Last night I wondered aloud on Twitter why window-based air conditioning units are so poorly designed, and why the technology seems so primitive. The average window unit, circa 2013, more or less resembles its forbears from decades ago: it’s still noisy, inelegant, heavy, and it looks like it was designed as a set dressing for “Logan’s Run.” It was sort of an idle tweet, but it garnered a surprisingly fervent response. There seems to be broad agreement not only that these machines seem hopelessly stranded in time, but also that that shouldn’t be the case. The fact that no James Dyson has reinvented the window unit is a surprise to nearly everyone. After all this is a market in the billions of dollars; if a crafty entrepreneur could create a product that successfully addresses even just a sliver of that, they’d be doing very well.The closest thing to innovation that the AC market seems to have produced is so-called ductless air conditioning, but those units don’t address the problem that most Westerners want to solve with window units: cool a room with a machine that costs less than US$1,000.