PhotonBoy's dislike for Steve Jobs is well known here, but some of those points can be easily enough addressed...
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Steve Jobs has a strange design ethic
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Not sure this is one of the points you were making, but arguably his design "ethic" is what has saved the company, so strange or not it's successful.
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He sold early Macs without hard drives, since they were too noisy.
[/ QUOTE ] Steve has often commented about wanting all of his stuff as possible to run without noisy fans. This put a very hard goal on the heads of the design team, no shortcuts had to be good thermal design. However, I don't believe that the noise was the problem with early Macs, but rather the size and the price. It was not until the SE that hard drives would even fit inside the enclosure, and earlier than that they would have added $400 or more to the price for a 10 or 20 meg (thats MEG cause we're talking ancient history here) I know the price cause I bought an external one for my Mac at around that time.
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He designed the Apple Cube without a fan (too noisy) and they flopped in the market (not expandable, crummy housing).
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They flopped because they were too expensive. No other analysis is really needed. And they were quite expandable actually. Even internally there is room for many different display boards as well as tons of memory and upgrading the hard drive is easy. Did the lack of more PCI slots serve as the reason you didn't buy one? I don't think so. They already had included on them every other connection and cable port that you would want.
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His mice have one button; nowadays, everyone has two, plus it feels like your mouse is crippled if you don't have a scroll wheel.
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Through extensive research it was discovered that the most common mistake a person new to computers makes is not knowing what to do with that other button. 2nd button commands are always available on the mac by holding the control key down when clicking. So someone with the stock mouse can still access all the same commands with the other hand, but it's simple for not so bright users to use as well. That being said I use a mouse with half a dozen buttons and a scroll wheel, all are fully supported by the OS. Who uses the stock crapo mouse that came with their machine anyway?
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I'm sure he rejected a battery lid on the iPod since it would ruin the appearance of the unit. Now he'll hear about it in court.
[/ QUOTE ] seeing as how neither of us really knows what the decision process was, I'm equally sure that it was decided not to waste space and resources and weaken the overall strength of he enclosure to put in a door that needs to be opened once every 18 months. If it ran on AA's that needed to be replaced every 10 hours of use that would have been a necessity. If it's a little tricky to open every year and a half thats not so much of a hardship is it? Whats the lifespan of this device? 3 or 5 years? Maybe more. So you have to open it 2 or 3 times ever. I think you can probably handle it that many times.
Even if you don't like Apple and think the iPod is overpriced crap it's hard to justify the class action lawsuit on those reasons isn't it?