on the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" first.