Earlier this year, I switched from my MacBook Pro to a new MacBook Air, aiming to move more of my content to the cloud, and have a less bulky device to take with me from office to office and trip to trip. For the most part, the experience has been very good, and if I can help it, I don't want to go back to thick laptops again, with their spinning hard drives and clunky optical drives. But the beautiful design and thinness of the machine also has made it susceptible to failure. For more than 18 months, MacBook Air's first and second generation customers have complained about defective hinges which are a design flaw with the machine, requiring potentially expensive replacement. Now, mine too have fallen victim.


A few weeks ago, when visiting partners with Barak Hachamov, my colleague at my6sense, he opened his MacBook Air, and we both audibly heard a cracking sound. The frame had a horizontal crack through it, and the screen became very wobbly, needing to be supported by something to lean on. He took his laptop to the Apple Store in Palo Alto, and as he resides in Israel and I am local, I was asked to pick it up. A week later, after taking his laptop home, my own MacBook Air decided to join the club.

Without any odd behavior on my part, without requiring any exceptional level of force or falls, or even knocking against anything, my own Air frame is cracked and the hinge has practically come apart at the base. Solidarity with Barak's machine? Perhaps.


So last night, I was back at the same Apple Store, telling them of my sad story. The folks at the Genius Bar commented on the relative newness of my machine (though not the latest and greatest) and said they see this problem frequently. The good news was there would be no charge, but they didn't have parts on site, so I'll be headed back at least two more times - first to drop it off, and later, of course, to pick it up.

Even without the cost of replacement, for which I am grateful, the interruption is definitely annoying. Assume perfect service, I should be without the laptop for a few days, and there's always the outside chance data could be lost, so I am backing up like a mad fool (again). But it has me thinking as well. By always demanding thinner products, lighter housing, and shinier form factors (See the iPhone 4G for example), are we increasing the chance of breakage? It seems there is an inherent design flaw that affected each of these MacBook Airs, one so prevalent that Apple's own tech support note on troubleshooting them says it could be repaired, even if out of warranty:

"You can take your MacBook Air to an Apple-Authorized Service Provider or Apple Retail Store for evaluation and repair if necessary, even if your product is out of warranty. If you previously paid for a repair for hinge-related issues that were not caused by accidental damage, you may be eligible for a refund. Contact Apple for more information."

Diving deeper, it seems this issue has been hitting Air owners for more than 18 months. About 150 people have contributed to a thread started in February of 2009 on the hinges breaking during normal use. Ars Technica covered the spike in complaints back in March of 2009 and Engadget in late February of 2009. But I didn't buy my own laptop until early 2010. Although it was refurbished, saving me some cash, I would assume the issue was known and examined.

While at the Apple Store, I got my first chance to see the newest MacBook Air devices - both the 13 inch and the 11 inch models. It's tempting, of course, to get this one fixed, wipe the drive, and sell it on eBay or Craigslist, just to move to the next generation, but I would have to warn the recipient that I couldn't guarantee the integrity of the device. It's pretty. It's functional. But it's broken.

Over the last 90 days of available statistics, popular multi-network sharing service AddThis shows few surprises in its top services selected by customers. Facebook dominates all options with nearly 40 percent of all shares, with Twitter and e-mail having just under ten percent apiece. But further down the chart, while most services saw single digit moves, up or down, two Google services are seeing significant growth - with Gmail logging an increase of 76%, and its companion network, Google Buzz, spiking, up 296% from the previous 90 day period. Sharing from AddThis to Buzz was good enough for #22 overall, just ahead of others including LinkedIn, Tumblr and Wordpress.

It's tempting to write off the blip as nothing more than a blip - a rule of small numbers. After all, the total percentage of shares to Google Buzz from AddThis totaled .25%, or 1 of every 400 shares. The top 10 services, comprising of Facebook, Twitter, Email, Print, Google, MySpace, Favorites, StumbleUpon, Messenger and Delicious, comprise more than 85% of all shares, leaving scraps for the remaining services - and one knows Google services aren't supposed to be "also rans" outside the top ten in most cases.


To dig deeper into the surprising data, I asked AddThis for more clarification.

While the company doesn't yet expose absolute sharing statistics, they reported that the rise in both Google Buzz and its companion Gmail is likely a recovery after a slow summer. The spike in Buzz propels it to the 5th most popular social network overall.


"Kids are back in school and sharing up a storm," wrote Justin Thorp, Community Manager for AddThis. "But... even with that, Gmail & Google Buzz are still seeing growth, usage, and excitement."

Aside from the 3-month bump, Thorp reports that StumbleUpon "has been the one that's seen some of the most continuous" growth.


Additional AddThis details on Google Buzz reveal that after the United States, which leads by a large margin, the next most active countries sharing to Buzz via AddThis are the Netherlands, India, Russia, Brazil, Germany, China, Canada, the UK, and France.

In contrast, the long since purchased, but still active, FriendFeed statistics show Turkey far outpacing the United States, followed by Italy, India and Pakistan.

While the world awaits Google's next round of social updates, long rumored, but still unclear, the loyal Buzz community eagerly awaits any signs of good news that show engagement and activity in the much-dismissed social sharing network. AddThis' statistics give a glimmer of hope, even if it is small numbers relative to other social tech titans.

20. The company is moving beyond telling you how to use the word "Tweet", and will trademark the @ symbol as well. Also, blue birds.

19. The #NewNewTwitter is going to be 3D.

18. Strains on the company's infrastructure thanks to a spike in users will lead the company to cut tweet lengths by half, to 70 characters.

17. By 2012, only the company's official clients can be used to update Twitter. Existing clients, such as Seesmic and TweetDeck, will be asked to migrate instead to Plurk and Identica.

16. The company's three founders, Ev, Biz and Jack, all have four or fewer letters in their first name. The new CEO is named Dick. This is the primary reason character limits make sense to these folks. Even their communications guy is named Sean, and goes by @SG. Thus, if you have a name like Demetrius or Annabelle, you should never expect to get a job at Twitter. In fact, you probably shouldn't even have an account.

15. Due to the popularity of retweeting, and the understanding that not everybody reads every tweet, Twitter will set up parallel domains called retwitter.com and reretwitter.com that syndicate the Twitter firehose, only delayed a few hours, so you can relive the past as if it were in real-time.

14. In 2011, you may see the fail whale in the Twitter office more than Ev Williams.

13. Due to office constraints resulting from rapid hiring, the company will settle on an agreement with Google and Facebook to rent out some of their empty cubes. The move is also a side bet, knowing half the employees won't have to relocate when the eventual buyout comes anyway.

12. Twitter is going to become so ubiquitous that your mom and all her sisters are going to join. That is seriously going to be annoying.

11. Twitter Lists are going to expand to include as many as 5,000 people. But that still won't be enough for Robert Scoble @scobleizer, who will hit the limit on day two and swear he spent 100 hours perfecting each one.

10. Twitter is going to acquire the country Eritrea, solely to request a top level domain of .er, and shorten its domain to twitt.er.

9. The FBI is reading your tweets. They're the only ones who ever click on your links.

8. Automated tweets from all those programs your friends use to say when they are watching TV, where their location is, what high score they got on whatever game, and if they signed up to start using some app will soon outnumber actual tweets pushed by hand.

7. Twitter's @Anywhere platform will be followed by a companion program called @Anytime. The combination means you can never sign off from Twitter. Even when you sleep.

6. As Chris Messina, who pioneered Hashtags, is now at Google, the company will make a move to prevent Twitter from using them, claiming intellectual property. This will surprise many, who had expected more of an "Open Web" move from Google. The removal of hashtags will make the world's trending topics actually readable again.

5. Derived from the company's HackWeek, Twitter will launch a World News aggregation site that uses tweets as the source, and takes target at both Google News and Yahoo! News.

4. This guy Nick Selvaggio, who has the handle @direct, actually sees all your direct messages.

3. After being lambasted for a male-centric blue version of the site, Twitter delivers a pink version with cutesy writing "for the ladies".

2. The guy who was in "Dude Where's My Car" has hundreds times more users than you do. No wait. That one's true.

1. Search.twitter.com will never ever ever work the way you expect it to. Ever.

20. The development teams behind Google Reader and Blogger are unified following a reorg, under a new project called "Google Breeder".

19. The Google New project accidentally gets uploaded to the wrong set of servers and overwrites Google News with internal company project updates.

18. Twitter becomes so successful that long-form writing is considered anything which is between 135 and 140 characters. As a result, Google runs out of interesting things to index.

17. Google's goats get an agent, defect to Zynga to promote Farmville.

16. Google's book indexing project fizzles as its realized nobody actually reads any more.

15. Due to an impasse with broadcast networks and cable's fear of Google's growing impact, Google TV traction stalls as only commercials are available.

14. With the founders of Wave, YouTube, AdMob all leaving or changing roles in the last weeks, leaders of all project teams within Google dust off their resumes and post them as shared Google docs with high-priced executive recruiters.

13. Aggressive legalities determine that Google has to take another photo of your home on StreetView if you don't like the current one.

12. Somebody actually asks a question to Larry Page or Sergey Brin about the future of Google Knol or Google Base in a public forum.

11. The code base between Google's new robot cars is mixed with the Android code base, making our phones autonomous beings that call and leave messages with text to speech to anyone in our address book whenever they want.

10. Google Buzz is discontinued after unfavorable press coverage. The Lively team is persuaded to come back, and is given the keys to "social".

9. Eric Schmidt loses a bet to Carol Bartz, is forced to buy Yahoo!. The new company is called Yahoogle. It passes anti-trust scrutiny somehow.

8. Yahoo! is determined to own the patents to Pay Per Click following their acquisition of Overture, Google forced to remove PPC from their offerings.

7. AJAX is the new Flash.

6. Jimmy Hoffa is found buried in Google's famous ball pit.

5. Microsoft cracks the code behind Google's search algorithm. Using SEO, Bing results flood Google's index for all terms.

4. An overzealous team of programmers looking for career advances takes Eric Schmidt's off the cuff remarks seriously, embarks on setting up programs to help people move and change their names at age 18.

3. Paul Buchheit is determined to own the intellectual property and trademarks to Gmail and its underlying code. Thus, Gmail and its users become property of Facebook.

2. Apple's suit against HTC is successful, freezing the development and deployment of Android for all partners.

1. It is revealed that the same 50 people click on 99% of AdSense ads, and most of them are marketers just demoing the product to potential clients.