Man builds girlfriend $125 iPad
A Chinese student who can't afford to buy the real thing builds his girlfriend an iPad from scratch. It's not entirely identical, given that it's adorned with pretty little rhinestones around the outside.
We are great supporters of love here at Technically Incorrect.
Which is why this tale of amorous electronic ingenuity far beyond using pepper spray on Black Friday, brings us to a state close to stinging tears of wonderment.
The way China Daily hums it, Wei Xinlong, a college student at the Northeast Normal University in Changchun, really wanted to make his girlfriend, Sun Shasha, very happy.
He knew she would love to be in possession of the world's No. 1 passion possession, the iPad. However, he didn't have the money to effect that love. So he set about building an iPad from scratch.
Like all resourceful students, he took to the Web and learned as much as he could about the way tablets are built.
Then he bought a touch screen and a battery--online, naturally--and set to work. He reportedly cobbled together parts from an old laptop he bought, also online: the motherboard, the display, and the memory, for example. Then he finished it off with some pretty little rhinestones all the way round the outside. (A picture is here.)
"One can read, download, watch movies, play games by just touching the screen," he told China Daily News.
Oddly, though the home-made creation is Windows 7 enabled, it does seem to have an Apple logo on it-- something that might amuse a few lawyers and stimulate a few counterfeiters.
The whole cost of the homemade machine was 800 Yuan, which, at today's inflated prices seems to be $125.
Sun Shasha, for her part, couldn't have been more deliriously happy. She told China Daily News: "This is the best gift I've ever had, and I will keep it forever."
Surely, with so many vast technical brains in the U.S., some dashing gent must have tried to make his lover a personally crafted iPad.
Or has love lost its creative power over here in the West?