Second, users are too hung up on the initial purchase price of hardware. That leads vendors to shave costs in areas that annoy the same users who are demanding cheaper hardware. For instance, applying a coat of contrasting color to the molded icons would add only a fraction of a dollar to a notebook's price. Third, vendors are so concerned about being good citizens of the world, favoring no one country, that they've moved from plain-English labels on their hardware to universal icons. Now the controls on the hardware are equally incomprehensible in every country of the world.
Users hate external modems.
If some country is too small to justify certifying an internal modem to the satisfaction of its telephone bureaucracy, okay, fall back to the PC Card modem and its infernal proprietary connector cable. Ultimate design user behavior shows that vendors are not solving usability problems.