razors and to an extent cars arent dynamic products.. when was the last time you heard of a shaving product manufacturer announce an update? the difference between a razor with a fixed need for a specific part that costs a few pounds and a pc/mac that is in constant need of care are very different.. its a ridiculous argument.
Yes, they could limit the specs of macs to exactly what they want them to be.. but a large number of computer users like to be able to specify their own hardware, such as the graphics card, the amount of ram, the hard drive size and any number of weird and wonderful peripherals.
I think that, given how stubborn people are, apple will have to looen their grip on the specs and allow users more freedom if they want to conquer the mass market.
With regards to the onlive thing, im pretty sure that those videos are on ideal settings.. the data centre may be 50 miles away... but if theyre connected directly by fiber and not having to jump through hoops via adsl providers, its a completely different scenario.
Case in point... I work at a datacentre, and the ping to our other site 70 miles away is maybe 2ms tops, file transfers are obviously very fast.
I live 15 minutes walk from work, which is maybe a mile? Suddenly that 2ms becomes 20ms when i connect from home. And to be fair to my home isp, the route is really short.. only 4 hops. Then you have to take into account that there will probably only be a handful of people using those servers in the videos.. what happens when they get a lot of customers? I'd be interested to know what hardware their servers are running, as crysis isn't a light game as they admit.. so how will they be affected when you have say 100000 players online at the same time?
For this to work on only 5Mbps, it would need to be rendered server side and basically be just video output you're witnessing. which means any latency is going to absolutely ruin your game :/
I'm sure in a perfect world it would work great, but in the real world i have my doubts.