Hitachi really made a splash with their “Hard Drive is the New Bling” promotion, or contest, or campaign, or practical joke, or whatever it is. We all had a good laugh and the writers of Engadget swore off the word “bling” forevermore. But the tin-eared marketing pales next to the sheer wrongness underneath.
The pitch wasn’t really about bling at all, or even geek bling. I imagine what it said before Cory Coolhunter in Marketing got hold of it was, “We should tell everybody that the best portable electronic devices use Hitachi microdrives.
I got my hands on one of the new OWC Mercury Elite cases last week – the big one that looks most like a mini-G5 tower. I think it would make a fantastic casemod project for the Mini-ITX crowd (with a nano-ITX board, I’d guess). Imagine a little card-reader slot right where the CD/DVD drive is on the real PowerMac. Dare I say it would be cute?
The irony is that, if somebody builds such a thing, it will likely be Windows/Linux only – unless they do it by stuffing the guts of a Mini inside.
A couple older pages here that you may find entertaining (or horrifying) if you are a PowerBook user: my titanium and aluminum PowerBook adventures. I sanded the paint off the former; my body chemistry ate the surface of the latter.
I’ve been called a destroyer of PowerBooks, but my PB 100 from 1992 still boots, so I can’t be that bad. I promise I’ll be nicer to my new 15".
