jonrob

People should also care about not being able to replace their batteries. Even if the rest of the hardware remains useful after 2, 3 or even 4 years, a battery is a consumable. It gets used up. In the article, it says the original Macbook Air was rated for 300 charges. That's not a lot, and since you can't replace it, you're going to find yourself buying a new laptop in 2 or 3 years even if the rest of the hardware would have lasted 5 or 6 years. And your old laptop won't be recycled either, because they decided to glue everything together.

Gives an interesting alternative to business as a zero sum game. Bob Young, founder of Red Hat:

"The challenge is to focus on market size, not just market share. When consumer demand for bottled water grows, Evian benefits, even though many of those consumers start with a bottle other than Evian. Red Hat, like Evian, benefits when other Linux suppliers do a great job building a taste for the product. The more Linux users there are overall, the more potential customers Red Hat has for our flavor.

The power of brands translate very effectively into the technology business. We have evidence of this in the Venture Capital investors who have recently invested in several Open Source software companies. The one common denominator between all of the investments to date have been that the companies or their products have great name recognition, and are recognized as being quality products. In other words, they have successfully established a brand."

There's still more iOS tablets being sold than Android, so how did Android manage to gain market share? Surely for that to happen, Android would have to be selling substantially more units?

Would love to be enlightened on this!

In fact, the quality of the comments are so high that there's even an Ask Metafilter sub-section, where readers post, often very personal, questions and do so without fear of the kind of reaction they'll get.

What's most interesting about the Metafilter model is that there's no up- or down-voting, only favouriting.

So how do they ensure the quality of the comments? Well, to become a member you have to pay a one off $5 charge. It's not much, so almost everyone can afford it, but it seems to be enough to discourage drive-by comments or anyone who's not serious about contributing respectfully and substantively.

There's also the possibility for posts and comments to be deleted, and for an account to be banned completely if someone fails to follow the guidelines. I don't think this happens often.

http://www.metafilter.com/about.mefi http://www.metafilter.com/guidelines.mefi http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi

It might be worth taking another look at your nearest Uni library, as I think quite a few are similar to Exeter/Durham, at least in the day and if you don't want to take out books.