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Oh man, that MagSafe to MagSafe 2 adapter review was elfin' hilarious! Kudos to Paul for managing to turn what would have been a 2 sentence one image review into a full fledged multi image and commented report. Hahaha!

So that MagSafe to MagSafe 2 adapter review... I get the part about it being over packaged, but what really excited me was the first photo: "...shown next to an oversized novelty quarter for size comparison" because I've always wondered how big those novelty quarters are! I'm left wondering whether it's filled with milk-chocolate, or dark.

Can we please have a section discussing why Microsoft's tablet is called "Surface" (who thinks up these product names?), and is that word going to be trademarked and removed from our everyday vocabulary? The presentation video is hilarious.

BTW, it is "Steve Jobs’s iPad introduction" or "Steve Jobs’ iPad introduction" -- I always thought the extra "s" wasn't necessary.

As much as we'd LOVE to keep harping on MS stealing from Apple...Apple did not invent the tablet form computer. Even though it was a lousy seller and badly implemented, Windows has had a tablet computer form long before iOS did. The fact that Apple did it right and marketed it in such a way to make it a 'must have' device is indisputable, but Jobs did not invent it, create the first or any of that. He took an existing product genre and did it right. Just like with the iPod and the iPhone. They weren't the first...they were just the first to be done in such a great way.

LeTap, on 21 June 2012 - 04:01 AM, said:

Microsoft actually already had a product called "Surface". It's a really big interactive touch screen/object interaction system. MSNBC used it on air in the 2008 Presidential election to manipulate election maps. They renamed it PixelSense this week when they announced the Surface tablet.

https://en.wikipedia...soft_PixelSense

TxTom, on 21 June 2012 - 06:16 AM, said:

True but not very meaningful. Tablets have been around for a long time, well before Microsoft got interested.
Example - I worked on an ARM powered tablet in 1989-91, the Active Book. See http://research.micr...ail.aspx?id=158 for a picture, ironically on a microsoft site. At around the same time there was the Momenta tablet and the ATT/Go/PenPoint machine. And of course not long after that the Newton.
But (probably, and new data would be interesting) the first tablet design seems to be that in Alan Kay's 1976 PhD thesis in which he did a surprisingly good job of nailing the entire idea of a personal portable programable machine. Historically minded folks might enjoy looking at http://www.mprove.de.../gui/kay69.html and maybe http://en.wikipedia....i/Pen_computing

timrowledge, on 21 June 2012 - 08:43 AM, said:

Even though there was a genre (after all, there were several children's toys that were tablet-like devices) there wasn't a market. If there's not a market, there's no sales, no competitors, no innovation. Apple created that. So while the iPad may not be the first, it is the one that made tablet devices viable and we still wouldn't have a market today if they hadn't. I doubt the Surface would exist otherwise.