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It took me three reads of the first couple of paragraphs to realise that "snowball" and "snowmobile" were actually hardware products that you can touch. Tech news publishers need to do a jargon check and use appropriate punctuation, formatting or something to call out terms that 90% of readers would not have come accross

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Maybe its because I saw your comment before reading, but I had no problem understanding the first few paragraphs.

The author states that a "snowball" is a grey suitcase with 50tb of HDD space inside, and a "snowmobile" is a massive 18 wheeler with what I would assume is petabytes of storage.

It's probably because it's 5 in the morning here :-) But looking at Amazon's own references to the appliances, they always capitalise the name. I guess what I can only assume was intentional obscuring what are probably trademarks made it read poorly to me.

Really? It's explicitly stated in the very first paragraph, in the second sentence:

> Not the lumps of mush and ice that children chuck at each other, but Amazon’s portable information storage devices, big grey suitcases that hold huge amounts of data.

Capitalizing it might have helped, though.

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