Lithe, light wonder

ENGLISH philosopher and essayist Francis Bacon once said: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."

He coined that phrase in 1625, in a book titled Essays, following which he received well-deserved praise for his genius in the English language.

Fast forward some four centuries later, and I am about to appropriate that phrase to describe an item of 21st century life that Bacon would probably not have conceived of in the slightest.

If he were alive today, Bacon might as well be describing the modern ultrabook: laptops packing a ton of battery life and substantial computing power, shoehorned into a chassis no thicker than a half-deck of cards.

Such seductive beauty, however, comes with caveats. In the quest to make devices thinner and lighter, manufacturers inevitably ended up skimping on several things, in a form-follo…