Offtopic, it's fun to see french idioms creep in to Gassee's writing. "Gas refinery" is a direct and ill-fitting translation of the french idiom "usine a gaz",

Offtopic, it's fun to see french idioms creep in to Gassee's writing. "Gas refinery" is a direct and ill-fitting translation of the french idiom "usine a gaz", which refers to something over-engineered and inefficient. Like a factory that's only producing hot air. Edit: and it's likely Gassee knew exactly what he was doing by using that term, since that article includes a paragraph about domain-optimizations that don't translate well to others, specifically calling out certain foreign words that have no direct translation. Whoosh to me...