Whatever happened to Japanese laptops?

1) The final development PCBs (the engineering validation articles) are actually identical to the production PCBs. Your final EV revision becomes revision 0 in production; only the manufacturing method changes. So the prototype floor definitely has the ability to make production-quality PCBs.

2) The design change may or may not be complicated. Adding a port typically refers to a port already supported by the chipset; so you add a ribbon connector for it and change the layout only.

3) You generally wouldn't have full pick-and-place automation for making prototypes. There are manual tools (sort of semi-automated) for making a few PCBs. A large company is making prototype PCBs all the time. They know how to do it, and they don't stop manufacturing for it.

4) For the case, the easiest would be to rework an existing case (add a slot). Creating custom injection molds is kind of a big deal. Then again, if Fujitsu does that in house, maybe not that big. Don't know.

5) The expense would not involve a cash outlay, but it would definitely involve diverting engineering, manufacturing and sales resources to even communicate and deliver this whole thing, let alone make it. The engineers may have been pulled off something, or may have been waiting for work; business hasn't been that great for most manufacturers, if you haven't noticed. No, I don't know how Fujitsu accounts for this or why they made the decision to go ahead. I am not a manager at Fujitsu. I can tell you that most companies are very loathe to let prototypes and one-offs to leave their hands at all. So it's definitely impressive on Fujitsu's part that they would go to that length.

> e) it still ran Windows

Your "e" item indicates that it was not Sony who took 90G of the 128G SSD, but rather it was Microsoft who took 70% of the drive space.

Lay the blame where it belongs, on Microsoft, they created an OS that consumes 90G of disk space. Sony did not create mswin, Sony just installed it because it is what most of their target market believes they want pre-installed.

Don't fucking respond. It would be better for everyone involved if the thread died, than if I wasted my time trying to cajole information out of people that clearly know no more than I do.

This entire thread was me taking a shot in the dark to see if any experienced EEs/industrial engineers/etc. had any interesting insight to give on the subject. Stroking your dick at your amateur understanding of manufacturing processes serves no-one but yourself.

I understand this is a hard impulse for people like you to overcome, but you don't have to respond to every post you see. Next time, try shutting the fuck up when someone asks a question that you can't respond to. I don't know everything, and I don't pretend to know everything, so I don't condescend towards people unless I know I have a world-class understanding of a topic.

I would rather have my score at -50 and be forced to create another account, than argue with people that have NOTHING to contribute but want to give me shit for asking questions that their pea brains aren't equipped to answer.

EDIT: Wish I could have had a real conversation with you on a site where that isn't fucking impossible due to "rate restrictions" for wrongthinkers. I really thought we could have gotten along, even after your second shithead reply that I tried to draw something constructive out of.

EDIT EDIT: Who are you voting for, wannabee EE?

Steve Jobs used a Thinkpad (a 560E I believe) running OPENSTEP for quite a long time after taking over Apple, because of his objections to using what he considered to be the primitive MacOS 8/9 OS. So Jobs had no problems with using non-Apple hardware.

The Titanium Powerbook and the iBook G3 Snow were already in the production pipeline when Steve Jobs met with the President of Sony, so aesthetics probably weren't the reason for trying to partner with Sony, perhaps Jobs may have already concerned about the PowerPC Alliance's ability to produce mobile processors and wanted an x86 partner to help pivot Apple away.

When Sony's president was shown a Vaio running "MacOS" what it was running was the preliminary build of Cheetah, MacOS X 10.0[1] without either the Blue Box (the classic Mac emulator) [2] or Rosetta [3] the "dynamic binary translator" (which didn't come out until 2006).

Cheetah was pretty exciting to us NeXT junkies but if it was running on x86, then it was quite limited in the amount of "Mac" software available for it, most everything that didn't start on OPENSTEP would have needed a lot of work to be recompiled and a lot of what would eventually be ported to Carbon would never have made the transition.

So it's understandable that the VAIO team wondered if it was worth it, since there was still a lot of uncertainty about Apple's ability to pull off the transition to Mac OS X.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_macOS_components#Class...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)