It starts with a good, if precious, idea: wouldn’t it be cool if we made an external hard drive that looked like a classic hardcover book?
The idea is greenlit by the powers that be, and begins its journey through the colon of product development. One by one, committees, jobsworths and other executive polyps strip it of moisture and add in “must have” features like giant, blinking LED lights, until we get to the end result:
It’s like those plastic kitchens they sell to little girls. Someone should buy a bulk lot of hard drive enclosures and orphaned Britannica Great Books, find a very sharp knife, and get cutting. Restore the sense of wonder!
Product Page [Hardbox via Gizmodo]
Yeah, already done and posted on boingboing, although in smaller format
It could contain its own user manual.
Huh. I happen to be looking for an external hard drive at the moment. They took a great idea I probably would’ve paid for and turned it into a pig-ugly gimmick.
Oh well, at least it’s suggested my next weekend project for me. I’m off to find a big old hardbacked book.
House it in a thermodynamics text for extra irony.
A dry one, then soaked in kerosene!
I actually did this with a book a couple of months ago. My wife wanted something a little nicer looking for the spare laptop drive i had. So I yoinked the hardware out of a $.99 enclosure on ebay($10 shipping of course), and put it in a copy of “letters from the earth” by mark twain.