Wireless Prankster?

2001-09-21

I'm at my favorite Mac bashing place, the Virgin Cafe, watching all the iBooks fail.

Today it's the airport wireless network that seems to be giving out every few minutes. The iMacs seem to keep working.

Although it could just be a bad hub, what if it was just a prankster with a frequency jammer?

Also, did I already mention you can not tell when you've turned on an iBook? Several people, including myself, picked "Shut Down" from the menus trying to get the network to work. Once the system is shut down, pressing the power button to turn it back on there is NO response. I suppose if you were in a quiet place you'd hear the hard drive start up but here in a cafe you can't hear it and there is no power light or LED. The screen doesn't come on for about 10 seconds which is way too long so what happens is most people press the power button again. Guess what that does? Shuts the machine off. So, they go thru this cycle 4 or 5 times, pressing the power button once, wait about 6 seconds, no response, press it again which shuts it off, this time waiting a little longer, repeat 4 or 5 times, then ask an employee who comes over, presses the exact same button, but knows to you have to wait longer before you get a response. Great design Apple.

Next on the list of stupid design, maybe much worse, the way the display is attached to an iBook, it swivels up like any other notebook display but then the way the hinge is designed it only opens maybe 110 degrees. Most notebooks will open about 185 degrees until the display is past being flat out the back of the notebook. The problem is, because of this 110 degree arbitary limit, ALL OF THE iBooks in the Virgin Cafe have their displayes BUSTED!!! People have tried to push them past 110 degrees and it just busts the plastic inside the LCD case until it sticks out about 1/2 an inch from the LCD board and you can see the circuit inside, wires, tape etc.. Fortunately they still work but if you touch the display it feels like it's only attached to the notebook by strings, like it would bust right off if you were not careful. More great Apple design 😞

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