Google: Gmail Outage Was Our Bad

So, yeah.  If you hadn’t heard it from 20 different places, GMail’s servers were down yesterday.  There was a massive unanticipated routing problem when they tried to do a routine server upgrade.  These things happen.  It was not a big deal.  It was not the end of the world.  The entire outage lasted less than 100 minutes (I’ve had power outages last 3 days.  Stop whining, internet.)

So fine.  It happened.  And it sucked for about as long as it takes you to go to lunch and come back.  And Google explained the whole thing.   And issued a huge apology. Seems like that should be it, right?

So why does Jennifer Van Grove have to be so snotty?

That’s one big oops Google. But it’s nice to see that you’re publicly apologizing for the outage and attesting to the fact that you will do everything in your power to prevent it from happening again. Here’s hoping you stick to that.

Google owes you nothing my dear. They’re a free service. They’ve been free since they started.  And they’re nice.  And they’re incredibly transparent (compare an apology like this to Apple’s App Store Rejection Process).

There needs to be a little professionalism in blogging.  That, to me, would be the great loss inherent in the death of traditional news media.  At least The New York Times can just report a story and not be complete dicks about it in the process.

I think this is part of a bigger discussion going on right now in blogging — especially in terms of anonymity and criticism (I’m, at the moment, trying to understand Time Out New York Theater editor David Cote’s  beef with George Hunka).

But in the end it comes down to — do you really need to populate the internet with a re-blog of a dead story just so you can bitch about it?  Try Facebook.  Or Twitter.

Or is it that you really don’t have anything to say?  In which case, maybe keep quiet?

UPDATE: Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch seems to be a bit crabby about it too. Seriously. Was it just a slow news day?  The only thing you have to talk about it to re-post a blog post from the Official GMail Blog and then bitch about them?  That’s some great journalism.  Hey, New York Times! you can close up shop!  We have a replacement for you!

Why not write an article about how a lot of big companies have growing pains (Facebook goes down all the time.  Or Twitter!  Jesus!) or a discussion of how Google’s massive, elegant server architecture system is still prone to human error?  Or a suggestion of how to improve it?

Keeping in mind all of this crap that’s been floating around the internet for the past few days (in no particular order):

1. Official Google Voice App Blocked From App Store
2. Apple’s Chickenshit Approval Process Has Gone Too Far
3. There’s No App for That: VoiceCentral Removed From App Store
4. What Steve said about the App Store and why we need to suck it up
5. IPhone SMS Attack to Be Unleashed at Black Hat
6. iPhone Jailbreaking Could Crash Cellphone Towers, Apple Claims
7. Is the iPhone causing Apple to lose the plot?

Apple, I’ve stood by you for a long time now, but you’re just being stupid.  Your App Store rules of rejection and acceptance need to be TRANSPARENT.  And when you reject an app like Google Voice, man up and give a freaking reason for it.  The Beckettian back and forth in #3 above is something I would expect from Dell.  And quite frankly, you deserved the unofficial response you got from Google’s Marissa Mayer (passive though it was).

As for #4, I completely agree.  If developers keep putting up with this, they’ll need to suck it up.  But after #3, why on earth would any sensible company want to spend months developing for iPhone, wait a month or more to be accepted then rejected with no explanation and no suggestions for how to get the app back into the store?  As a developer it makes my blood boil.  Makes me want to start coding mobile apps for basically any other platform — Android, WebOs… even Windows Mobile.

And as for the crap you’re trying to pull against the EFF and their campaign to make Jailbreaking a legal option, can you smell what you’re shoveling?  How can you say Jailbreaking would crash a cell tower?  Sure it’s a possibility.  But do you really think a serious terrorist would use an iPhone to do that?  You can do that with just about anything that can connect to the cellular network (an eval board, an old cell phone… basically anything but a tin can).  PLUS, unless you fix that SMS bug in #5 above right quick, a hacker wouldn’t even NEED to jailbreak his phone.  He could just send a text message and not only overwhelm the cell towers but crash all of the system’s iPhones in the process.  I only hope the courts can see right through that one (see #7 for more analysis on this one).

I’d been a pretty satisfied iPhone customer since the 3.0 (iPhone mind you.  not AT&T.  AT&T can suck it. I only hope Apple doesn’t renew their exclusive contract with them and I can ditch them for another provider when my contract is up.  And if they don’t I hope there are better iPhone alternatives by then.)  Most of the apps that I installed via Jailbreak were accounted for or rendered unnecessary with copy/paste, better integration with Google Calendar, etc.

But now, just out of principle, I’m going to jailbreak my phone again.  I advise you all to do the same.  This walled garden that Apple’s is creating is really stagnating for developer innovation (when there’s 15 variations of ‘Pull My Finger’, how many of those ‘approved’ applications do you really think are useful?).  And frankly, their guardianship seems to be done by a gang of ADD monkeys (I need to be 17 to use Wikipanion? Really?  And AroundMe?  It’s like you understand only the letter of the law, but not the spirit.  And frankly I’d rather not have a guardian of my phone than have an overprotective, uncommunicative one).

I guess in my mind, for any healthy industry to thrive, there needs to be some competition.  Where’s the competition?  Android, step up your game!  Palm, your marketing sucks.  Do better.

Until then, the best we can do is rebel in mild ways.  Like Jailbreaking.  Thanks Dev Team, for giving us that option.

UPDATE: A bold move from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch: I Quit the iPhone.
UPDATE 2: Developer Steven Frank is ditching the iPhone too.

The Saga Continues: Why The FCC Wants To Smash Open The iPhone
EVEN MORE: Apple Rejects Dictionary App for Containing Swear Words

It’s not enough that they have a warning on Wikipanion that some of the content in THE OPEN SOURCE ENCYCLOPEDIA might have content that’s inappropriate for children under 17?  They now ban dictionaries for swear words?

It’s like they have the Three Stooges manning their application approval process.  I really hope the FCC beats Apple to a pulp on this one.  They deserve it.

THE RECAP:

Of course this all started with the ill-fated Seinfeld campaign which made the mistake of putting Bill Gates in front of a camera for comedic effect.  The commercials made me wonder, “Why would I trust these guys’ opinions about computers? They seem really out of touch.”

Then there was the “I’m a PC” campaign which banked on the underwhelming selling point of “Look! Macs might be cool but some people also use PCs.”

Then there was the mildly misleading “Laptop Hunters” campaign to show that PCs are cheaper than Macs.  And that, given $1000 and a script, a paid actor would choose an inferior PC over a Mac.  You can read about it here and here and (my personal favorite) here, where a filmmaker chooses to edit video on a PC.  Interesting choice.  And as always, all of these ads were made on Macs.

But you were just getting warmed up!

THE NEW IE8 CAMPAIGN

Ten Grand is Buried Here

This all started last week with the Aussie-birthed campaign Ten Grand is Buried Here, whose intent was to persuade users to download IE8 and follow a bunch of clues to find 10K online.  Let me start by saying that I applaud the thought: were IE6 (which is now over 8 years old!) to vanish from the earth, I would be a very happy web developer.  So, good idea.  Kudos!

The catch (or let’s say, ‘the hook’) was, of course, you could only find the money using IE8.  This was reiterated several times on the page, along with browser-specific digs on whatever non-Microsoft product you used to visit the page.  Firefox is ‘old,’ (as old as IE?), Safari is ‘boring’ (again, as boring as IE?), Chrome is ‘tarnished’ (ha!).

The upper brass at MSFT decided to change their tune this week — opting to remove the browser-specific digs and make the page viewable to all.  Maybe it’s not a good idea to alienate potential users of their product, they decided.  Clever.

(Mis)Information Warfare

This morning I found the more formal IE8 campaign — a subtle information / spin campaign on the product page that further attempts to convince users that IE8 is the best.  My favorite part is the Browser Comparison tab which, without stating any facts, declares IE8 to be superior in 8 categories: Security, Privacy, Ease of Use, Web Standards, Developer Tools, Reliability, Customizability and Compatibility.

Ok.  Where to begin?

First off, where’s Safari?  Where’s Opera?

Second, with such general categories and no statements to back them up, this chart might as well read:

Third, some of the claims they make are ridiculous.  IE8 is more standards compliant than Firefox?  And Chrome?  Both of which score way better on the Acid 2 and Acid 3 tests?  Are you high?  And IE8 is only more compatible with more sites on the internet because those sites were coded for IE6, and won’t render anywhere else.  Plus, IE hasn’t run on Mac since version 5.5.  That’s not particularly compatible with anything.

And then there’s the MythBusting tab.  Which ventures into the realm of pure delusion.

Myth #1: Internet Explorer is much slower than Firefox and Chrome.

They claim their browser is faster because, once you learn all of their application shortcuts (Accelerator, Smart Address Bar), you can get around faster than you can if you use a browser that doesn’t have these features.  If we pick apart this statement, they’re basically saying their browser application is slower, but that you can work around it.  Of course they also neglect to say that Chrome and FF already have most or all of these features.  Which renders the whole thing a choice between a slower browser that has nice user shortcuts or a faster browser that has the same user shortcuts.

Myth #2: Internet Explorer is less secure than Firefox.

Sites a Microsoft-sponsored NSS Labs report that Opera has already called into question.

Myth #3: Firefox is a richer, more adaptable browser than Internet Explorer.

Firefox and Chrome are based on open-source technologies.  They are therefore virtually infinitely adaptable, and therefore ‘richer.’ And while there may be a ton of IE8 add-ons, I can definitely say not all of them are free.  I’ve never had to pay for a Firefox add-on.

Myth #4: Internet Explorer doesn’t play well with Web standards.

Let me start by rephrasing this as 3 more specific statements.  1) IE has a history of not playing well with web standards and 2) IE8 does better than previous IE versions where web standards are concerned, and 3) IE8 is more web-standards compliant than Chrome and Firefox 3.

1: true. There is no denying IE has never played nice with web standards.  They are the reason you can’t make an AJAX call without a browser test.

2: true.  Sure.  It can’t have gotten worse.  Right?

3: truly questionable. This statement is based on the claim that:

In addition to passing more of the official CSS 2.1 test suites than any other browser, Microsoft got really hands-on in the overall testing process by developing and contributing thousands of new tests for the consortium.

This is an uncited reference to this internal blog post, which states IE8 passes more of its own CSS 2.1 tests than any other browser manufacturer.  Tests which have been submitted to the w3C, but which have not yet been accepted by the consortium.  Plus CSS 2.1 is the last generation standard.  Who cares if they made up more tests for themselves to pass if the tests are for a spec that is slowly becoming obsolete? 3.0 is the current/next gen standard.

It’s just sad.  These guys used to be innovators.  And they have a massive number of people working for them up in Redlands.  Why can’t they just develop a great product, instead of developing one that they know is inferior and then pretending it’s better?  One can only pray their market share continues to slip.  Maybe then they’ll get the message.

UPDATE: I just found Michael Calore’s analysis of IE8′s MythBusting on Webmonkey which says a lot of similar stuff.  And is pretty hilarious.

Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs …

… and now I’m mad.  What a load of crap!

Twitter, as far as I can tell, is totally and completely worthless.  For me.  And for pretty much everyone I’ve talked to in my circle of friends.

It seems to be a revolutionary new way for people I don’t care about to say things I don’t care about and listen to the opinions of still more people I don’t care about.

While the aggregation of all of the posts on Twitter could amount to ‘the next wave of culture’ or ‘news’ you could say that about anything.  I could say that about the blogs I follow via Google Reader.  Or about the items on McDonald’s Value Menu.  Twitter is just data.  Mass amounts of unweighted, subjective data.  And while, yes, it does give you ‘access’ to people you otherwise might not get access to, I’d still say you’re fooling yourself if you think that access is unfiltered.

Do you really think Sarah Palin updates her own Twitter account? Oprah? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Ashton Kutcher? Maybe.  But it could just as easily be their press agents.  Or their interns.

To call it social networking is a lie.  It’s almost entirely anti-social.  You post talking points and assume someone somewhere cares.  The ‘conversation’ barely exists (unlike Facebook, where conversation is the whole point).

So fine.  Let the media people all hang on each others’ words until their heads explode.  Let the teeny-boppers follow Ashton Kuscher.  Let the Republicans follow Sarah Palin.  But count me out.

I don’t see anything Twitter has to offer me that hasn’t already been rolled into Facebook’s latest update, or into something like FriendFeed (that aggregates everything people have already posted).  And I already have a blog, thank you.  I appreciate that I don’t feel lazy or uncreative enough to feel daunted by word count potentially greater than 140 characters.  I like writing.

And the funniest thing is that Twitter’s platform is still completely unstable.  People have complained about their service being jittery nonstop for the past year.  And now, even in light of all of this media attention, they still can’t seem to get it together.

I’m not making any predictions because… sadly… I’ll probably be wrong. But let’s just say I wouldn’t mind if Twitter turns out to be a bad trend (like 80s neon and AOL) that people just try to forget they were excited about after 3 months.

Maybe we can focus our attention on more curious things like the supposedly game-changing Wolfram Alpha, and what on earth that could be.

UPDATE: Oh great. Anyone have any guesses as to why Apple is now, so to speak, sucking Twitter’s dick?  I’m sorry…. a Triumph of Humanity? Come on! A cure for cancer.  That’d be a triumph of humanity. The judges would even accept ‘a cure for Swine Flu.’  But Twitter?  What, did the same guy who wrote the Time article write this one too?  Maybe he gets paid to publish in bulk.

Man, I didn’t like you before, Twitter. But now…

Note the text:

Bio: Creating New Energy for Alaskans as governor of the 49th state!

As pointed out by Gawker, this blatantly violates the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, a big no-no as far as reality and existence in this dimension goes.  Physicists and chemists everywhere should write Palin to inform her that she is toying with forces she couldn’t possibly understand.

Thanks for this, Gawker.  You’re always so trashy, but sometimes your trash smells oh so sweet.

Interestingly, while I was poking around on Twitter, I found California Gov. Schwarzenegger’s Twitter page (he’s one of the 7 people that Sarah Palin follows, along with Karl Rove and Newt Gengrich.  What a classy great group of people.), and noticed that he’s following almost as many people as follow him ( Following 43,369, Followers: 55,117).  That seems a little out of character for a public figure (Newt, for example, follows 92 people, while 214,506 lost souls follow him), but maybe that’s how Arnold keeps up with all of his many, many, many friends?

I thought maybe he was turning over a new leaf with this whole rollback of Facebook’s Terms of Service (the ones nobody liked — hereafter called the Evil Terms of Service, or ETOS).

PSYCH!

Turns out Facebook is pretty sneaky after all.

Yes.  They put their new Terms of Service to a vote. And if it passes they will adopt the terms.

BUT:

1) FB will not adopt the terms unless at least 30% of active users participate in the vote (which roughly equates to 60 million users).

2) They gave these active users a week to read 1100 lines of legalese in order to make their ‘informed decision’ about which of the terms sounded more appealing.

3) I (and I’m definitely not alone in this) thought that FB had rolled back their Evil TOS (ETOS) when their users revolted back in February.  But if one compares the two documents being voted on, the terms marked as Current include the ETOS language that got everyone mad:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Which basically says ‘if you post it, we own it.’

I know a lot of my friends didn’t think to vote because they thought the vote was between the the OLD terms of service (pre-September ’08) and some NEW version — that the offending ETOS version wasn’t even on the table.

It was confusing.  And I think it was deliberately confusing.

Now, I read it.  I read enough of it to know that the ‘current terms’ were the offending ETOS and the ‘new terms’ were less bad, and cast my vote accordingly.  But anyone who believes this is some sort of democratic process, just because Faccebook says it is, might want to read between the lines.  I’m sure Facebook is counting on most of their users either a) voting for the current terms thinking they were the old terms or b) not bothering to vote because they thought the ETOS had been repealed in February.

It is, no doubt, in Facebook’s interest to have their internal ETOS adopted.  If they own all of the content on their service, just think what they could do with it.  The fact that they’re hemorrhaging money wouldn’t seem like quite so much of a problem if they suddenly walked into a worldwide distribution license to ALL OF THE CONTENT on Facebook.

I think Facebook is being manipulative to try to get what they want, cloaking misdirection and miscommunication in user apathy.

But seriously Facebook.  If you want to take away my rights to my own content, just do it — and own up to your users’ wrath.  But don’t try to make it look like I asked you to take away my rights.

For more, check out Chris Dannen’s column at Fast Company

UPDATE: Alright, some of this sounds like conspiracy, but maybe we’ll just call Thursdays ‘Conspiracy Day’ here at Geek Chic and let you decide for yourself:

1) Facebook’s voting closed at noon PDT.  But almost every news source thought it was closing at midnight.  Did the Washington Post not check their facts this morning?  Or did Facebook change the cutoff because the press was starting to pick up the story?

2) Some users claim they didn’t hear there was a vote (to which, we have to say, ignorance is never really a great argument for a re-count, but still…)

A Cyber-Attack on an American City

The long and short of it is that an unidentified group of people cut 8 fiber cables in Morgan Hill, CA (my hometown) on April 9th and basically everything went down.  Internet, phone, ATMs, emergency services, burglar alarms…

The most disturbing hing about it, I think, is that this is the first I’d heard of it — 2 weeks after the fact.  I partly paid attention because I’m from there.  But still… shouldn’t this have been reported by someone?  Like, maybe, CNN?  Or at the very least, the fearmongering FOX News?

Equally disturbing is the fact that they don’t know who did it.  It seems like they needed to have been fairly familiar with the city’s communications grid to do it.  But I bet a bright high school kid could get the paperwork he or she needs to do that.  Then all s/he’d have to do is organize a group of friends from Live Oak to all cut the wires around the same time.  It wouldn’t take much.

On the more mildly disturbing front (but still fairly disturbing), one of the casualties of the attack on the city’s fiber cables was the hospital’s local network.  Their local network!  Which is a pretty essential thing to have up and running at a hospital, don’t you think?  Who’s idea was it to make a local network in the hospital that was entirely dependent on its connection to the internet?  Is this the only hospital like that?  Or are there a lot more whose network engineers weren’t looking at the bigger picture?

On a mildly entertaining (and fairly educational) note, what did not fail is CB communication.  In order to relay radio calls for emergency services, they woke up the president of the local ham radio club and he and his buddies basically made up for the missing communication services.  This is a good lesson to learn — that it’s good to have a healthy relationship with a fair number of ham radio folk.  They may be the only way people can communicate in an emergency.

Look.  I’m not one to play into doomsday scenarios.  I don’t believe the premise of the latest Die Hard movie, or Fight Club’s ending, is actually realistic.  But I definitely believe we’ve gotten lazy — relying on technology working flawlessly and very seldom exploring possibilities of selective or total system failure.

I would hope that, with the changing of the guard in Washington, that we’d take a bit of time to explore our telecommunication system’s vulnerabilities and the ways that we can compensate in emergency situations.  I’m not saying that we need armed guards at every manhole, but we should definitely have a plan if someone were to stage an attack like this on a larger scale.  Morgan Hill has a population somewhere around 30K (and, all things considered, they seemed to come out reasonably unscathed).  If someone were to stage a similarly coordinated attack on New York — or New England — it would be a big, big mess.

Once again, I’m not saying we should be cowering in fear.  But we should definitely take a hard look at what happened in Morgan Hill and do some serious thinking — and planning — about what we would do if something like this happened on a larger scale.

It’s obviously a possibility.

UPDATE: As my friend Paul pointed out (also a Morgan Hill native):

a) actually this attack was in South San Jose and its effects stretched as far out as Santa Cruz (where Paul lives)

b) Perens’ characterization of Morgan Hill, with all of its ‘brokerages, and investors in the very wealthy community’ was… to be nice… maybe a little bit off the mark.  Anyone who’s been there will tell you — MH is literally 3 freeway exits between San Jose and Gilroy.  If you’re driving south on 101 and you sneeze, you miss it entirely.  And while it’s a town with a healthy upper-middle class, we’re no Los Altos Hills.

So I don’t imagine the attackers would’ve gotten very far trying to ‘manipulate the stock market’ from Morgan Hill when the wires were cut.  I’m sure they could’ve done more damage with an iPhone and a tethered laptop from an uncomfortable booth at Lyons.

While I have no objections to the design they’re moving towards (staged separation rockets, as far as I know, have a lot less of the maintenance issues that plagued the Shuttle over the last few years — and as a result cause far fewer teachers to incinerate), I do have some objections to the trajectory of the program.  The main goal, it seems, is to get back to the Moon.

The arguments in favor of this, as stated by the NASA scientists interviewed this morning were as follows:

1. While our parents’ generation went to the Moon, our generation hasn’t yet
2. We’ve only had a little over 300 hours to explore the Moon.  There’s so much left of the planet to explore.
3. We need to get smart minds excited about space again.

My responses to these are:

1. So what?  My parents generation has been to Vietnam.  Doesn’t make me want to fight another war there.  Seems like a pretty juvenile argument, to tell you the truth.
2. First of all, the Moon isn’t a planet.  It’s a moon. Show some respect to poor Pluto.  Second of all, in the time we’ve spent there, we’ve figured out that a) the moon is not easily or readily inhabitable and b) the moon used to be part of the Earth c) it’s now a big ball of dust and rock with little signs of life, water, etc.  What else do we need to know about it?
3. There are tons of exciting challenges in space.  Tons.  Not the least of which would be cleaning up all of the junk we have in orbit which caused the ISS people to be on high alert last week.  I don’t see how going to the moon is particularly exciting and inspiring to a new generation.  It’s done (unless of course you believe the conspiracy theories, in which case we haven’t actually done it yet).   Let’s aim higher.

There are those who agree with this and think that, if we want to head to the Moon again it should only be to the purpose of establishing it as a base of operations for deeper space exploration (Mars for example).

The Russians seem to have the right idea.  On Tuesday they will start experiments with the aim of testing how humans would react to such a long space flight as the one required to get to Mars.

Only time will tell how this all will come out in the wash.  But I definitely think we should think carefully about our long-term goals in terms of space travel.  Especially considering it’s a recession and these things are damned pricey.

So the lead story here seems to be a pretty big deal: ‘GM Loses 9.6 Billion as Its Strugles Continue.’  Wow right?  That sucks!

What’s the lead image?

“Living Together : My Monkey, My Self”

WHAT?

Have things really gotten so bad that, instead of dealing with monumentally bad news about the econmy, we feel we should give mental precedance to stories about having monkeys in the house because you’re just not a cat person?

Granted, AIG’s quarterly loss of 61.7 billion obviously made GM’s loss look like chump chnge.

Still.

The 26th, when the story was published, was a Thursday.  A Thursday!  This is the kind of fluff reporting I’d expect on a Sunday!  Were your editors all on vacation?

<sigh>

Come on NYT.  Stay sharp.

I used to be a huge ThinkPad fan.  Huge.  My parents worked for IBM for a bunch of years and we used to have at least 3 ThinkPads floating around the house at any given time.  They were great, tough little machines.

I had my doubts when IBM sold their ThinkPad line to you.  On one hand, IBM’s quality control had shrunk to the point where it was basically non-existent, so I couldn’t imagine another company doing worse than Big Blue already was.  Still, I was skpetical enough to start buying Mac.

But I was curious enough to keep my eye on you.  And you certainly did come out with some little gems. Your X Tablet series with the pivoting screen that turns into a writing tablet? Genius.  Really, you outdid yourself with that one.  My brother has had one since they came out and loves it.

So what’s with the W700DS?  What the heck is that?

To get you up to speed, let Wes Williams from the Lenovo product dev team pitch the new system to you:

Ok.  Back up just a second, Wes.  When you go on a business trip — a SIMPLE BUSINESS TRIP, say from LA to New York.  Or London, say — you used to schlep all of that crap with you?  Seriously?  You’re not just pulling my leg?  Because you’re starting to sound like a late night TV ad trying to sell me a single tool that combines 10 other tools that I never actually use. But ok.  Let’s say I’ll accept that as your inspiration.  Even though the idea of you trying to get all of that crap through security in your carry-on is more than a little laughable.

So what are you trying to sell me?  A laptop that combines 1) a Waccom writing tablet 2) an extra 10.6″ screen 3) dual integrated RAID-capable hard disks 4) 5 USB ports (wtf?) 5) integrated color calibrator (which does what, now?) 6) all in one media reader 7) dual cooling units (I can see why you might need those).

This is starting to remind me of a certain Simpsons episode, where Homer tries to integrate all of mankind’s automotive desires into a single car:

But alright.  I’m game.  How much would it cost me to buy the machine you’re demoing there?  Crunching some numbers here on your ‘Customize‘ page, it looks like:

$5,974

And that’s with your 25% discount!?! Oh hells no! What kind of fool do you take me for!  I could buy a nice used car for that!  Or pay the rent on my apartment for 6 months!  And on top of that I’d probably have to pay to have someone else help me carry it, considering this ‘mobile workstation’ weighs a hefty 11lbs and measures 16 x 12 x 2.1.

But ok.  So what.  A fully loaded MacBook 17If I calm down for a moment and think about it, maybe you’re right.  Maybe there is something I could do with this hulking aircraft carrier of a laptop that would make it worthwhile.  Why don’t you show me what some of your ‘users’ are doing with it?

All right!  I get it now!  It’s a babe magnet!  Like a Ferrari or a yacht or something.  I’m not actually supposed to use the machine, I just have to carry it around town and opportunities for laptop stripping games will present themselves!  Games where I will always win! Because hot girls with Macs won’t be able to believe I could afford a machine like that in this economy!  Much less carry it!

And since all of the hot girls in Brooklyn are Mac users, I must be your target audience!  You made this computer especially for me!

So I take it all back.  You’re right Lenovo.  You’ve once again managed to distill everything I look for in a computer into one single inexpensive (cheaper than 2 MacBook Pros!) compact (smaller than a Smart car!) laptop.  You are a true industry leader.

Sincerely,

Jeff
Chief Geek
Geek Chic