Linked List: June 24, 2012

Sunday, 24 June 2012

How Much It Costs to Charge an iPad for a Year ★

Jonathan Fahey, reporting for the AP:

The annual cost to charge an iPad is just $1.36, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a non-profit research and development group funded by electric utilities. By comparison, a 60-watt compact fluorescent bulb costs $1.61, a desktop PC adds up to $28.21 and a refrigerator runs you $65.72.

But there’s an even cheaper way to go than the iPad. EPRI calculated the cost of power needed to fuel an iPhone 4 for a year: just 38 cents.

If The New York Times had run this story, the headline would have been, “iPads Cost Four Times More to Charge Than iPhones”.

Hands-Off: Microsoft Surface Tablet Review ★

Danny Sullivan:

Nice trick? No, you know what’s a nice trick? Bringing out devices that no one can actually use. I know they work. I could see that one of the Microsoft guys was all logged into his. But why not let us actually use them, especially when you’ve made us wait from 10 to 60 minutes specifically, as we were told, so we’d all have some close-up time with Surface.

No journalist seems to have really used any of these at the launch event. None of the hands-on reviews that I’ve read, having been in that room and toured the stations, have anything that reflects any real hands-on activity to me. There’s plenty of careful photography that can give the impression that hands-on was going on. Some of it doesn’t even illustrate how the last station with the Surface tablets with keyboards in them literally had a rope to keep us away.

The only sane take on Surface at this point is, more or less, “Interesting, but let’s see what it’s actually like to use.” Because right now, no one outside Microsoft knows.