Battery Life Estimates are Bunk—Here’s Why
June 20, 2009 by Rico Mossesgeld
Filed under Laptops
Savvy laptop owners learned a long time ago that manufacture claims on laptop battery lives were essentially best-case scenarios. An XPS M1330 for instance never reaches the promised 3 hours—even with all connectivity off and the screen dimmed to minimum.
Courtesy jyrik
But why, you ask? Here’s Daniel Lyons’s theory
These battery-life numbers are based on a benchmark test called MobileMark 2007 (MM07). The test was created by a consortium called BAPCo (Business Application Performance Corp.), whose members are—you guessed it—computer makers and other tech companies.
The iPod Nano Failures Prove that Apple is Human After All
August 21, 2008 by Rico Mossesgeld
Filed under Portable Audio
Thanks to a “can do no wrong” image cultivated by its effective marketing machine, people make the mistake of assuming that Apple’s the best out there—bar none (may we invite you to revisit the myth of the Apple iPhone’s overwhelming superiority?). So you can imagine the amount of press coverage the flaming iPod nano (which has something to do with its battery) has received:
Wha? The Apple iPod nano actually failing is news? When did we anoint Apple and Steve Jobs as god-incarnate, incapable of any gadget-related error whatsoever? Apple may have a lot of undeserved attention from the online and offline media, but this also means its really under the magnifying glass; the smallest slip-up generates news stories from here to Timbuktu.
