Google's spellchecker has been watching billions of people correct their own typos keystroke-by-keystroke for years. It runs on a global network of computers with untold hoards of RAM and disk arrays with indefinite IOPS. Your OSx spellchecker gets updated... occasionally, and it runs on your Mac.

> It runs on a global network of computers with untold hoards of RAM and disk arrays with indefinite IOPS.

Much of that is just to provide automatic spell checking to millions of people concurrently.

I would doubt the actual spell checking software for a single language, excluding proper names, would be something a Mac can't run.

Makes me think that the equivalent of this '30 years ago' story with today's present as the past will be "they used to carry out complex operations on their OWN computers? Oh, they had non-instant network speeds, that explains it..."

OS X uses Hunspell, an open source tool used by many. Maybe you should be complaining that Google aren't contributing to Hunspell or anything that might replace it.

Would you be surprised to hear that Google also uses Hunspell and has contributed to it?

Yeah... blame Google for Apple's shortcomings. Because Google is responsible for Apple's software choices.