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Comment by podperson | Hacker News Reader

Setting aside the price, requiring a tool to remove it is a design fail. What I'd like is for it to have a removal prong that tilts out when pressed on one side (perhaps with a pen). I guarantee that I'd lose the butt ugly gizmo.

So it's ugly I'm going to lose the thingy. Oh and it's $35.

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That's a red herring. You can remove it with an un-bent paperclip or a bit of string. You could knot the string or loop the paperclip around itself to make it easier to remove frequently, if you wanted to, but the device is intended to be removed rarely.

A tilting removal handle could break off, making it IMPOSSIBLE to remove.

I think you could design a tilting removal handle such that if broken off it could still be removed with a paperclip.

In any event, I could.

You're certainly free to market a competing product with a tilting handle.

You should! This started out as a Kickstarter.

The idea is that you don't generally remove it. In reality if you lost the tool you would use a paperclip.

Also I disagree that it is a design fail. What (i think) you are describing is poor industrial design; it would be more prone to break, as well as costing more to produce (bearing in mind this is being done by a startup).

The real design failure is Apple's. My laptop (like nearly every digital camera ever?) has a spring loaded sd-slot, that allows the SD card to sit flush with the edge.

Only after reading your comment I understood that it does not have a spring loaded slot, it's the first that I know of that does not have one. And now I'm wondering if there is not 1cm more to make the card go fully inside the computer? Doesn't look too hard (but maybe it is?).

The more I think about it the more I agree the real design flaw is from Apple.

As I see it, there are only two reasons why the SD card doesn't go all the way in in an Apple laptop:

* So nothing can get stuck inside. * So valuable space isn't used up inside the computer. The motherboard in a macbook air is tiny. The extra half-height of the SD card that would be necessary for it to go all the way in is significant.

Either way, as it stands Apple hasn't provided a spring-loaded mechanism, so they have to do something like this. They only made the removal tool by popular demand: in the Kickstarter they were just advising use of a paperclip, which seemed reasonable. Over-engineering is always a danger, especially when you're fighting to just get a product shipped.

A spring-loaded SD-slot that is not covered by a latching panel sounds like an extremely poor idea to me. All my cameras have such latching panels, but I can understand why Apple did not want to do that on their MacBooks.

Some laptops have a fake card to fill the slot, why not do the same with one that follows the outside lines so it doesn't look bad while keeping the slot clear from dust?

Much like the tool that Apple includes for removing sim cards from your iphone, this tool is a glorified paperclip. Not the end of the world if you lose it.

Also, prongs break.

That said, I don't have a macbook with an SD card. Nor am I running low on internal storage, so this thing isn't for me anyway.

What's the expected number of times you'll remove the SIM card from a phone in normal use? Hmm. 0.

Requiring a tool for removing removable storage media is a different order of inconvenience.

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