And as someone who remembers (and was part of) the first phase of migration to Apple/OS X, around 2001/02, it seems to me that it had less momentum and was harder to envision than the migration from Apple that may be in its infancy now.

(Note: "migration from" doesn't imply losing market share, or even a lower growth rate. It rather means that a specific, tiny but crucial slice of mind share may have begun to erode.)

I think the very beginnings of it were earlier. The moment Apple jumped the shark was when they banned apps not originally written in C/ObjC from the app store. In that moment they made it virtually impossible to be a geek with any credibility and not be at least a little embarrassed to be an Apple fan. They reversed their decision but it was too late - geeks flooded into Android and the Android market increased its app count by about 400% in the ensuing months. Ever since then I've noticed that my geek friends who carry iPhones have been defensive about it - they say things to rationalize why they aren't carrying a real geek phone.

But this decision showed they were willing to make heavy-handed and capricious decisions at users' and developers' expense and revealed the dark side of Apple's policy of total control of their platform.

Is it a product, or a tribe?

Can we get off our snark and get people on our side instead? Comments should elevate others instead of showing off our sarcasm.

I've been an iPhone user since day 1, made some money on the app store, and my wife followed with the iPhone 3G, then my cast-off iPhone 4 when the 4S came out.

Now though, after I bought her a Nexus 7, she mentioned that she'd happily get an Android phone now. That's quite an indicator, and probably occurring all over the US. Google really hit it out of the park with the N7.

It's received a lot of bad press, but I feel like the majority of it is by the more hardcore Linux users who are understandably not used to the carpet being yanked from underneath them. I am still amazed, after an entire summer of using it, about just how much Gnome 3 has re-thought in terms of its UI. The experience is not without bumps and is definitely buggy in places, but I feel like it's the first open-source shell which places user experience at the top of its priority list.

EDIT: there are rumours Ubuntu 12.10 will come in a vanilla Gnome 3 flavour, as opposed to Unity. A "pure" Gnome 3 Debian is all I personally ever need to stay happy, particularly on my Apple hardware that (for now?) supports loading non-OSX operating systems.

I was looking at the Lenovo Carbon X1 as a possible candidate to replace the Macbook Air I'm currently using but it's not all-the-way-there yet. At least, not for me.

I'm hoping that the other manufacturers catch up soon.

Huh? It's Linux. It's just not GNU/Linux.

Now though the distraction is useful. I use GNU/Linux on my servers, desktops, and laptops, and I use Android/Linux on my phone. The terminology now makes conversation easier, instead of more cumbersome.