Speaking for myself: a combination of ease of use, features, quality and a mature ecosystem. They certainly don't have a perfect track record in any of these, QA being a well-documented example in the last few years. And the alternatives have gotten better, but they're still not good enough to convince me to switch.
iPhones have better hardware/software integration, which is easy for Apple to do because they control everything. They get better performance out of their hardware because of this.
From Schiphol on Schengen flights frequently (~50% of the time) no one checks anything in my experience outside of scanning the QR to get into security, and into the plance.
I'm still pretty happy with the first version on my iPhone combined with Feedbin. Are there compelling reasons to upgrade aside from the fact that it's an iPad version as well?
Yeah, really, even conceding the inventory rebuild/weak dollar rally in that chart. I don't think that the aggregate numbers produced by the Fed are always useful when looking at the economy: the composition of the aggregates is usually so diverse as to render the aggregate meaningless. GDP is a canonical example.
The U.S. retains industrial capacity in high end and military areas, but that isn't going to help average people produce items that are valuable to one another and to people in other places, which is the core way to build wealth. We've masked this fact with debt for the last 30 years, and now it appears that that game is over.
