..and I ain't even muslim..


Clever and Well-Designed Product eh?
So's a safety pin. Or a hasp for your shed door.

This 'shelf' is the epitome of simplicity; a few cents worth of alloy stock bent to appropriate angle and finished with routine anodising.
Now the pretty-obvious Idea Is worth *something* but ... but not-fucking-Nearly {conservatively: 80+%) of the price charged acolytes
-- who must nearly-all have 0-Sense of what a simple bent metal piece might cost, shipped from China and arrayed like a Pharaoh's mummy
-- in a graphically-correct box costing maybe half what the metal piece cost (bent.. but not yet polished and anodised.)

Thirty-fucking-Dollars USD + Tax + Shipping!?

See.. I could imagine buying this handy oversized-paper-clip, even (in some weak moment of intellectual vacancy) at an expected Steve-is-Precious/Precocious elite price of,
say ... oh.. maybe $13.95? [2-year warranty for $2.50 more.]
Y'know, like say, were I in the candy store with a friend buying a sexier iMac than my own and I Felt I needed to bring home Something-elite? and like that.
But No Way at a price which should -by-Law- demand: the affixing to my derriere at Checkout, a neatly Apple-lettered placard saying not exactly
~~ Kick Me! (but some modrin obliquely-inferential koan.)

See.. were this 'Accessory' prominently displayed on an island for impulse buyers:
I'd feel a moral imperative to be #1 in a coterie of soon-recruited fellow-pickets, equipped with sarcastic and neatly-Apple-lettered SIGNS
urging a boycott until the price was at least Halved.
Eventually.. even in Murica, abject-absurdity Must be noticed Aloud. One might think.
(And it would be more Zappa-like abject off-wall-Fun than a transistor-guitar concert, I betcha!)

Now You, Bman, have every right to assign a much-higher valuation to the convenience of this oversized paper-clip than do I.
And I could.. scrape up the price of 22 or so decent-grade cans of cat food and raise my WD Passport Elite off the deck,
to make space for another stack of unsorted notes, in its present locale. Cats win that one every time.

But tell me, please: didn't >you< feel ... just-a-teensy-bit Ripped-Off ??
-- when you sprung for this doodad? Did you not want to write a brief note (later.. on reflecting what you had done) to -->
Apple Marketing LLC / Div. of Selling the Sizzle and Screw the nonexistent-Bacon, Gmbh?

Just curious.. if I'm the only one (here, anyway) with a similar take on just this One example of, nothing exceeds like excess.

[/irade]



Yeah.. yeah.. She gets a new i-5 screamer, will never calculate nondenumerable infinities while computing probabilities of a nationwide brownout occurring when Pluto is next in retrograde --and I Don't.

Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent demographics.
aka "ROI" ain't the only criterion, well -- so far. (I'm 'buying' today for a bleaker future than you are, apparently.)
In words of Rosanne Rosanna-Danna, Never mind.

PS: had noted earlier, about those encased drives, what you said; almost got one on sale
-- thought that if I had it I would put nearby a tiny/quiet Braun squirrel-cage desk fan
(whose design just happens to be pretty complementary to the sleekness of iMac -- and even color-coordinated. Heh.)

Point-of-detail though:
I note that my tiny (2.5 HD) WD Passport spends most of its life asleep, with the power light blinking slowly to show that.
In its plastic case (no vents) it's barely lukewarm when I occasionally touch it.
'Course too, reloading all the saved stuff after some main-drive crash would be different, I expect.

Surely your drive doesn't stay spinning in between backups. Is it really ever hot when you touch it?
because it's hard to imagine that the standby electronics would use a lot of power
and I presume that Time Machine sends a 'sleep' command after it finishes. Or drive electronics have some time-out?
Maybe not.

I don't even 'hate' Jobs' o'erweening, punctilious obsessions ... like with putting ONLY a then- mondo-Expensive optical drive in the Lisa / no fans EVAH!! (even slow, temp-cotrolled ones)
... until the Mac Pro G-4 was it? had a case full -- which still managed to be a quiet tower unless/until pushed into some video mac-hinations of the 'Pro' ilk .

So ... he Does learn, eventually, that some of his Insistences were indeed mere psych-obsessions. +6.666 on that Cluefulness, at last..
I share his attitude that 'machines' can be attractive as objects while remaining fully functional. Where I part with him (and his love for the ^up^-scale demographic) is in ROI,
precisely the Point of my irade about that laughably over-priced piece of bent metal, above.

So Steverino gets my vote for making the (nearest-to literally) actually User. Friendly. pop-OS
[which is, of course, simultaneously a Pro-OS too, for those who play in the fields of CL perturbations for fun or profit.]

I just don't worship the sucker.. nor lust after every gadget he spawns -- even the ones I could afford. But need not.
(Also: have little idea what he plans to do with his $Bs, eventually.)
That will determine his actual character, just as Billy's stolen Monopoly-loot has become shepherded by Melissa,
who obviously was/is more socially aware and adept than the heartless geek who did the pillaging.
Maybe Steve needs someone with a soul nearby, too? We'll see.

My Spring '08-built 20" iMac remains the first nearly-flawless 'computer' I've owned -- coming up on 2 yrs. in Jan.
As a giant laptop it remains ~ vulnerable to high ambient temps -- but thanks to iStat, decent temp sensors and smcFanControl: ¡no es una problema!
Add-in the silent sophistication of Time Machine.. frosting on the cake. iMac Kicks Doze Ass.