Looks like he's pinching a loaf. Xerox that look.

I came to that conclusion about Google several years ago. There's a reason that I never bother to look at my Google+ account even though I created one. I didn't trust it to not go away, so why bother. And that was almost four years ago.

We're well past the point where new Google services should be presumed DOA. My general assumption at this point is that unless it is a major source of ad revenue or they spent at least triple-digit millions to acquire it, they don't care about it.

So what you're saying is that the GGP should himself or herself a letter about it. Sounds like a solid plan to me.

You're assuming that fix-ups involve the same characters. That need not be the case. For example, most people would probably categorize my first novel as a fix-up, because a chunk of it started as an unrelated short story that I adapted into the universe. It uses different characters, and is expressed as a flashback to the main character as a child, being told the secondary story by his grandfather (who otherwise plays a very insignificant role in the book).

Other fix-ups interleave stories about different groups of characters that are happening at the same time. If done well, the result is indistinguishable from any other well-written third-person novel unless you've read one or more of the original stories.

Actually, it does make them incompetent. A competent leader would look at your point of view, recognize that your points have merit (assuming they do), and try to find a compromise design that meets your needs without compromising too much on their goals. Only an incompetent leader is intransigent and is unwilling to adapt his or her views when presented with new information that contradicts them.

You have to come up with a better reason than "that's the way it has been done in the past". Sometimes decisions need to be made to undo past fails. So make an argument about the merits of the current design please.

Making changes to a design may be justified, but it is the responsibility of those who want to change the design to justify those changes by showing how it makes things easier for the common use case without making the uncommon use cases impossible. If the designer can't do that, then either the design change needs to be rethought or it needs to be a user preference.

Either way, if you're going against established norms, and if there were good, solid reasons for those norms, you'd better have a darn good justification for going against convention, because probably 99.9% of the time, when UI designers do so, they're making a serious mistake. To use an architecture example, the Centre Pompidou is quite possibly the ugliest building in existence. They went against the established norms, and they got away with it because it's an art gallery, and a part of what art galleries do is to challenge those norms. But try to design a law firm's headquarters that way, and you'll be asked to take a long walk off a short pier.

This MacBook (not a MacBook Air, nor a MacBook Pro) is aimed at a definite market segment, arguably the biggest buyer of Apple's computers... college students.

Go poll real college students and see how many of them use their laptop to charge their cell phones at night to save space in their tiny dorm room. See how many of them sync their phones to their laptops using a cable. Go ahead. I'll wait.

A cell phone manufacturer building a laptop that can't even be connected to their own cell phone without unplugging the laptop from the wall falls solidly on the "There's not enough crack in the world for this design to make sense" end of the scale. I truly can't imagine what they could possibly have been thinking, and I'm even more baffled that nobody along the way spoke up and said, "What in h*** are you thinking?" loudly enough to get this design rethought before it made it all the way to the general public.

The key words in your post are "for work". Apple has not historically built products that are designed primarily for corporate users. It builds stuff for consumers. And a sizable percentage of consumer laptop users regularly use HDMI. A sizable percentage regularly use SD cards. A sizable percentage regularly use their laptop to charge their cell phone while traveling. As you start to chip away at the highly common tasks that this laptop fails miserably at doing, you're quickly left wondering who will actually buy this, or at least I am. I'd imagine it will be very popular among Apple managers, and maybe in some other corporate environments, but beyond that....

Okay, maybe K-12, but only by cannibalizing the K-12 iPad market.

Which is pretty much everybody who uses HDMI. Have you seen how quickly Netflix burns your battery life? And on an ultrathin laptop that tries to squeeze every bit of battery power that it can out of an undersized battery, I'd expect it to be even worse.

So, how long did it take you to write those Xinerama compatibility functions for Enlightenment?

Was the "memory" implant the image of an electric sheep? We can remember it for you, wholesale.

You're all talking about C++ and not LINUS TORVALDS! Have you all LOST your MINDS!? ;-)

Write-only code is easy in ANY syntax.

Try an $80 adapter... just to get HDMI. This new laptop makes no sense. I can't think of anybody I know who doesn't use HDMI with their laptops, even if it is just as a way of piping Netflix to a hotel TV while traveling. And I can't think of anybody who doesn't use a USB port, even if it is just for charging an iPhone. So pretty much 100% of laptop users will have to own this enormously overpriced, clumsy adapter and carry it around with them at all times, just so they could make that computer slightly thinner.

Worse, most users polled would rather Apple make laptops thicker to give us better battery life, because the real-world battery life is a third what Apple claims unless you do nothing more complex than running Word and a web browser. A whole day running Xcode or Photoshop? Yeah, right. Making them even thinner and taking away ports that nearly everybody uses is exactly the opposite of what users are asking for.

Who did they design this for again? Apple managers?

My position is that businesses make money using the property, and their location is a significant contributing factor to their financial success, so because they gain the most from owning a particular piece of property, they should also have the highest property tax burden. Residents receive less benefit from owning property, so they should pay less.