Little consumer wireline but substantial wireline overall. NN is an extremely positive thing for Sprints network planning/design, as they are building capacity over intelligence. Source: I stare at Sprints network maps every day.
I use the RRD Graphs from pfsense to monitor my stuff, I have had to escalate multiple times with TWC proactive group to get some rather severe issues taken care of. Stuff like high latency to the gateway, packet loss to the gateway, intermittent WAN disconnects.
Make sure the techs they send check your line and the nearby lines for return and noise levels.
I would imagine he's comparing to the typical resolution changes on Windows where everything is significantly smaller. OS X scaling does much better at replicating a normal image, and personally I find it much more comfortable of an image to stare at for extended periods.
Disabling whole cores or lumps of cache to improve yields is one thing, but a lot of the features Intel is segmenting the market with are very tightly integrated with the rest of the chip. It would be extremely hard to detect and classify a defect as affecting HyperThreading or VT-x but leaving the core otherwise functional. It's a bit more plausible that defects in the high half of a vector SIMD unit could leave you with a SSE-capable but AVX-defective chip, but I suspect that in practice any broken functional units are treated as rendering the entire core inoperable.