Anorexic Electronics

What is everyone's fascination with devices, portable or not, being thin?  From the hullabaloo around Apple's MacBook Air to my recently-purchased Novatel MiFi 2200, companies keep pushing under-nourished products on the unwashed masses.  They tell us it's cooler and hip to buy emaciated electronics powered by bony batteries.  As opposed to, dear me, something slightly thicker with Ron Jeremy stamina instead of American Pie emergency use only.

I don't think it's part of the green fad.  There seems to be an arms race to wafer thin and its source escapes me.  When has one of your friends complained about their phone, computer, laptop, etc. being too fat as opposed to just overly wide, prematurely out of juice, strangely long, annoyingly loud, or exceedingly hot?  My girlfriend's fancy MBP grills her thighs, my stepdad's Xbox 360 simulates airport noise, and show me a usable modern cell (iPhone even) you don't have to charge religiously.

Isn't thinness one of those solutions in search of a problem?  The kind of non-issue inflating every tech bubble to date.  Yet, it persists, and people buy into it.  News outlets purport to impress us with it.  And it isn't necessarily about small, just thin.  Paper must be proud.

Let me pick on the MiFI recently delivered.  The casing is super-slick with an absolutely tiny form factor.  A deck of cards is much thicker.  Reading the manual informed me it lasts 4 hours with one WiFi client (less with more) or 10 hours on stand-by.  Personally, make it as thick as a deck of cards and give me a few more hours.  Four is barely enough to get in the zone and, if evenly divisible by users, unimpressive to a foursome.  Plus, it's relatively well known that you have to halve any advertised time length of this sort for real-world use, and wear and tear.  That brings us to two hours for pete's sake!

Laptops have been doing this to us for years and the industry is surprised when netbooks appeared with decent (not even great) battery life.  The EEE 901 I'm using right now with Ubuntu 9.04 will last at least 3 hours of development usage: FireFox with 4+ tabs, one Arora instance, Geany, two consoles, Apache running PHP, and Pigdin.  I'm lucky to get half that running the same OS on my Lenovo ThinkPad with an upgraded 9-cell battery.  Now I pack around a Fox water-pack, minus the bladder, with a complete portable office.  And the netbook is not thin.


To combat the worthless built-in powerpack of my MiFi, I bought a solar multi-charger to go with it.  I have only used it once, to charge my RAZR, but it seems as if it will do the trick.  If nothing else, it's interesting considering it can suck off the sun.  Hmm, why did I get that for Washington, right before Fall/Winter no less?