Instead of Fixing a Man's Laptop, Sony Sends Seven Broken Computers to His House for HIM to Fix [Wtf]

Joe Litwin was waiting for a box to ship his broken Sony Vaio laptop in for repairs. Normal enough, right? One thing: the box never came. Instead, other Sony customers looking for repairs began shipping their broken computers to Litwin's home. What the?

It's an incredibly odd mixup—a man who wanted Sony to fix his computer accidentally became the warehouse where Sony directed their customers to send their broken computers. In total, he received seven broken Sony computers with five more on the way. Someone even called Litwin's phone number, asking if he was a Sony technician. Who knows when this will end!

Can you imagine the monumental mistake? All those computers with all that personal data in a stranger's home? Sony doesn't know the root of the problem but has figured that they had somehow started printing Litwin's home address as return labels for other customers. After failing to receive any help from Sony's customer service on his own, he reached out to the news. Predictably, Sony is now fixing the problem. I think one of these should be in order for Litwin. The other customers don't even realize where their computer is right now. [NBC4i via Consumerist]

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PC Laptop Makers Have Completely Given Up [Laptops]

Intel dumped $300 million into the laptop industry to buy it something it's never had before: attention. Ultrabooks sound cool, and could look beautiful while running like little thin crust pizzas of awesome. Instead, we're seeing pathetic MacBook Air clones.

What went wrong? From the floor of Intel's Developer Forum, its yearly showcase of new silicon and what it's going in, it's clear Apple's capable of a two front intellectual property war, if they choose. Cupertino thinks its designs are under attack! And they are—but they're looking in the wrong direction. Samsung's phones and tablets might share Apple's black rectangle minimalism, but the crop of black-on-silver Ultrabooks littering the floors of IDF are the real ripoff—like a heap of fake Gucci bags off eBay. Absolutely zero effort has been put into their design, beyond the labor of opening a tab of store.apple.com. If someone replaced my own Air with one of these shams I think it'd actually take me a second to realize the switch. That is, until I realized they were counterfeits, not replicas. And it certainly wouldn't be the first time. This is only the latest wave amid years of Apple design dupe frenzy.

If Ultrabooks are going to take off—and we hope they do, and they certainly should—they're going to need to become desired objects by virtue of their own desirability. They need to stand on their own. Hijacking Apple's design department is only going to make them look like second place losers—which at this point, they already sort of are. Independent thought, independent design, and the courage to actually compete against Apple instead of bowing to it and nibbling its aluminum unibody toes will put Ultrabooks in the public eye.

I don't care about Apple's intellectual property. Let lawyers squirm in their undies about that. What I want is a wide choice of awesomely slim laptops for everyone—OS X or Windows fans alike. Samsung's proven that yes, you can indeed make a gorgeous laptop that actually outdoes Apple's anorexic chassis in some ways, all without breastfeeding from Jonny Ive's aesthetic mammary. Lenovo and Sony have also gone their own way, and done it well.

Ultrabooks mark the first time I can remember myself caring about a PC laptop for any good reason. Intel's heaped money into the project, practically begging companies to succeed. And they have a chance! These computers have terrific components, the luxury of extreme thinness and lightness, and could be paired with the phenomenal (looking) Windows 8—all in all, a super exciting bundle. But the manufacturers behind them are going to have to rustle up some ambition, some faint desire to be different from Apple. Anything else is surrender.

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Intel Claims Next Chip Will Run Your Laptop For 24 Hours On One Battery Charge [PCs]

I can't wait for 2013. That's the year where Intel's Haswell architecture arrives, bringing three very important things. One, the ability to run your laptop for 24 hours on one charge. Heaven. Two, 10 days on "connected standby."

And three: This 22-nanometer 3D-transistor architecture consumes so little power—20 times less than their current gear—that it can run on a solar cell. That's exactly what they demonstrated at the Intel's Developer Forum today: a Haswell-based Windows computer running entirely off a solar cell that was being exposed to a light bulb. Imagine that. Basically, your computer would be able to run indefinitely without ever having to power off, even if you run out of battery power to run the machine's display. I'm impressed.

That's why you can also have ten days of connected standby with your computer connected to a wireless network. That means putting the display to sleep but have the machine continuously connected to the Internet for ten days, grabbing email, tweets, or synchronizing files down from the cloud. I don't know about you, but this low power peace of mind is one of the things that I like most about these new chips.

Before 2013's Haswell comes Ivy Bridge in 2012, which will also reduce power and support DirectX 11.1 and OpenGL 3.2 directly on the chip, as well as 4K high definition video playback. [Anandtech, Marketwatch, Forbes, Ventura Beat, Cnet, Sweclockers]

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Lederhosen. Laptop. Sleeve. [Notebooks]

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that I need to shut up as you let the wonderful of the world's first lederhosen MacBook sleeve wash over you. Sure, fine, getting out of your way.

Okay, you all good? This thing makes no sense at all and it's delightful for it. CoverBee wants you to know it's modeled after genuine Bavarian Lederhosen, which is traditionaohmygodIdon'tcareit's PANTS. For. My. MacBook. German pants. Fancy German pants! The pants-sleeve's made to fit a 13-inch MacBook Pro, but it hugged our 13-inch MacBook Air more or less fine once we tightened the functioning suspender straps(!!). It also comes in 10-, 15-, and 17-inch big-boy sizes, and there are even pockets for your accessories.

The Leder-sleeve is $200, which is a little steep, but if you're not at least a little charmed by this wonderful thing I hope someone clogs you in the face. [CoverBee]

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A Woman Bought a Laptop for $250 But Ended Up with a Stack of Papers Wrapped in Duct Tape Instead [Wtf]

Fresh off the woman scoring a wooden iPad for $180 in a McDonald's parking lot, another woman spent $250 to buy a laptop in a gas station parking lot and ended up with a stack of paper wrapped in duct tape.

This happened in the same city in the same week. The woman was approached by a man (who had a grill in his mouth) at a gas station in South Carolina saying that he had laptops, iPads and iPods in FedEx boxes for cheap. She agreed to buy a laptop for $250 but when she got home, all there was inside the FedEx box was the stack of paper and a white power cord (how thoughtful!).

I didn't think this needed to be said but before we see another instances of idiocy, I guess we have to declare a PSA. If you want to avoid getting ripped off, don't buy your electronics at a gas station parking lot. If you want to avoid getting ripped off, don't buy iPads and laptops for a few hundred bucks. If you want to avoid getting ripped off, use. your. brain. [WSPA via Consumerist Image Credit: Martin Haas/Shutterstock]

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Lenovo U400: Where Have I Seen This Laptop Before? [Lenovo]

Let's call a spade a spade: the Lenovo U400 looks a lot like the MacBook Pro. But that's not bad, because it's a fantastic design. And don't mistake it for a cheap knockoff either, because it stands up on its own.

The U400 has an all-metal body that's 0.8 inches thick, a 14-inch display, an Intel Core i7 processor that runs at 2.9 Ghz (Core i5 and Core i3 options are also available), discrete AMD Radeon 5400M graphics, up to 8GB RAM and your choice of a 1TB HDD or 256GB SSD. The U400 will also boot in 17 seconds and has a battery that lasts 7 hours.

Additionally there's the U300, which has all the same specs as the U400, except that the screen is 13.3-inches and the battery only lasts 6 hours. The U400 will be available in November for $900, while the U300 is still TBD. [Lenovo]

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