Apple is often referred to as a design leader. Since Steve Jobs came back and took over the company in 1997, the focus and inventiveness shown by Apple’s industrial design team has been remarkable.

Apple’s design prowess has greatly influenced the evolution of the common laptop over the past 10+ years. The company has gone from being a marginal player in that market to become one of the biggest, most popular laptop manufacturers in the world.

That success has of course bred imitation from other laptop makers, some subtle, some not so subtle. Would today’s laptops be as slick and beautiful without the influence from Apple? Most likely not.

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It used to be that you’d pay a significant price premium for a slim ultraportable laptop – machines that were smaller and lighter than typical 5-6lb laptops. In the days before netbooks, they were really your only option for getting a thin and light laptop. But now that netbooks have carved out a segment of cheap and portable computers in the $200-$500 range, the ultraportables needed to adapt as well.

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That empty surface on a laptop computer is just begging to be decorated, and when you’re a geek, you decorate in geek style. Here are 14 great examples!

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Sometimes bad things just happen, we all know that. And sometimes they happen to our loved ones (we’re talking about our computers here).

For the last five years the data recovery company Kroll Ontrack has been publishing a yearly list of strange ways people have broken their computers and/or hard drives. We here at Pingdom have gone through those press releases and handpicked the funniest and most bizarre incidents, for your reading pleasure.

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