g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
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James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
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Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
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.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est




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Friday, November 11, 2005
12:09 - Got that right
http://daringfireball.net/2005/11/full_metal_jacket

(top) link
John Gruber likes his new PowerBook. He's got a long and detailed design review; and in typical fashion, has a few gems of observation:

Better yet, compare and contrast to the exterior of your typical PC laptop: two-tone plastic, gratuitously beveled corner edges, dozens of silly extra buttons surrounding the keyboard, and so forth. The difference is that PC hardware appears not to be designed so much as decorated. There are exceptions — IBM’s ThinkPads and Sony’s Vaios are generally pretty good-looking machines. But I don’t think they look as good as PowerBooks or iBooks, and one reason is that although they’re simple, they’re not simple enough.

Epitomizing the PC industry’s lack of respect for their own case aesthetics are those ubiquitous little stamp-sized decals peppered over their laptops’ palm-rest areas. One for Windows, one for Intel (or AMD), sometimes a couple more for components like the graphics card. They’re garish and turn the surface of one’s laptop into a Nascar-style promotion board. Sure, you can peel them off, but judging from the laptops I see in coffee shops and airports, very few people actually do. Presumably these decals are part of the licensing deals struck between the laptop makers and Microsoft, Intel, et al., but why not just say no? We’ll buy your CPUs; we’ll license your operating system; but we’re not going to put your ugly fucking stickers on our computers. Apple is slated to soon start using the same Intel x86 guts as other laptop manufacturers, but I’ll eat my hat if they start boogering up their cases with “Intel Inside” decals.

No kidding. I've been trying to picture Mac ads on TV with that ever-more-garish Intel chime at the end; it just doesn't fit into my brain. Somehow I imagine Steve has a little more fortitude than your typical PC marketing company.

I hope they've got the hard drive issues figured out. Every single person I know who's bought a 12-inch PowerBook—and there are at least five I could name—has had the hard drive die. Every single one.

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© Brian Tiemann