Posts by Erik Ray

Man buys MacBook Air, pulls it apart, takes pics

this is only v1

Anyone who has followed Apple over the years knows that this pattern is to be expected. Version 1 of a new product line will be sold at high price to a few early adopters. It will have problems, to be sure, but the point is Apple is dipping their toe into a new area. Don't forget, there will be dozens of later versions which address the problems and lower the prices.

Look at the iPod. It started as a $400 clunky, monochrome, 5GB brick. So many pundits claimed it would never sell, that it was overpriced and underpowered. Sounds familiar?

The complainers will always complain because they can't think outside the box. Version 2 will be better and cheaper. Version 3 better still and cheaper still. Eventually, everyone will be talking about the MBA's descendant as the must-have subnotebook.

Apple's in this for the long haul. Don't forget that.

Sun's war against clarity and business continues

sun = the anti-apple?

compare and contrast with apple's attitude toward social networking. are there any apple employees freely speaking their minds? do you think this helps or hinders their business plan? essay question is worth 100 points.

Clash of the compacts: Eee vs Air

this has me stumped

What does Apple have against replaceable batteries? I find it really hard to believe that it is an engineering hassle to design a system where the battery can be removed and swapped by the user, since Apple have overcome so many other problems. It can't be a cost issue, given the huge margins on Apple products. So what is it, then? Are they loath to add new items to inventory rolls? Is it an aesthetic eyesore they would rather not live with? My money is on the aesthetics, because we have seen before how they prefer to limit useability rather than cut corners (literally) with aesthetics, as in the case of the headphone jack on the iPhone.

Revealed: USB 3.0 jacks and sockets

a wasted chance

...to do away with the stupid rectangular port. There is always a 50% chance you'll have it upside-down and end up having to turn it around. If they did it like Apple's Firewire, which has a non-symmetrical side, you could plug cables in without looking. It's almost as bad as RJ-45 cables with those stupid nibs that get caught on anything like a fishhook, so you can never pull a cable through a nest of other cables without having to untangle it. Sure, it might not sound important to you until you consider that all the time spent messing around with cables, added up over a lifetime, probably amounts to about 3 weeks. That's time you could be hanging out in Jamaica, man.

Nature sticks entire archive online

copyright expiration?

What is to stop somebody from taking the older articles and just rehosting them on their own server? The copyright will have expired, so the content ought to be public domain.