Skating to Where the Puck Was

Darren Murph on the new Mac Mini:

I made crystal clear in my Mac mini review just how awful a decision it was to nix the [optical drive] in the consumer version of the machine, particularly with Apple making no efforts whatsoever to shrink the chassis in the drive’s absence. My primary beef is the removal of an optical drive on a desktop. Is Apple seriously so naive that it thinks all Mac mini users will be perfectly fine taking to the wild, wild web to find whatever content and software they’d like to enjoy, including new-release films and 1080p content? And what, may I ask, comes next?

Murph, back in February 2010, on the iPad:

The iPad is, in my mind, one of Apple’s biggest misses. […]

I can’t begin to explain how disappointing this device is in the sense of being a usable computer. There’s a 1GHz CPU in there that can’t even be used for multitasking. There’s no camera for video chatting. There’s no way to watch a Flash video and chat within an IRC client at the same time. There’s not even a way to connect a USB device to this without paying Apple extra for an adapter. The iPad is remarkably limited in scope and functionality, and for no good reason. A netbook can run circles around this in terms of actually getting work done, and if I want to enjoy multimedia, I’ll carry around something that can fit in my pocket.

★ Friday, 29 July 2011