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Folding plug.

Do you remember Min-Kyu Choi’s folding plug design from a couple of years back?

No?! Shame on you. It was a phenomenal bit of work. Look, here’s his original video that went just a little bit viral. I’ll wait while you watch it1.

Memory-refreshed? Right, well, after placing 3rd in the James Dyson Award 2009, taking a gold medal in the 2009 International Design Excellence Awards and winning Designs of the Year Product Award and Design of the Year at the Brit Insurance Design Awards 2010, Min-Kyu formed Made In Mind with Matthew Judkins to develop and commercialise the idea.

Fast forward a bit and Made In Mind has now unveiled The Mu, a USB power adapter built around the folding plug concept.

The Mu folding plug

At £25 it’s rather expensive, especially given that the mass-produced reality is slightly uglier and cheaper-looking than the original design, but all credit to them for bringing the product to market. Let’s hope that it won’t be long until they’re producing2 a folding plug to be used with other devices.

Via The Verge.

  1. If you’ve no time for video-watching then this story includes a good number of photos of the prototype. ↩

  2. Or licencing, perhaps? I’d love to see what Apple could do with MacBook adapters if they used this folding design. (Yes, yes, UK mains adapters are probably only required for a tiny percentage of all the MacBooks sold worldwide but let’s be optimistic, remembering that the head of design at Apple is a Brit…) ↩

The new iPad.

Yesterday Apple unveiled the new iPad.

Just “the new iPad”. Not the iPad 3, iPad HD, iPad 2S, iPad 2R or iPad Pro. I am pleased to see the numbering thing dropped. Presumably we will see the same thing happen to the iPhone line later this year.

The new iPad has some new features that had been predicted by rumour sites (Well done, rumour sites). It is also “missing” some new features that had been predicted by rumour sites (Well done, rumour sites).

The one surprise for me was the inclusion of 4G/LTE mobile networking. As far as i’m aware these services barely exist outside North America and are hardly ubiquitous within the US, so i thought Apple would hold off for another year.  Maybe they’ve conquered the battery-drain problems common with such high-speed mobile connections and just wanted to show the Android folk it could be done.

Perhaps the most exciting announcement made at yesterday’s press event though was that iPhoto is coming to the iPad. It looks very, very good. So good in fact that i’m left wondering if my current Mac will be my last. It is clear that the future of mass-market “computing” is the iPad (other tablets are available) but i honestly wasn’t expecting it to happen as quickly as it appears to be.

Since email, web, video chat, word processing, spreadsheets, music and now photo management/editing are handled by apps on iOS devices, i’m struggling to think of a good reason i need a Personal Computer (in the old sense of the word) anymore. Right now, i only have one – and that’s storage capacity.