I could whack back at all of those, but I'll just do the most interesting one.
You don't understand the innovation in those products. But don't worry, I'll tell you:
A7 is a new mobile ARM architecture that no one was anticipating. 64-bit is just a part of it. Read the Anandtech review to get an idea. It's has previously unheard of performance/watt -- incredibly important for mobile devices, obviously. The new Mac Pro his a fundamental shift in workstation power away from CPU to GPU. This is quite significant since CPU computing power increases have stagnated (relatively speaking) vs GPU computing power. This is a big step though... no one's quite sure if Apple is ahead of its time or made the wrong bet or what (well, at least no one should be sure). Re the fingerprint scanner... well, I agree in general that Apple isn't going to be somehow special in regard to protecting civil liberties. But fingerprint data isn't nearly as much a problem as location x time data so no real problem there re the NSA. I know iOS 7 is divisive. I still argue it's innovative. It's not so much the visual design (I like it fine, but I think a lot of things could have worked... to me it's not special). Maybe the most remarkable thing is how they've finally cracked OS updates. It seems small but when you can assume the bulk of the entire installed base will have the latest it really allows the platform to accelerate. This is something that would have been a huge boon to software development since it's very beginning and no one has managed to pull it off for a large scale platform... until now. It's huge and it's difficult to measure how this will benefit the platform. In the short term you'll just see that the software you use will be updated more quickly and consistently than ever before and will more quickly incorporate the latest system features (because developers can focus on the latest OS (or two for the most conservative) without fear of leaving their old customers behind. In the longer run, it means the platform can evolve much more quickly as a whole, so it's hard to say what this will mean. E.g., let's say bump to share is really a great thing. Samsubg introduces it in their S-whatever. But it only works with other S-whatever or later phone. Meaning, no matter how great it is, you're going usually not going to be able to find someone to use it with. The software developers all know this so they avoid designing software that actually depends on it. So a possibly great feature is almost completely neutered (note: I'm not actually saying bump-to-share is great -- I don't think it is -- I'm just trying to explain this in terms of something we all know.) But with iOS... well, now all of a sudden you *can* assume everyone has the latest and greatest. So you can design software that depends on it. And all of your users will mostly be able to take advantage of it without compromise. What will this lead to? I don't know. But it's great.
