Not all of us tech people aspire to be system administrator on every single box with an operating system that we own or come into contact with. Eventually you start to realise there are too many boxes and not enough time. I have absolutely zero interest in being able to ssh into my mobile phone - I'm happy to accept that the people who were working on building the mobile phone full-time are going to be doing better work than I can manage to squeeze in outside of my day job.

No kidding! I have enough of a time on my own projects. I don't particularly care about adjusting gamma on my TV or constantly f'ing with the microwave to get it to warm up pizza. Although I enjoy hacking, sometimes I just want stuff to work. I'd rather tinker with something that's going to make my products better rather than spending hours trying to get a phone to do something. I spend enough hours getting molested by Heroku and performing anal exams on obscure Gems and a/b testing and blah, blah, blah. If I wanted to waste my time on a phone, I would have bought Android.

I'd speak for yourself — as a die hard "tech person" nothing in tech gives me a beefier erection than successfully accomplishing science fiction.

Thanks for that mental image.

We do? I'm an geek, using Linux with a custom kernel and a tilling WM, and I never had any real interest in Apple products, but Siri seems fantastic; it's the first time I really want an iPhone feature.

Siri seems to be the dream of every guy who read or viewed sci-fi, where voice interfaces are ubiquitous.

Sure, I'd wish it didn't transmit everything to "the cloud", and I'm definitively not buying an iPhone just for it, but it reached to me like no other Apple product did.

No, it is simply another means of control, like touch input.