Hasta La Gadget!

Going to a retail store for consumer electronics purchases can be both exciting and frustrating. After working at Best Buy for two years, I have a few opinions to share that you might want to consider before your next shopping trip.

1. We have no formal training in the field of consumer electronics.
Upon transferring to the computer department from home theater, I expressed concern to the manager: “Will there be time for someone to train me on laptops/desktops? What do these specifications mean?” His reply was simple: “Just do your best. A good salesperson can just read the labels and compare specs.” Ouch.

Salespeople are not necessarily experts in the products sold in their departments, even if they are expert salespeople. Though many express a strong interest in the products they sell, your time spent at a retail store fishing for information about a future TV purchase could be better spent online researching the products yourself (I heard CNET has pretty great reviews).

"You need those HDMI cables, you know you do."

(Credit: Amazon)

2. We make little off the big-ticket items, so we smother you with accessories.
Remember the story “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie“? Well, if you tell a salesman you’re going to buy a TV, he’s going to want to sell you a DVD player to go with it. Once he sells you the DVD player, he’s going to want to get you to buy an HDMI cable, too.

Managers at Best Buy (and possibly all retailers) tell employees that the store profits surprisingly little from video game consoles and computers. Cables, accessories, mice, and other components, however, have a huge profit margin– stores can make about $120 from a $150 Monster HDMI cable. Angry yet? The point is, we’re going to work really hard to convince you to purchase that big item, but once you’ve said “OK” you’ve opened Pandora’s Box.

Here’s my advice: Grab the big item, and run. Purchase all accessories online, including memory cards, cables, traveling cases, and so on. Amazon, Monoprice, and Newegg are all reputable discount Web sites. You’ll find what you need at a much lower price.

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If you have stripped down an old road bike and turned it into a fashionable’n’fun fixed-gear machine, you will have a bunch of parts left over. Once you have weighed them in your hands and laughed maniacally at the sheer weight of the gear cassettes and brake assemblies you no longer have to carry with every single revolution of the pedals, you might wonder if you can recycle them.

If so, you may consider a rather stylish clock, just like those made by Kenneth Armstrong. He has been tinkering with cogs, disk-brakes and even entire wheels for seven years, combining parts into these sculptural timepieces. There’s something of the steampunk about these, and if you check out Armstrong’s site, you’ll see he’s been rather busy, turning out locking posts made form old d-locks and tables fashioned from bike wheels and tubing. There’s even a rather uncomfortable but cool-looking chair welded from old handlebars. We love them.

Recycled Sculpture [A Portfolio Recycled via Urban Velo]

You’ll need a screwdriver to do it, but the sealed batteries in the new MacBook Pros announced last Monday are as user replaceable as those of the MacBook before it. IFixit has already carried out its customary explorations inside the body of the new notebook, and found that, apart from the rearrangement of ports and the latch-free baseplate, things are much as before.

The new, bigger (and 60 grams heavier) battery is claimed to last seven hours. IFixit found that the new unit is a 60 Watt-hours cell, up from the 45 Watt-hours of the original, itself supposedly able to last five hours. So there will be a boost, but we expect you’ll be lucky to even get five hours from it.

The doorless base brings new problems, too. I swapped a 500GB hard drive into my 13” unibody MacBook last week and it was so quick and easy that it wasn’t even worth writing up for Gadget Lab. The hard drive is still considered user-replaceable by Apple, but “replacement does require removing 10 more screws than on the MacBook Unibody.”

IFixit also notes that the SD card sticks out about half an inch when inserted, a little messy, and that the new combined headphone/jack socket omits a digital in connection. It also means that you can’t use headphones and a mic at the same time.

It’s apparent, though, that this is still one of the easiest Apple machines to take apart. If you don’t believe me, try replacing the hard drive on a 12” PowerBook.

MacBook Pro 13” Unibody Teardown [Fixit via Cult of Mac]

Like the iPhone, the Kindle DX will automatically rotate the screen from portrait to landscape mode when you flip the unit on its side.

(Credit: CNET)

You now have a choice between two different Kindle models, and the big question is whether you should spend the extra dough on the

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The NEC USB 3.0 controller is due to hit the streets this month, and already Sarah Sharp (the, um, “Geekess”) has been able to crank out a Linux driver for the device. Sharp states that she is “working with Keve Gabbert (the OSV person in my group at Intel) to make sure that Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat” pick up the driver, meaning that Linux users will likely be the first to have their Super Speed dreams become a reality. Are you a hardware manufacturer with some hot USB 3.0 controller prototype that wants to out this guy through its paces? Hit that read link to get started.

[Via Ozel Web Tasarim]

Filed under: Peripherals

Linux gets first driver for USB 3.0 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Jun 2009 09:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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