I agree that solar (and all green design) should be done more and promoted more.

I too am eyeing a solar bag, but I'm not too hot on the available designs. I don't mind shelling out a few hundred dollars for some worthwhile technology -- which I totally think it is -- but technology needs to progress a little more so the solar cells are much smaller, and easier to incorporate into designs.

With that said, something like this would be magnificent for Burning Man next year...

By the looks of it, they are getting worse!

Sigh. Honestly, for that kind of price, spending an extra $20 to make it look good would seem like a pretty obvious choice. But no.

I'm an engineer, and I see this all the time - my company develops product all of the time that are technically competent, and yet they never spend the tiny fraction of extra time that it would take to make our products fun to use, rather than just functional.

Part of the problem comes from many engineers just having no taste (seriously! No taste what so ever - there are some engineers who do not even understand what taste is, let alone have any!). Another part of it comes from the commercial side - people aren't willing to take the risk of making a product that is slightly more expensive than the competition, but better designed. Yet another part of the problem is that many of the people that buy this type of product (the laptop bag) are corporate purchasers that care more about spending as little money as possible than whether their staff would prefer the more expensive item.

All three factors combine to consistently give us monstrosities like the one in the article...

If only there were more Steve Jobs in the world. Sigh