And ‘FWP’? Why use an acronym that means nothing to most people?

I’m sorry that I didn’t catch the Maxwell Smart reference. I am old enough to have watched more than a few episodes. But that was a long time ago…

OMG, I had to plug my SD card into the BACK of the machine! That certainly qualifies as an FWP.

And it is worth noting that Cook turned the iMac 90 degrees to show its true profile during the media event. It is a bit deceptive, but not egregiously so.

I am no expert on this technique. But it is very cool and you should take a few minutes to check it out. I never expected it to be used on a computer. Not surprisingly, Apple is the only computer company that cares about design enough to explore cutting-edge manufacturing techniques. No one else is close to Apple’s unibody chassis.

Great at inventing, but utterly pants at management. That’s us.

Spin welding was used to join circular plastic parts which is over a half century old, and it was used before that to weld metals, too, in some special cases.

Then after WWII a big jump was the commercialization of multi-kilowat ultrasonic transducers which could vibrate plastics at 20 kHz to create frictional heat and bond two plastic pieces together reliably.

I would not be surprised to find out that the “friction-stir welding” used ultrasonics. Electromagnetic induced infusion seems unlikely given the conductance of aluminum, though I obviously guessing on this.

So the Brits are doing what inventors do worldwide in pushing the state of the art.

Progress, bah! Humbug!

I use USB thumb drives all the time (I’ve never used an SD card) and it is not that difficult accessing the rear of the iMac… it rotates rather easily.

The loss of the SuperDrive is unwelcome, but I’m guessing Apple’s thinking here is the opposite of what you think… The SuperDrive was going anyway as it has in all of their other products. With the SuperDrive gone, it gave them more freedom in the design. DVD drives are extremely cheap and OS X allows you to access the DVD drive of another Mac on the same network, so there are workarounds.

I should think that a huge percentage of Mac users used the SD card reader.

Britain’s human capital advantage was always it, giving birth to a concentration of “tweakers” more than anywhere else, as economists Ralf Meisenzahl + Joel Mokyr explain: the UK was fertile for “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.” (read New Yorker article 2012 Nov 14 “The Tweaker” by Malcolm Gladwell http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell)

2. we Americans, supposedly, the inventors of the world, though only in the last 236 years, have fallen asleep and lost our visionary “american excellence”; anyways, it’s all good, as it exposes our arrogance and gives us the chance to reboot our country to think again, think differently rather, as Apple has been all along ; )

Notwithstanding Apple’s vision that all software will be downloaded from their App Store and disks are not necessary, I need optical disks often enough.

And the memory card reader makes it so I seldom bother to hunt for that custom USB cable that comes with digital cameras; I always just pop the card out and plug it into my iMac.

Now when users need that functionality, they’ll need to make it a USB 3.0 or Lightning accessory. (*sigh*)

Just because Apple calls it “progress” doesn’t mean it necessarily is.