I think I spent a good deal of my life “needing” stuff like that, but I’m pretty certain I’m making my own next media player. I’m just not entertained by much like that because I see so much more prior art that was actually done better.

The tools to do this anymore are pretty simple to come by if they’re not already thrown away. Heck, you can print PCB’s at home, design vlsi’s at home with free software, and even make a 3d printer for less than two grand. It’ll be interesting to see something like a limited run steampunk audio player with a funky dial or morse code keyer… or a door sentry that identifies people by height, skin hue, tells you if they’re carrying a phone with a frequency counter, or even just a cool nightlight for my kids.

Dude, you don’t have to tell me about the Mac coloring issue. I’ve worked on thousands of mac laptops, and the white macbooks are by far the worst. Not to mention the aluminum laptops dent super easily, and show scratches like nothing else. They are truly well built machines in many ways, and the inside of an Apple laptop is so much nicer looking than any PC counterpart. But I think that the biggest flaw is that by objectifying their design and emphasizing form over function, it does create (as you so accurately described it) a subconscious desire to buy the newest and prettiest one when it comes out.

Then again, I’m a huge nerd so I always “need” the new technology. I can’t really blame that on Apple

OSX hasn’t seen serious updates in a long… LONG time. The apps are mediocre at best. Mail.app is hideous, there’s a better way to do about every iApp but garageband (it’s good in its simplicity), and who knows what else I’m missing. Good things? Spotlight, Services, mature and free dev tools (but locked into obj-c), big hacker community…. but I could go on about the bad parts a lot longer than I can the good. It’s not limited to OSX either, a week after using my android phone I just said to myself “whoa wtf was I missing”. I had case to use the iPhone for something and it just felt wrong… why did that app close when I clicked a link in it? Why can’t I see my mail count at a glance?

The worst part, the worst part of it all, is that it’s completely a case of tweaking their product cycles and the quality of the products so you buy the next ones. Undoubtably you’ve seen an older iPod that’s faded to a terrible color. This happened way before jobs came back though, go find some really old Macs.

Look at your average iPhone though. How many scratches on the glass? How many scratches on the back? You do realize they make scratch resistant materials, right? “Ehh, it still looks great sorta, but I guess i need a new one”

No, I take it back… here’s the worst part. It all looks like toilet hardware. You get it, and you think this is nice and clean, unused, and nice. You have it for a while, the purposely designed materials start to fade, and it shows some wear, but it’s not too bad. Fast forward two years and your iPod’s white finish is yellow and scratched, and the chrome is scratched to bad the text printed on it is illegible — it looks like a twenty year old truck stop bathroom. Does it still work? Probably. Is the subconscious mental image so bad you absolutely need to have a new one? Yes.

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