So this probably shouldn’t bug me as much as it does.

	1. A netbook is slow. The MacBook Air is not.
	1. A netbook has sub-par graphics. The MacBook Air does not.
	1. A netbook has a low-power processor. The MacBook Air does not.
	1. A netbook feels cheap. The MacBook Air does not.
	1. A netbook has a small, cramped keyboard. The MacBook Air does not.
	1. A netbook has a tiny trackpad. The MacBook Air does not.
	1. A netbook runs an old version of its OS. The MacBook Air does not.
	1. A netbook is too slow to play games. The MacBook Air is not.
	1. A netbook is cheap. The MacBook Air is not.
	1. **A netbook is not designed to be your main computer. The MacBook Air is.**

£2 t-shirts. Who gets screwed?

£1 chicken breasts. Who gets screwed?

When I see a cheap deal I can’t help but wonder “who’s getting screwed?” With the t-shirts, it’s often the workers (though things are improving). With the chicken, it’s usually both the suppliers and the chickens (but things aren’t improving).

I like “who gets screwed” because it’s blunt; it reminds me to think. Notwithstanding the value technology can add—cheaper transport costs and supply-chain management being two big ones—if something is cheaper, the cost is elsewhere. “Who gets screwed” cuts to the chase.

My starting point on the web has never been my friends; rather it’s been other people who I’ve found to be interesting. I read blogs by people I’ve never met—and, truthfully, I’ll probably never meet—and the majority of the people I follow on Twitter are not people I know offline. I choose to listen for what they think or say or do rather than who they are. So much of my knowledge comes from the help of these strangers.

It is one in the morning. Howls ring across the street like the wailing of a banshee. Few words are determinable amongst the yowls and yelps; the sound is incoherent, like the gibbering and whoops of chimpanzees. A shopping trolley skids along the street, accompanied by shrieks.

Sometimes, in my kinder moments, I imagine I was similarly afflicted by a kind of exuberant incoherence when I was a student. Then I remember that even as a student I felt somewhat embarrassed by association with some of my peers. Not to imply I would have been a perfect neighbour, just that I tried to be somewhat more considerate than some in the neighbourhood.

John Carmack’s demonstration of the Rage engine running on iOS and the recently released Epic Citadel technology demo seem to represent a sea-change in the view of large games houses to iOS as a gaming platform, moving it from a niche platform to one in which they are prepared to put significant engineering resource to out-shine what their contemporaries are able to do with the device.

It also shows just how far extremely talented programmers can push the graphics envelope on iPhone-class hardware far beyond what most people imagined was possible. If either company is willing to licence their engines to other developers with reasonable licensing terms, we could see an explosion of brilliant games for the iOS platform as developers no longer feel the need to write their own graphics engines from scratch and can instead spend their times writing the code and story lines to make their games unique.