Hello, hello? Is there an editor in the house?
The headline "Lines for newest Apple product smaller than normal" strays a bit from the idiom about lines (US) or queues (Brit).
Don't we usually refer to queues of people "lined up" for this or that bottleneck, as being "long" or "short"?
And about "smaller than normal," what is "normal". Does the head-writer mean "normal by Apple standards/practice/history"?

Not that people pay attention to headlines all that much--they just seep into our consciousness as a "frame"--(what was wrong with the word "context," I wonder?). And thereby color everything that follows in the story.

BTW, the head writer could have figured out a way to wiggle in one of Apple's "favorite words of the aeon," that paragon of Apple paeans to plug-n-play, Gestalt. When an Apple Macintosh "boots up," the Gestalt Manager is enlisted to check out the computer's gestalt, its environment, context, or (shudder) frame, frame of reference, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.

And what does said Gestalt Manager find? All the bits and pieces of hardware and software that have been previously registered by their creators with certain inalienable rights--their ticket to ride the Apple Experiment, their own unique* identification info.

And this is existential stuff--like, the software and hardware just won't function, won't work right--without that registration information tucked into the software file or burned onto a Gestalt chip (or circuit?) that the manufacture must design into its product, and manufacture with that chip aboard. And of course, Apple must keep the Gestalt registry intact, up-to-date, all their software must refer to it, and so on.

All of which has caused me (and I find later, folks with many, many more BeFriendings than I'll ever have also done so) to say that Apple, the Software Company, cares so much about its users, and their "users' experience", their desire to do useful things, easily, even with glee--that the company took on the responsibility of manufacturing its own hardware--and setting up the infrastructure to accommodate another world-full of "third-party" hardware and software. That's a lot of "infrastructure" to make it easier for Appleistas (also known as customers) to "just do it", to do their thang [drawing, planning, tracking, talking, writing, movie- and music-making, photographing--communicating perhaps foremost, and whatever else creative critters can imagine and then implement], what ever it happens to be. [I used to be a software developer on Macs, and had the job of registering our "app"--and all the file-types, about 60, that this "app", a newspaper art department graphic artist's "Designer's Assistant"©®™... would be using.]

What I wanted to illustrate for you, about headlines and computers--and headlines and "monologs" about computers, is that the entire context, the Gestalt, is as CRUCIAL to successful communication as it is to successful computing. Fortunately/unfortunately, there is always more gestalt, more context, more continuum, than I think any of us can ever master. With the help of great tools and much labor, invention and good will, we can certainly do better than our parents could. And if the planet survives war, pestilence, famine--death, however, "happeneth to us all alike"--our children might do better than we have done. A fond hope, for which there's little substantiation in our current gestalt.

----notes-----

* A word about the word "unique." Isn't it fitting to use "unique" in discussing Apple Macintosh computers' gestalt. Computers--all of 'em that I know about--work at base with only zeros and ones, the binary numbering system, radix/root two, I think it's described. A teensy transistor stores either a zero or a one. It's either on or off. "Unique" is, similarly, a binary word. (This concept is something my late father made a part of our family communication gestalt, particularly after the advent of TV--about a decade after everyone else had a TV, we got a popular model (NOT) with remote control (via a 3/4-inch diameter cable) to my dad's "reading chair"). Brand name, Conrac. I never saw it elsewhere, 'til I had the opportunity 20 years later to frequent a TV studio control room. There, the Conrac logo was common.

Unique is derived from Uno, the popular card...oops, from Uno, Latin for "one". I take it as an absolute, unlike our current "reportorial-style" dictionaries which might as well go with a "google vote" on spelling, meaning, etc. Lights are either on or off. Here's the Apple/Oxford Eng. Dict.: "usage: There is a set of adjectives—including unique, complete, equal, and perfect —whose core meaning embraces a mathematically absolute concept and which therefore, according to a traditional argument, cannot be modified by adverbs such as really, quite, or very. For example, since the core meaning of unique (from Latin ‘one’) is ‘being [the] only one of its kind,’ it is logically impossible, the argument goes, to submodify it: it either is ‘unique’ or it is not, and there are no stages in between. In practice, the situation in the language is more complex than this. Words like unique have a core sense, but they often also have a secondary, less precise (nonabsolute) sense of ‘very remarkable or unusual,’ as in . It is advisable, however, to use unique in this sense sparingly and not to modify it with , , , etc."

I rate this rank editorial pusillanimity with a booo, hiss. Do you note the familiar fudge, at least in our time, "In practice, the situation…is more complex than this"? Think of assertions of fact in our world today. One of my favorites is this, from NIST, an agency--supposedly scientific, with a title of National Institute of Standards and Technology--of our government that "investigated" the happenings of 9/11/2001. A NIST exec. asserted: "There was no evidence of explosives being used to bring down #7 WTC, #2 WTC and #1 WTC."

Some rude, rabble-rousing individual (he probably even has a "Question Authority" sticker on his car's bumper) then asked a fairly simple follow-up [to authority]:

Question: "So, did you look?" [for evidence of explosives, that is.]
Answer: [after a brief pause]. "No."

Unasked were the further questions, "So who decided, or who was the 'decider', on whether to look for evidence of explosives and/or accelerants?" And, "Who should be prosecuted for failing to follow our laws, rules and regs.? Like, laws prohibiting the denial of such civil rights as 'the right to be alive' or 'the right to due process,'?" And so on.

A good clue that mendacity is about to be employed, or lies launched, by any gummint official is when they shift the "frame" or context into the passive voice. Good to know that there are laws, rules and regs that REQUIRE our hirelings and votelings (our elected gummint officials) to search for evidence of "accelerants" and explosives in building collapses. And laws, rules and regs that REQUIRE that all crime scenes (the gestalt of criminal activity) be preserved until a full, tweezer- by tweezer-full crime scene investigation can be completed. On the other hand, what are a few thousand deaths in Manhattan and Virginia & Pennsylvania when compared to the billions of bucks our gummint can send over to its pals in the military-industrial complex, the billions of bucks our military can get in the form of "force projection" military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan--bases to replace those we quietly closed in Saudi Arabia, because that really, really annoyed Usama bin Laden and a few million other Muslims--and, lest we forget, attempted control of pumping and drilling rights in Iraq (How's that "Hydrocarbon Law" coming along now--haven't heard much about it from our so-called "free press"?, and the rights of way and "protected" status of the Afghanistan-to-the-sea (or to former Enron's "gas-fired" electric plant(s) in India), oil and natural gas pipeline contracts?

Unfortunately, we have no one in the United States to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," (Art. II, §3, clause 6) despite the past, what has it been, two, three, four, five? presidents who promised to do just that, with all the pomp and panoply of presidents taking their oath of office? It's such a shame, really, because I'm sure it would be even "uniquely" beneficial to the nation if presidents WERE to honor their oaths of office. Or perhaps the promise to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution only refers (Art. II, §1, ¶7) to the actual, original parchment on display in the rotunda of the National Archives building. Except that document's had such careful, archival "preserving," such massive "protection" (see Wikipedia or other sources on that topic), and is "defended" with guards all over the place, it would almost seem "rotunda-dundant" for the president to spend so much of his time over at the Archives, y'know? Then again, maybe the oath is about the People's instructions TO their gummint, by means of the WORDS, concepts and principles embodied by the WORDS of the document? You tell me. But I digress.