He purchased the "MacBook Pro" at a Best Buy in Texas, and the retailer is citing the problem as Apple's responsibility rather than its own. The box was apparently sealed with the brick (a paving stone, really, but I've already eked two jokes out of calling it a brick and I refuse to let that kind of thing pass me by) inside, which does seem like it would be a bizarre screwup on Apple's end. Ryan hasn't gotten the mess sorted out with his credit card company, Best Buy, or Apple, but this is so ridiculous somebody's bound to refund his money. [Consumerist]

Used to be, diving into a whole new product line was something only for the crazy ones, those who live dangerously, the mavericks. "Wise men wait to buy" was the refrain that rang through the web, with fear of hardware defects and half-baked features tempering the go! go! buy! buy! fever of a new product announcement.

But things are different now.

Manufacturing is Getting Really Good
Whether it's a unibody carved out of a single block of aluminum or a smaller, more efficient and reliable die for a game-console processor, manufacturing is getting better. Across the board. Mark Kotkin, the head of survey research at Consumer Reports, says that on the whole, reliability is higher and frequency of repairs is lower than they ever have been for the major brands. In the repair department, two of the least problematic major electronics are LCD and plasma flat screens, a shocker given the fact that they are two of the newest product types at the store.

Put simply, companies have tons of incentive to make their manufacturing process better, incentives that aren't directly related to making customers happy. If manufacturing is simpler and has more quality control, more product gets out the door, reducing throwaways and padding the bottom line with less cost (ergo more profit). That's nothing shocking—manufacturing gets better as tech gets more advanced. But because there's a built-in financial incentive for this to happen, it's a factor that won't be ignored, even—or especially—when cashflow is tight.

Software Updates Are More Powerful Than Ever
Gone are the days when every piece of home electronics comes with a different set of core parts. Today, our gear is more defined by the software that's running inside. And while no amount of firmware patching or OS upgrading will affect a melted solder point on a GPU or a warped laptop lid that won't close evenly, software updates bring serious enhancements down the pipe. Even gadget novices know enough to stick flash drives into their TVs to get improved HDMI performance when the situation arises, or anxiously pounce on new updates for game consoles with the hope of a fix or a free new feature.

Apple may control updates to the Nvidia GPUs in the new MacBooks, but knowing they are officially upgradeable via software—to allow for all kinds of goodies, like 8GB of RAM, dynamic dual-GPU cycling, and the like—is a buying incentive.

Some phones have it even easier, getting updated over the air. The G1 wasn't even fully released yet when we caught wind of the first OTA update coming down the pipe, and within a few hours of going open source, bugs were already being filed and fixed in the main Android stack by outside developers.

And back when we said wait on the iPhone? We were proven 100% right, as we watched it come fully into its own, at long last, with the 2.1 software. But because it was a free firmware update for all iPhones including the first-gen EDGE models, early adopters who didn't heed our warning still benefited from the massive revamp.

Microsoft showed similar goodwill by letting its major Zune updates trickle down the entire line, the latest update giving it a song recommendation engine that bests the iPod's.

Software upgrades are not always advantageous—recent iPhone and PlayStation firmware releases are crowning examples. But what's broken in software can be fixed in software, and when the breaks are egregious, the fixes usually come fast.

Internet Bitching is a Powerful Force
It's hard to make over a million of something and not have a few duds slip through QA—that fact will never change. Even though Apple claims that the Brick process is so simple that they "can get it right every single time," there will always be anomalies. (Humans, after all, are still involved.) A quick scan of Apple Discussions right now shows people complaining about slightly tilted function keys—the solution offered? pull up on the sunken end slightly with a prying tool.

This level of minutiae is there because now, complaining about product defects on the Internet actually gets results, and major companies are shifting their strategies because of that. Not previously known for warm fuzzy customer relations, Dell was forced to take action after increasing unreliability (and the company's tight-lipped or non-existent response) threatened to bring the whole ship down. The reaction? They created the Direct2Dell blog and IdeaStorm feedback site. Now only days after a story with unaddressed hardware issues hits Digg's front page (bad battery life, 3G reception, and on), a recall notice or firmware update goes public. Companies are learning a fundamental lesson: Having thousands of angry product owners unite on Digg to flame your defective hardware is not good.

My favorite example was Creative's unfortunate suppression of an unofficial driver—written by a totally random guy in Brazil—that gave the company's sound cards the Vista-friendly capabilities Creative itself was too lazy or distracted to publish itself. After nearly 2500 diggs later and plenty of posts from us and others, Creative finally realized it was being foolish. That's the power of internet bitching.

Even When You Wait, You Can Still Get Screwed
The first point here was unsurprising—tech manufacturing is more reliable than ever. But maybe you were thinking, "That sure wasn't the case with Nvidia's massive GPU recall." True, but the weird thing about that was that the product had been in production a long time before the defect was discovered. It affected everything from Dell laptops to MacBook Pros, many products that had already stood the test of time. In these cases, when a widely used component is at fault, even waiting for a product refresh wouldn't have saved you any trouble.

Reputations Are Important
You can also greatly increase your chances with a first-gen product by being smart about who you buy it from. While this theorem could be pretty safely applied to new products from Dell and Apple, for instance, buying a brand new form factor from someone with a less than stellar repair record—Consumer Reports' latest survey ranks Gateway worst for desktops and HP at the bottom for notebooks—may be something to think twice about. Just because a company is huge and does not mean it is immune to reliability issue. (Red Ring of Death, anyone?)

Final Thoughts
Don't take this is a blanket excuse for not giving a second thought to buying brand-new hardware models; while all the trends here are valid, designing and manufacturing complex CE gear never will be a foolproof process. Prices will go down, and reliability in the future will be better than today, so waiting is still wiser, even if it's perhaps just not as necessary.

This argument doesn't factor in another more complex and in some ways unrelated fact about electronic: Planned obsolescence. Companies have a separate financial incentive to weighing disposability over long-term reliability. Gone are the days where you can be satisfied with the same television for 20 years—advancements move faster now, sure, but manufacturers now make sure to leave off some future-proofed hardware—or charge a lot more for it—to ensure that your TV won't last too long. Which is a sad, but different, issue.

When the scope is limited to more contemporary times, these trends can be taken as a sign that things are improving, bettering your odds of not getting screwed compared to a few years back. Which is refreshing news for everyone: Getting screwed less in the gadget world = good.

The keyboard seems to be identical to the MacBook Air, but with a larger trackpad. The left side houses all the ports (much like the earlier photo), while the right side has a slot for the optical drive. Apple.Pro is responsible for previous case images as well, but only time will tell how accurate their tips are. [Apple Pro via Mac Rumors]

Update: Apple's previously stated that they found a company in China to manufacture their iMacs out of a single piece of aluminum. So, assuming the rumor isn't 100% accurate, this could be a new process with the same company to make MacBooks in a similar way, or Apple found a way to do this themselves with a in-house plant.

TGDaily (Netbook)
"There is some chatter that this "Brick" is actually a Mac tablet, but we here at TG Daily believe that if that is in fact the case, Macworld in January may be a more appropriate event to unveil a tablet. Another rumor has it that Apple may introduce a brand-new sub-notebook to compete with Asustek's EeePC."

iPhone Savior (Mac Mini Pro)
"Sources have indicated Apple's "one more thing," code named 'Brick' rumored to be announced around October 14th along with a MacBook refresh, will actually be a re-design of the Mac Mini super-sized to reveal a Mac Mini Pro of sorts."

ComputerWorld (Wireless USB Hub)
"Perhaps the "brick" would have a Wireless USB hub...We know that most features of a traditional dock can be used with USB. Audio in/out, keyboards, mice, DVD drives, external hard drives, networking... even new displays can be plugged in via USB. "

Macenstein (Windows Smasher)
"...it is now our belief that The Brick has nothing to do with the device actually looking physically like a brick at all. Rather, we feel it is likely that it is simply a name for an upcoming product (or group of products) that Apple thinks will be sexy enough to pull a huge marketshare away from Microsoft. After all, how do you break “Windows”? You throw a brick through them!"

All we know for sure is that all of these guesses cannot be right...assuming the "Brick" is a real product in the first place.

OK, so you're out there on your ops, and you want to pick up chatter from enemy radio. You don't want to look suspicious, so you pull out your pipe and pretend to pack it with tobacco. You can't actually light it, because inside this pipe-shaped countersurveillance radio is a receiver, batteries and a bunch of other stuff that won't take kindly to smoke and embers. The device's neatest attribute is its lack of earpiece. Instead, you'd bite down on the mouthpiece, and hear signal through bone conduction.Once you've gathered your information, you can stash your film and other goodies into a dead rat. Or, if you think rats are icky, you can put your data into a brick or a rock. Here's one actual "concealment" brick with a cement cap:Since there's always a risk of getting caught, smart guys wrote down their info on water-soluble paper, and stored it in thermoses. A thin layer of glass separated the paper from water; when the bad guys came close to apprehending the agent, he'd just drop the thermos and the glass would shatter. There'd be no sign of the paper, and the contents would then be drinkable—if you didn't mind all the broken glass.

Earlier on, guys would wrote down data in exploding notebooks, but I imagine the practice was curtailed when they drew a little too much attention, especially in phone booths, airplanes or gas stations. Note: The instructions tell you to remove the safety when you start using it, not just when you need to blow it up. If your data-dumping apparatuses didn't get you out of trouble, you're lucky you've got an Escape & Evasion Rectal Suppository Tool Kit shoved up your ass. That's right, that tool kit is rectal, and goes up presumably far enough that the man with the rubber glove (you know the man) won't find it. Hopefully you'll be able to get to it when you need to saw, drill, ply and file your way out of a Siberian prison camp. Escape futile? Or just having an upleasant time with the whole suppository tool kit? If you planned ahead, you got the agency to provide you with a definitive way out. Though not common, "L-Pills" containing "lethal" substances were issued from time to time, and stashed in pens. U-2 spyplane pilots carried something slightly different, a needle, hidden within another larger needle (you know, so you don't prick yourself), tipped with something nasty called "saxitoxin." All of this CIA tech and much more like it is covered with great depth and hair-raising anecdotes in Spycraft, a new book by Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, reviewed by us, and available for pre-order at Amazon.

(Click on the image to access the huge version—remember to zoom in if your browser auto-scales it.)

It all first started in 1947, when LEGO bought their first plastic injection machine. The brick was not invented then but took final form in 1958, when the shape of the stud-and-tube brick was patented. Since then, LEGO sets have been going through dozens of iterations, from the younger version, DUPLO, to the most sophisticated LEGO TECHNIC and LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT sets, going through all the different themes of LEGOLAND and, of course, the most successful line of all times according to LEGO, LEGO Star Wars.

LEGO brick curiosities

• There are about 62 LEGO bricks for every one of the world's 6 billion inhabitants.

• Children around the world spend 5 billion hours a year playing with LEGO bricks.

• More than 400 million people around the world have played with LEGO bricks.

• LEGO bricks are available in 53 different colors.

• 19 billion LEGO elements are produced every year.

• 2.16 million LEGO elements are molded every hour, or 36,000 per minute.

• More than 400 billion LEGO bricks have been produced since 1949.

• Two eight-stud LEGO bricks of the same color can be combined in 24 different ways.

• Three eight-stud bricks can be combined in 1,060 ways.

• There are more than 915 million combinations possible for six 2 x 4 LEGO bricks of the same color.

• 7 LEGO sets are sold by retailers every second around the world.

• The LEGO bricks sold in one year would circle the world 5 times.

• 40 billion LEGO bricks stacked on top of one another would connect the earth with the moon.

• LEGO bricks are so much more than just toys. They are used in classrooms from preschool to university level to teach everything from math, language skills and science to engineering and technology principles.

• The LEGO brick has inspired generations of innovators, like Jonathan Gay, inventor of Flash.

• World-renowned author Douglas Coupland believes the LEGO brick represents a "language in itself."

• A January 2008 Google search produces 57.6 million references to LEGO bricks.

• There are 55,600 LEGO videos on YouTube.

• Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, used LEGO bricks to build the external low-cost and expandable casing for 10 4GB hard disks when they were busy developing the Google search engine (today, they have reportedly been used in Google's college graduate recruiting exercises to test potential candidate's creative horsepower).

The first LEGO I remember—which I shared with my brothers and which my dad built for us, obviously without being able to contain his excitement—was a huge fair wheel, yellow. I don't even know where that set is anymore, but I remember the armless minifigs. Or perhaps I'm dreaming. The very first LEGO we got, and which I remember building clearly, was the LEGOLAND Space Galaxy Explorer, which came along with three other sets, including a Rocket Launcher, the Space Shuttle and the Mobile Tracking Station. Do you remember your first LEGO set? Tell us in the comments. [LEGO in Gizmodo]

But first, the bricking. Was this done on purpose? Lam doesn't think so. Jacqui at Ars believes that the firmware was completed weeks ago, and the bricking is unintentional. It doesn't matter what the intent was: They didn't go out of their way to stop it, which is almost as uncool. Principles aside, this situation won't affect lots of us, since the majority of us don't have a reason to unlock. But bricking it entirely is something they should work really really hard to avoid, even if it costs them some revenue share from AT&T. My main concern is for the safe development of Apps that so far have done nothing but made the iPhone better.

"Users who make unauthorized modifications to the software on their iPhone violate their iPhone software license agreement and void their warranty." That photo above is what Lam's iPhone looks like now. Does this mean Lam's warranty is in the shitter? Because he didn't unlock my iPhone and nothing he did can't be fixed with a system restore. Going after the hacks, which have changed the iPhone from a good product to a great phone? That's idiotic.

There is a good side to all this, provided we can get Apple to make firmware that doesn't brick iPhones. The press release also mentions the feature updates via the firmware, like the Wi-Fi Music store. This is historically how the PSP firmware updates were made as "must haves" for owners. Unlocking an iPhone isn't nearly as appealing if it means you don't get the benefit of new features. So, if anything, the unlocking cat and mouse game should push Apple to make a lot more innovation, and quicker. A good thing, when you consider that the best iPhone innovations in the last few months are not the web apps or official Apple updates, but the third party hacks.

Apple has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs available on the Internet cause irreparable damage to the iPhone's software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed. Apple plans to release the next iPhone software update, containing many new features including the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store (www.itunes.com), later this week. Apple strongly discourages users from installing unauthorized unlocking programs on their iPhones. Users who make unauthorized modifications to the software on their iPhone violate their iPhone software license agreement and void their warranty. The permanent inability to use an iPhone due to installing unlocking software is not covered under the iPhone's warranty.

So, I'm very happy to find this classic moto styled brick phone with a GSM SIM slot inside. And the china-import even has MP3 ringtone support, a speakerphone, SMS, a color screen, and other modern niceties. It is 3/4 of a pound, and nearly 8 by 2 by 3 inches in size, though. At $170, it's a steal, when you think about it per pound. One wish — I'd like a shoulder strap, and a chiropractor on speed dial number 1.

Stat smather, post jump.

* GSM Network GSM 900 / GSM 1800 / GSM 1900 * CSTN, 65K colors LCD Display * 128 x 160 pixels, 29 x 35 mm Display Size * Speaker phone * Screensavers * Wallpapers * Polyphonic (32 channels), MP3 ringtones * 500 Phonebook entries * Call records: 10 dialed, 10 received, 10 missed calls * SMS Messaging * Java MIDP 2.0 * English and Chinese English languages and text input * T9 text input with Chinese Pin Yin * Calendar * Calculator * Alarm Clock * Rechargeable battery * Dimensions: 195 X 41 64 mm (7.69 X 1.63 X 2.5 inch) * Weighs 12.5 oz. (including battery)

–Brian Lam

80's Brick Cellphone [Thanks Curtis!]

Product Page [Via Dealhack]