Washington Post (June 17) reports Barnes & Noble’s offer of tablet software update at
a surprisingly cheap price under the title, “It’s official: Nook Tablets are now ridiculously cheap."
It says:
“(There are) rumors that the company might pull back on hardware in
favor of selling content for other companies’ gadgets, and therefore
(lots of folks) wonder if it’s holding a fire sale so it can exit the
tablet market. Could be. But it’s also possible that B&N is trying to
clear out its stock because it has new models in the works.In either case, I don’t think people who buy a Nook HD or Nook HD+ are
going to end up with a doorstop. Now that the tablets work with Google
Play services, they’ll be useful no matter what Barnes & Noble ends up
doing.”
I can’t pick the exact meaning of “end up with a doorstop.” "Doorstop" must be a metonym of something. I first took it for “doorstep.”
Does it mean a makeshift solution for sweeping out the company’s surplus inventory? Is this a set of phase? What does it mean?
Best Answer
The term doorstop refers to a door-stopping device, “Any device or object used to halt the motion of a door, as a large or heavy object, a wedge, or some piece of hardware”. Like the terms boat anchor (“something obsolete, useless, and cumbersome [whose only] use is to be thrown into the water as a boat mooring”) and brick (“(technology, slang) An electronic device, especially a heavy box-shaped one, that has become non-functional or obsolete”), doorstop can be used to refer to obsolete and useless equipment.