It turns out that FaceTime is like an Egg McMuffin and not like Coca-Cola. Coke is a combination of many readily-available ingredients plus the mysterious, top-secret, and proprietary Merchandise “X” that turns a Cola into a Coke. When Apple created the FaceTime standard, they combined existing, open, off-the-shelf standards for network communication, handshaking, and media streaming into a new recipe, creating a technique that practically anybody can replicate.

These are the treasures that await when you take the time to read a 6000-word Andy Ihnatko review.  Not only is Andy the only journalist I can think of who would even put an analogy like this into a review, he is the only one who could pull it off.

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