There's an implicit level of trust involved when you leave a device to be repaired at a service store or in Apple's case, a genius bar. If a phone is under warranty and has to be swapped, that device is exactly that—swapped—meaning the damaged or non-working one is kept and sent back and a fresh (or recently…

There's an implicit level of trust involved when you leave a device to be repaired at a service store or in Apple's case, a genius bar. If a phone is under warranty and has to be swapped, that device is exactly that—swapped—meaning the damaged or non-working one is kept and sent back and a fresh (or recently…

Sony's cameras (video) got awful to use. They worked fine, but having to consult the damn manual ALL the time made me want to break things. The button arrays and LCD menus became a muddle, and they did this when they released that awful spate of about five different shaped MP3 payers around 2005.

This is why people build their own computers...because with that kind of freedom comes great responsibility. If you hot rod a car, when something goes awry (as at some point something always will) you can't bring it back to the dealer for help or a fix. You are on your own. That's the giveaway. The vast, and I do mean…

Nothing lasts forever, but insofar as the whole 'Apple switch to Intel Processors' as some bellwether or canary in the coal mine, the folks at Cupertino were using IBM/Motorola processors for their PowerPC line for a decade before switching to Intel because Motorola couldn't make good on their promise of increased…

The "Jump The Shark" moment came for me and a few other techies around 2004/5 when Sony debuted a crazyquilt line of what seemed like twenty different music/MP3 players to compete with the original iPods that were killing Creative, Rio and all the other brands like a turkey shoot. That Sony launch was a what-the-f*ck…

@Lone Truth: Pretty gross hyper-simplification. Patent law has not a whit to do with build quality, and every company has patents. Did Apple somehow illegally corner the market and f*ck everybody by nabbing every supposedly good one, or did their extraordinarily tight-lipped R&D unit simply come up with killer ways of…

Apple Store employees have a system just like what Philip described. You are assigned a card with the serial numbers of all the portable Apple product you own and upon leaving the stores you are asked to show those serials and the devices you have with you—laptops, ipods, phones and tablets with their serials…

Ohhhhhhh...IMAGE FAIL, NOT DISCOVERED UNTIL HOURS LATER...Re-DO! (and this one is an original Kirby panel)

Jack "King" Kirby did it first, and the awesome-est. Behold, the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier (Digital render of "King" Kirby's creation by John Byrne)

Apple actually pulled out some serious stops inventory-wise. Everybody complained like mad about their supposed "short-stocking" to drive sales. THIS time, they front-loaded the supply chain and retail inventory (Tim Cook's Specialty) that even the usual reseller suspects at launch couldn't deplete the stock like…

NYC doesn't get it's water from the rivers that immediately abut it—the heavily industrialized and thus brackish Hudson and East Rivers. The city gets its water from glacial reserves upstate from the lush and green mountainous regions near the Catskill Mountains. It's gravity-drawn from these well above sea level…

BS'er: She's actually not a supporter. She let him keep using the song as long as he donated the royalty money to PETA, which the fat fuck did, through clenched, babies' blood-stained teeth.

Impossible. No curtain or shower rod would support his bulk. Now, doin' it from a felled Sequoia across a ravine and maybe, just maybe we've got a chance.

She has two of my old Macs (which I still own and still run), At the :20 second mark, her screen shows her collection of computers on her home network—one is a PowerBook 540C—the same one Ving Rhames used in the first Mission Impossible movie in the final bullet train scene. And at the :30 second mark at the left of…

Hipster-ish? Yeah It Is. Kind of silly looking, too in 2012? Yep. T'is that as well. But also evocative of cool, old-school analog techie badasses who used to sport a very similar look when they maintained the rainbow-wired guts of our electrical system and what J.J. Hunsecker called "American Tel and Tel" Damn right.

iTunes via Jobs and the Apple engineers REVIVED the music singles industry. For a long time, 45 RPM singles were the loss leader for the record companies. Your song would play on the radio, or "Your Hit Parade" or "American Bandstand" and you'd go down to the record store and pick it up. The record company would make…

"For the love of money, People will lie, rob, they will cheat...

I think they have a limit there, too...but there are just so many more people in the squads. Here in the US/NYC there may be fifty to a hundred in an organized bunch. There, it's scores of groups of fifty to a hundred. It's the same problem...just on steroids, crack and Red Bull through an i.v.

Profit motive. The vast majority of these folks waiting are scalpers who have been paid to hold places. And the pay is incumbent on them getting a phone. Trickle-up awfulness. No phone, no money for the place-holder, no phone for the reseller to sell at a huge profit.