Whats
on the docket today... ah yes, one of my recent Craigslist acquisitions from the free postings. This particular model has been discontinued, and sells anywhere from $15 to $60 on eBay. My question is: why electronic typewriters? It seems like another example of adding unnecessary complexity to something which worked perfectly fine before. A look at Wikipedia gives us an answer: "For a time, these products were quite successful as their plastic
daisy-wheel was much simpler and cheaper than the metal typeball" system used with analog typewriters.
But cheaper and simpler in some ways means more complex and expensive in others.
Indeed, the reason the original owner got rid of it was that she was sick and tired of the fact that roughly 1/4 of each disposable "ink" reel was scrapped just getting the thing to print consistently before it could be used. Plus, each of the disposable cartridges cost $10-$15 each. And in the case of this model, none of the fancy spell and grammar checkers (made possible by a few kilobytes of internal RAM), or other features like floppy disk readers were present.
Ah well, so it wasn't the crown jewel in Brother's line. But it made for a fine teardown.
In January of 2004 Apple released its first iPod mini, which was kind of a big deal - it was the first iPod to feature the "click wheel", where the buttons for playback control were integrated in the scroll wheel itself. I never found much use for a music player with only 4gigs of capacity however... I've had the 6th gen. A1238 160gig iPod classic for years and we're in a committed relationship.
In the interest of full disclosure (despite the fact that I love my iPod and iPhone) when it comes to computers I should mention that I'm a definitive PC man (suck it Apple). However, as a designer myself, I have to give Apple's lead designer Johnathon Ive some serious props for creating some iconic pieces of design. We could get into whether or not the simple-leaning lack-of-many-buttons interface is a good or bad thing, but let's just get on with the photos, shall we?
