Plenty of families don't actually need N cars. They can probably get by with N-1 and summon another when needed.
Also, one car can do multiple errands without a driver, eg drop someone off at work, drop the kids off at school, and then go stage somewhere until needed.
In Europe entire families usually share just one car. Some cities like Jena, Germany (<100k) have 4 tram lines and three inter-city rail stations (1 that serves a high speed ICE train). That famous city from the song, Chattanooga, no longer has a (functional) passenger rail station at all.
>In Europe entire families usually share just one car.
Yet, in the case of France, the number of cars per household keeps rising; the share of households owning 2 cars, owning 3 cars, keep rising as well; in spite of the decrease of the size of households (the number of people per household).
To add insult to injury, car owners have become so lazy that don't bother parking their cars in their garage or their yard. Nope, that's out of fashion, now they park them on the public space: streets, roadsides, side-walks, etc. It's like witnessing an invasion, it spreads everywhere.
Your note about the brand is so true that even their self-awareness lacks self-awareness, such as this note from the SF Symphony first-timer's guide:
6. What should I wear to a San Francisco Symphony concert?
Contrary to what many people think, formal attire—such as tuxedos and evening gowns—is not required at Symphony concerts. In fact, most people only wear formal clothing to our Opening Gala. At our other concerts, most concertgoers wear business or cocktail attire.
It is really the other way around at other places. The orchestra in my town (my old employer before tinnitus ended my carreer) has a big image of the solo clarinettist in a quite out-doorsy clothing saying something about how you should come as you are and ignore the fact that the whole orchestra looks like penguins.
And in my city they’ve started live-streaming the operas and concerts to big video walls in multiple squares around the city, most of which in low-income areas.
With the original iPhone's marketing, the question implicitly being asked and answered was "how is the iPhone better than my feature phone / BlackBerry?"
With the iPhone 6's marketing, the question implicitly being asked and answered is "how is the iPhone 6 better than my current iPhone?"
At this point, there aren't that many potential iPhone 6 customers in the US who still don't know what iOS feels like.
Barriers to entry such as wiki markup are rarely about whether a group of people are theoretically capable of doing something. The larger problem is that an article about [x] will now only be started/improved by the cross-section of people who both care about [x] and are willing to spend time on the unrelated concept of wiki markup.
In a public general-interest Internet conversation, when you reach the limit of your willingness to productively engage, it may be prudent to cease engaging.
I wouldn't write off mockery as unproductive. It's been an element of perfectly productive political discourse since the beginning of recorded political discourse. If done well and in an informed fashion, it ends up dispelling the illusion that any ignorant bit of pseudo-theory someone can conjure up is worthy of the public sphere.
Most already have. Looking backward, the primary competition has been web, not OS X. Looking forward, the ascent of mobile is only making it easier to deprioritise Windows.
