Re: [NTLK] A bit of a mystery

On 3/17/2007 12:16 PM, Frank Gruendel wrote:
>> Hmm very very interesting. I have to wonder
>> why in the world they bothered with a backup
>> battery in the MP130 then?
>
> Probably because they wanted to change as little
> as possible of the MP120 design when the 130 was
> conceived.
>
> To the best of my knowledge supercaps hadn't been
> invented yet when Apple developed the MP120 (or they
> just had, but were still very expensive).

Yes that is quite possible. Though from what I just read 120 also has
FLASH RAM, which is even more surprising. Especially considering that
many PDA's still use SRAM but without any sort of battery backups system
so if your main battery is runs out, your data goes poof. Often called
a "blackout" by those who experienced them. Though I believe that is
becoming less common with the newer PDA's (either internal flash or some
sort of battery backup). But it took them YEARS to implement this even
with all of the customer complaining.

It is also interesting that Apple didn't have "nonvolatile" aka FLASH
RAM listed as a selling point. And when the backup battery got low, the
message made you think if you didn't replace the battery and your main
batteries died you would loose everything. Why wouldn't they modify the
pop up dialog to say "Backup Battery is low, replace soon or you may
loose your clock settings and OS updates"? Such a modification would
only taken a few minutes to do.

-Dan

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