Data box: Designing electronics these days is as much about deciding what to leave out as what features to include.
The epitome of this maxim is the current must-have computing choice: the netbook. These inexpensive, 1.3-kg (and lighter) PC wonders are configured for mobile consumers in a wireless world. In the process of shrinking the size of screens, keyboards and touch-pads down to their smallest usable levels, built-in optical drives and big hard drives became expendable. Somewhere along the way, USB became indispensable. However, one company's design decision is another's marketing opportunity.
It was not all that long ago that floppy-disk drives (1.4 megabytes) suffered the same marginalization. They were replaced by recordable CD (700 MB), which has been swallowed up by recordable DVD (about 4.4 gigabytes).