Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Dennis just wrote about some laptop frustrations. I have to agree. I can't tell you how many times I've closed my laptop lid, placed it in my bag and opened it back up on the train a 30 minutes later to find the battery half drained. Since I refuse to install any of the Toshiba Power management software for my Tablet PC (because it locks it up from time to time) I get about 1.2 hours of juice as my tablet runs at full bore the whole time.
Today I flew up to Redmond and for the first time in my life forgot my power brick. What a disaster. This made me wonder why the world needs 25 different kinds of power tips and adapters. Can't the manufacturers just agree on one common plug and then design DC adapters that aren't ugly and huge but smart and small, include cable management and can dynamically adapt to charge any laptop? Then I could just borrow one from anyone with a laptop.
Apple has always made superior laptops. They just work, aren't ugly with dozens of panels, protruding pieces of plastic and boneheaded design placement like my microphone that is located right near my loud fan. Oh, and lets not even mention the 15 or so “stickers that come on the thing. That's just tacky. I'm not sure this will ever change. The business that OEMs are in require that they compete on price, so they'll never spend the kind of money Apple does to make their stuff sexy and functional. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go to an Apple store and play with a 15 or 12 inch PowerBook. Notice the clean design, smart placement of panels, lack of stickers and panels, fluid lines, pulsing LED lights, keyboard controls that have stunning On Screen UI, and ambient light detection for back lighting the keyboard etc.