I thought the main reason was obvious: it's only available if you buy from Apple directly, not from, say, Amazon. Apple makes more money when you buy from their store instead of a third party.

There's another benefit to Apple as well: engraved products aren't returnable.

Never, never, not in a million years, listen to a single word of advice uttered by someone who isn't happy with their life. They have absolutely nothing to teach you. This is strong stuff, granted, but I think it is tremendously important.

Every single piece of bad advice I have ever received was from someone who didn't like their life. If you're unhappy, you have two basic options. You can do something to make yourself happier, or you can rationalise a reason why happiness isn't possible. The former is generally a steady upward slog. The latter is like quicksand - the longer you're there, the more solidly you become stuck.

All the bad career advice I got was from people who didn't like their job. Some believed that jobs were just inherently unpleasant, so you might as well go for the unpleasantness that pays the most and gives the best pension. Some believed that good jobs were just inaccessible for 'the likes of us', so there's no point getting you hopes up. Some were so uncertain of their employability that they took the first job offered to them and never dared do anything to jeopardise it. I heard rationalisations dressed up as philosophy, as ethics, as macroeconomics, but they were rationalisations all the same.

Learning from the mistakes of others is useful and productive, but an unhappy person can never provide any insight into how to be happy. Either they don't know what would make them happy, or worse, they do know but won't do it. Never underestimate how hard someone will work to rationalise why they just can't go back to college or start their own business or visit Europe or leave their awful wife.

When seeking advice, ignore status, intelligence and experience. Seek out the happy people, they're the only people who can help you.

> Never, never, not in a million years, listen to a single word of advice uttered by someone who isn't happy with their life.

Out of curiosity, are you happy with your life? :)

I began to suspect the same after I read the article and it said that.

Oh poop. I'm the ezl from the github repo where that source lives. Was hoping we'd have more time to fix it before being embarassed.

HNOH was intended to be a quick weekend project (famous last words). We didn't quite make it in the weekend, so we just let it hang out in his half complete state.

rguzman, smalter, and I have been meaning to put some love into it, but we've been slammed working on what we think will be our real startup, http://www.leasely.com, so we've not really carved out the time.

Its broken and buggy, the calendar features don't work right, and there are issues with creating/canceling recurring office hours. We'd LOVE for this to be used in real life, but its not in a state we can really say we're super proud of yet. We want anyone who wants to be involved to get involved, so if you have hours to donate, please get in touch.

The heavy lifting was done by HN users: rguzman, deuterium, C Allen from NYC (github.com/bitemyapp/, http://bitemyapp.com), and a few others.

So we f-ed up, there are still bugs, and its been on the backburner since we're trying to work on leasely but now we've been embarassed into fixing the bugs so we will.

[edit: linked to C Allen's github and personal page]