My only word on the iPad.

[roseembolism]

A comment by Mark Atwood got me thinking. He was complaining about printers and it occurred to me that one of the reasons I'm so "meh" about the iPad is that I can't help but thinking that a lot of computer development is overly focused in one area. We get neat new interfaces like the iPad, but in the meantime, peripherals such as printers are as annoyingly prone to failure as they've always been. With the exception of wi-fi connections, it really seems like little practical development in peripherals has been done in 20 years.

MArk was saying he liked the idea of a steampunk printer, with brass gears and solid construction. I have to agree it would be worth to ppay the small fortune for such a printer, as long as it was more reliable than current models- and especially if it had an ink reservoir, so I didn't have to replace the ink cartridges every hundred pages or so..

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Sadly, printers are reaching the "commodity market" stage. There's no point in improving something if it won't do squat to help your company's bottom line.

Now if Apple would do a huge marketing buildup and then release something stunningly beautiful and richly overpriced and not going to be worth it for a few more revisions yet and named iSomething and it turns out to be a printer, then just as with all the other iWhatevers, loads of people will buy one without even stopping to think about whether they need it or not, and hey, the whole market could shift. We can only hope.

[fintach.livejournal.com]

There have been no sweeping improvements to printers, but there have been incremental improvements. I mean, last year I bought (on sale at Frys) a laserjet, duplexing printer for about $40 or $50. A few years ago that would have cost ten times as much.

I would love to see some kind of sweeping improvement though.

[ghilledhu.livejournal.com]

Two words: Dot matrix printer.

(Okay, so it's actually three words.)

[yuusada.livejournal.com]

Pfft, who needs your fancy dots; I've got a daisy wheel.