> It’s interesting how a lot of companies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right.
I think many companies see the features (windows flying around in Exposé, brightly colored window management buttons, pulsing status light, etc.) but don't understand that generally Apple doesn't just throw something in for looks and has thoroughly researched and iterated internally on a particular solution.
At the expense of sounding fanatic, generally an Apple feature looks the way it does as a result of its function. (What is the problem: make window management easy. how is that solved: make all open windows easy to see by spreading them out). When other companies attempt to copy, they look at what Apple's solution looks like, not realizing what it _does_. (e.g. Areo Flip 3D: what should it look like: windows flying all over the place. what problem does this solve: ???)
That's exactly it. Instead of copying Apple's intent, competitors instead copy the result without ever giving a moment to consider the original motivation.
This reminds me of a post by Tog or someone similarly luminary. He explained that the Mac OS submenu behavior arose from multiple iterations, refining until everything worked easily. A big part of that was letting the user move their pointer at an angle into the next submenu region. A Fitts' law consideration -- this didn't require the user to be too methodical in their movements through the menus.
Then, when Microsoft borrowed the UI, getting into submenus required the user to exactingly follow the path of the currently-highlighted menu item in order to traverse into the next. Breathe the wrong way and your whole drill-down progress just disappears. Microsoft's solution? Insert a brief delay as you hover over a drillable menu option.
Result without intent.
As it happens, this reminds me of the UI for Windows Phone 7. It's like a suit said, "Hey, go design me something that looks really modern. And hip. With sans serif fonts. Apple uses those right? They're really hip."
And we end up with a UI that looks more like a magazine layout than a tool for using your phone.
Thanks for the description of the submenus in Mac OS!
I've been using Macs exclusively for the past two years and, after starting to use Windows again last week, I couldn't really point out why the menus annoyed me so much.
And it's exactly what you describe: on Mac OS, if a submenu is open I can go in a diagonal to the sub-item I want, even if I hover another item in the menu on the way. On Windows, as soon as I'm not hovering the original parent item, the submenu disappears, so I'm constantly going back and forth to reopen the submenu.
The delay is called "hysteresis". Gtk implements this through "gtk-menu-popdown-delay", and seems to be making sure the mouse is moving in a triangle region towards the submenu. (See gtk/gtkmenu.c, esp gtk_menu_set_submenu_navigation_region.)
That's brilliant. I'd never noticed that about Mac OS submenus (although I definitely noticed how arduous it was to navigate Windows submenus).
I do have one outstanding gripe about Mac OS menus, though, which is that if you misclick on some non-reactive part of the menu (a greyed-out option or divider line), it simply closes the menu. I can't think of any reason why this would be better behavior than leaving the menu open, since at least 90% of the time my intent was to actually click on something that would respond.
About the menu closing: I think the behavior comes from an older design. On older OS versions (I don't know if this changed with OS X or if it was earlier) you had to hold down the mouse button the whole time you traversed the menu. Letting go of the mouse button over anything but a menu item resulted in closing the menu. You can still do it this way. And now, even though the menus are 'sticky', they close when you click on anything that isn't a menu item. I'm so used to this behavior now that I use it to close menus. Still though, it would be interesting to try it both ways for a while.
I just tested this in Firefox on Windows, and it does support going in a triangle across other menu items at the same level as the one with a submenu. The delay permitted is a bit short though, which might be what they've tweaked better on the Mac. No Apple machine here, so I can't comment more directly.
Canonical have really upped their game recently. These days a fresh Ubuntu installation looks pretty slick, compared to a just few releases ago. Maybe it's not quite up to OS X standards yet, but reading the design team and Mark Shuttleworth's blogs it's clear they're thinking things through, and not just throwing bling at the screen:
I've used Ubuntu for a few years now, and I adore Gnome's simplicity. For someone who mostly lives in Emacs and Chrome, its a great Desktop: its simple, it (mostly) works, and it stays out of the way! They must do some incredible usability testing, since it usually doesn't frustrate me like Windows does. If it didn't have such a single-minded fixation on warning you about Non-Free Components (gasp!) it would be almost unbeatable.
xmonad is great and I used to miss it on OS X, but I've grown to appreciate SizeUp and Divvy for OS X. You get tiling functionality when you want it, and only when you want it. It's slightly more involved than xmonad but only slightly. And it's unobtrusive. They're certainly limited compared to xmonad but they get the job done for me. I only have a couple of configurations I use very often.
I looked into SizeUp, but it seemed to follow a different model than xmonad/awesome: it only tiled (and then, only in halves or quarters). What I like about xmonad/awesome is that there's a master window and all other windows are automatically managed for me on the other side of the screen; if I want one of my windows bigger, I just rotate it into the master slot. I really don't have to manage my windows, which I love.
Another one to try is Optimal Layout. It gives you tiling, hotkeys for resizing and moving windows, and a better Cmd-Tab (though you have to Alt-Tab instead, unfortunately), and the latest release supports rotating. I love it.
Wow. Not big fan of Gnome personally & haven't used Linux desktop since 2006, but that GUI looks definitely elegant. (Hopefully they have gotten things right under the hood, too.)
I think other companies just realize that Apple has already done the work of getting a feature (or style) well known to the public and that they don't need to solve the problem in a brand new way. That would require as much engineering and quality control work as Apple, plus you'd have to market the hell out of it so that people understood why it was cool, and then, after all that, still sell the product for way less than Apple's because no one is going to pay an Apple price for a Dell product. No, the way to make money is by paying a couple devs to hack up something that looks really wiz-bang cool in demos with very little regard to the problem it solves. Then you get people to think it's just like an Apple product, but cheaper. Until they use it for a week, but by then they've already bought it.
I think the best example of this is all the custom Android skins out there. Without exception they are all worse (at usability) than what they are trying to improve, but the first Droid was the last Android phone to ship stock. Just look cool in the ad and you're done.
Why are the zoom/minimize/close-or-sometimes-quit button so small and difficult-to-acquire targets? I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm just wondering what the rational is for that.
Also, why does the dock not stretch across the bottom? Apple certainly knows about Fitt's law - what's the reason for ignoring it?
What would the purpose of stretching the dock across the bottom be? If you have few icons, they'd only be really spread out. Not necessarily beneficial.
What they do right on the dock and menus is extend the hit area all the way to the edges of the screen and adjacent items. You can drag your cursor all the way to the bottom of the screen and still hit the icon in the doc even though it's ~20px above. Likewise the apple and spotlight menus can be activated by clicking the the very corners. Much easier to hit because they have "infinite" height.
"Edges and corners of the computer display (e.g., Start button in Microsoft Windows and the menus and Dock of Mac OS X) are particularly easy to acquire because the pointer remains at the screen edge regardless of how much further the mouse is moved, thus can be considered as having infinite width.
"Similarly, top-of-screen menus (e.g., Mac OS) are easier to acquire than top-of-window menus (e.g., Windows OS)."
What would the purpose of stretching the dock across the bottom be? If you have few icons, they'd only be really spread out. Not necessarily beneficial.
The icons don't need to be evenly spaced. Windows gets this part right. When you don't stretch it out all the way then the position of the elements keep changing as apps get added to the dock. So, for example, dropping something into the trash or opening a new finder window (or any other app you have permanently in the dock) can't be done by muscle memory. You need to locate it with the mouse each time.
What would you do with the extra space on the 2 sides of the dock anyway? You can't really populate them with windows since the dock will, in all likelihood be covering part of the window.
I agree with the menus at the top. That's the classic example of Fitt's law at work.
You make an interesting point about muscle memory. My dock has enough icons that it stretches across the whole screen maybe that's why I've never noticed this as an issue.
Can you imagine a left-aligned dock? Or a dock in two parts - pinned apps and open apps/minimized windows? I think it'd look horrible and the benefits would be minimal. They may have erred on the side of aesthetics and decided the usability tradeoff was minimal.
I was partial the the NeXT dock starting at the top right and going down, but I concede that in the merge with Mac OS that area is used for other stuff.
RE the dock: that's an awful lot of screen estate to waste - and how do you do it? make things space out wide when you only have a few items in the dock? (which increases the need for more precise mousing).
remember that the dock can go the full width; you just have to fill it with crap. :)
RE the dock: that's an awful lot of screen estate to waste - and how do you do it? make things space out wide when you only have a few items in the dock? (which increases the need for more precise mousing).
The screen space at the sides of the dock are already wasted aren't they? Do you keep anything important there (without it getting partially covered by the dock itself)?
The items don't need to be evenly spaced out. They can just be packed in from left to right.
remember that the dock can go the full width; you just have to fill it with crap. :)
You can do some plist magic to make the dock flush to the left or right but can't make it take up the full width, alas.
The dock is a waste of screen space full-stop. Almost any app can be launched more quickly with a Cmd+Space, 2-3 chars + Enter if you're already at the keyboard. I'd have it removed altogether if accessing minimized apps in other ways wasn't so sucky.
> Why are the zoom/minimize/close-or-sometimes-quit button so small and difficult-to-acquire targets? I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm just wondering what the rational is for that.
My guess is because these are rarely ever used. I just use expose instead of minimizing windows, and I typically kill an app before I consider closing its window.
One advantage (for me at least) is that this way the corners have been left empty and I can use them as hot spots for some other functionality (such as Expose').
Not sure if that's the reason (more probably just fashion sense) but I like it.
The moment I realized the LED was mimicking breathing (I first experienced it with a white iMac) was the moment I realized just how far Apple goes to make computers for humans. Truly personal computers. This is the kind of stuff that gets people lining up for new Apple products, not some silly brand whoring or desire to be hip and fashionable.
Admittedly, they made the LED way too bright on the earlier MBPs, such that it would distract you if you were trying to sleep in a dark room. The newer MBPs have gotten the brightness just right, however.
Also, none of this ignores the fact that Apple routinely privileges superficial aesthetics over ergonomics, utility, etc. (Magic Mouse, hard edges on MBP, glossy displays), but that rarely stops the whole package from being the best on the market.
To be fair, on top of that, they're also really good at marketing. But their marketing is only effective because it has a sincerity--they're genuinely proud of the products they make. I bet you can tell when someone is trying to fake that.
Yeah, this definitely is an important component of their success. The authenticity of their marketing message, thanks to that pride, resonates with people who are being fed bullshit everywhere else.
Regardless of how you feel about him, it's impossible not to be at least a little captivated by a Steve Jobs keynote. The joy of watching someone stand up and just be proud of how honestly hard his company works – it's refreshing.
Back in the 1990s, Apple's products were junk, but the marketing was still excellent.
I think when engineering types hear the word "marketing", they immediately take it as dismissive. But Apple is an example of a company who owes their skin to phenomenal marketing over the long term.
Apple's marketing in the mid-to-late 90's was poor to nonexistent, frankly, while on a technical level Macs weren't any worse than PC's (both crashed a lot and came with fairly comparable hardware, but the Mac OS 7/8/9 UI was very arguably better than the Windows 95/98 UI). Apple's user loyalty was fantastic (and fanatic) in the mid-to-late 90's, but the company itself didn't do anywhere near the kind of promotion they did once Jobs returned.
Yes, Mac OS 9 had technical disadvantages compared to Windows NT and Windows 2000, and Apple had a second-system effect of legendary proportions with Copland. 90's Apple wasn't that great at technology. But they were abysmal at marketing, while Microsoft were fantastic at it.
Yeah, Apple's 90's marketing was ass. But I loved every last Mac I owned during that decade.
Apple had overall high product quality but their focus was lacking and they weren't terribly ballsy. They had a distinct feeling of running on the fumes of the Mac's initial success. But it was (and is) a sufficiently great product that those fumes informed an OS that, from a user perspective, remained the best. Mac OS got long in the tooth, but I'd still take it over Win95/98/NT any day.
I don't know about you, but the things I do not miss are putting spaces in extension names to reorder them (at boot time, they were loaded alphabetically and there were often conflicts, if the order was "incorrect"), manually setting up, how much RAM can a specific app use, or rebooting with virtual memory on/off, depending on which app I wanted to run. I still remember, that reading websites with table-layouts on the only somewhat standards-compliant browser (IE for Mac) was exercise in frustration.
Both windows (95/98) and macs had their share of shortcomings, you just had to pick, which set you can tolerate.
Windows had the same problem, except instead of having conflicts between extensions (which everyone understood were extensions to the operating system), installing applications could cause conflicts. Personally, I never reordered extension names to avoid conflicts.
agree with philwelch. Apple's reputation for good marketing is a very recent phenomenon. As someone who has followed apple for a long time, in the 90's I recall them being mocked for their crappy marketing.
Making great things can be very risky. Most companies are setup to avoid risky behavior at all costs because exposing yourself to risk can be very destructive. The few truly great things squeeze out of a typical company are all because of accident more than by design.
Apple has managed to figure out how to be risky in their behavior without being destructive. They've learned that you can actually jump out of plane if you have a parachute.
Making great things is marketing. The first (and perhaps most important) part of marketing is understanding the, you know, market, and what products would be appropriate for it.
The pervasive Marketing==Advertising mindset is a little short-sighted.
That’s silly. If anything that implies “understanding of the market” is “marketing” then “marketing” has become an all-purpose synonym for “running a business”. At that point, it has no reason to exist as a separate word. I contend that “marketing” does not in popular practice have such a broad definition.
Yes, absolutely. Marketing is part of everything. It's not a separate department or effort, it's a facet of every effort of a company. It's something that everyone, from product design to development should keep in mind.
I'm just running with the definition given to me by my marketing professor at my university's business school :)
Look at 37Signals. I contend that everything they do is marketing, even if it's not writing commercials or buying ads.
There's more evidence of their attention to detail if you look closely. Most companies, if needing an indicator light, would simply drill a hole in the case where the light is to go. Now have a look at the MB sleep light. It shines through a few rows of ultra small laser made holes, meaning when the light is off, the surface of the case is almost completely unbroken
Ive talks about this. The point is that an indicator should be invisible when there isn't anything to indicate. Otherwise, it's just another tiny distraction.
He's right, and it's a cool feature. But the fact that it's sitting right next to the useless (from a user's point of view) black blob of the IR sensor kinda spoils the effect.
That interview for sure shows passion and obsession for details. It gives an impression that Ive is one of the greatest industrial designers of our time partly because his obsession and understanding of manufacturing processes. He knows the limitations and possibilities of his tools.
"The newer MBPs have gotten the brightness just right, however."
That's because the sleep LED adjusts to the ambient brightness. Try this: watch that LED in a dark room, then turn on the lights, keeping your eye on it. You'll notice it gets quite a bit brighter in reaction to the light.
[...] the moment I realized just how far Apple goes to make computers for humans. Truly personal computers.
Jobs has been talking about anthropomorphic technology for quite a bit [1]. I've always liked to imagine Jobs had some influence on WALL-E's EVE. It was a Pixar movie, after all...
You've got the right idea but the wrong influence.
Jobs doesn't do the actual industrial design - he knows what he likes, and he has a great eye for it (or so I hear) but the man behind Apple's design aesthetic is Jonathan Ive. And he did design Eve.
Amusing if true: the glass cube outside the Manhattan Apple Store was designed by Steve Jobs himself, and the lease stipulates that it is his personal property and he has the right to remove it at the end of the lease: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/05/12/05/jobs_wants_32_...
(If I ever had the balls to ask Steve Jobs a completely inane question, I would ask what the hell it was with him and cubes.)
Spheres are more symmetrical than cubes though. Cubes are symmetrical about a high but still finite number of planes--spheres are symmetrical about an infinite number of planes. But I guess it's harder to get a sphere to sit still on your desk, or to fit computer guts into it.
I can't think of a more worthy successor. Brilliant, if true.
The power multiplier that Jobs brings to the company comes from two things: his uncompromising sense of good taste and his idealism for the role of technology in our lives.
The things that Jonathan Ive builds are reflections of his own deep commitment to those values. He gets it.
Interesting, I had definitely not heard that. The name that I thought was passed around regularly was Tim Cook.
I'd have to think that letting the design guy worry about design would probably be the better route, rather than clouding with all of the other business decisions and realities in a major way
If they want to keep the template Jobs has established, they need a person who can drive products (both tech/design sides) and say no in a manner that leaves little doubt.
The exciting part is that there are so many _potential_ worthy successors even when Jobs leaves. The same can't be said of many companies with rockstar CEOs.
Steve Jobs's eye for talent is just as keen as his eye for design. It's an absolutely critical skill and has been an essential component of Apple's success. It's also a skill that too often goes unappreciated. Unlike most rockstar CEOs, he doesn't surround himself with people he can dominate and control.
Indeed, the story of Jony Ive reflects this: toiling in relative obscurity before Jobs' return, Steve immediately recognizes his talent and promotes him aggressively.
The first time I saw that LED I thought of an SF story I read where an intelligent computer had a "smile light". I was like "Cool, it's like the computer is snoring."
My wife can't stand having little LEDs on all over the place. We've hidden our wireless router, our battery charger and everything. One night my laptop was on the floor as we were going to sleep, and I said, "Oh! Let me put away my MacBook," and she said, "Don't worry about it, I find it soothing."
Totally agree with your wife, for the most part. I always cover the exposed LEDs on my various devices before going to bed. However when I'm not trying to sleep, my MBP's pulsing light is mesmerizing.
My tower has a blue power-LED. To cover it up, I stuck a dark post-it over it. Still too bright.
5 layers later, and it was about 1/2 the brightness of my MBP's snoozer. About right for a dark room. A couple months later, when I packed my tower up for xmas vacation... the post-its were bleached white, all the way through, in front of the LED. Way too much power.
My MBP? Still too bright for the night, IMO, but I tend to like dark. It's at least not annoying, like damn-near every other light-emissive device in my house at night.
My router and desktop are both black with blue leds.
Best solution? Electrical tape. You can't even see it unless you look close and I really couldn't care less about the led. If the router isn't working I'll know.
Heh, I can't stand any kind of blinking light. This whole trend has me going nuts every night as any random peripheral not utterly killed dead and smashed with a hammer is liable to suddenly decide to start blinking in the middle of the night and wake me up.
I'm surprised that not everyone notices that. The first time I saw a Mac in sleep mode I immediately realized that it was breathing in a relaxed manner. (It seemed so obvious I never even mentioned it to anyone, so I don't know if anyone else noticed.)
The other day, I noticed that my friend’s Dell laptop had a similar feature but with a shorter fade-in-fade-out period. Its rate was around 40 blinks per second, or the average respiratory rate for adults during strenuous exercise—not very indicative of something in sleep-mode.
As to why Dell didn't copy it exactly... perhaps they reviewed the patent and decided they would get in trouble?
Personally, I think we should not personify our computing hardware. It's a tool, not your friend. When my machine goes to sleep, its lights turn off. If I want to wake it from sleep, I press the power button. If it was off instead of asleep, I would press the same power button. No need for an LED to tell me what's going on.
> Personally, I think we should not personify our computing hardware. It's a tool, not your friend.
I think the breathing LED is great precisely because it's a subtle form of personification that manages to be "friendly" without actually going far enough to be "your friend". (Remember: technophobes.)
Also, it's relaxing. Sometimes this is exactly the cue you want after a stressful session at the computer.
I like the shaking head 'no' you get from the password login box on Mac OS X because mistyping your password is a minor annoyance and that unexpected humanity takes the edge of it.
It's not hard to imagine a PC laptop manufacturer designing a light that moves side to side like a Cylon. In fact, this might even be a good fit for an Alienware laptop.
No, they didn't, but they tied it to something unique: human breathing at a resting pace. They anthropomorphised it.
Ok, that's done, Apple took it. What's next? What's even more intuitive or revolutionary?
We'll never know if major companies with insanely great designers constantly regurgitate what Apple did years before.
I don't think its unreasonable to hold companies other than Apple to the same design standards. Certainly most large consumer electronics companies have similar resources (human, industrial, capital, etc.) to use.
Other companies prioritize features over usability. Apple does not create as feature rich programs, focusing instead on making them simple, easy to use, and aesthetically pleasing. Google, Microsoft, Linux devs, etc. build more feature-packed, customizable products. It is difficult to make software both feature rich and yet uncomplicated and easy to approach. I like the Firefox way of doing things: put commonly needed preferences in menubar->preferences and hide everything else away in a strange place like about:config that the user can find if they need.
Personally, I am satisfied with Android 2.2's, Ubuntu's, and even Windows 7's UIs and prefer the richer sets of features (not that I dislike iOS or Apple products; I actually use them at work on a daily basis). I think there are benefits to doing software both ways and I think the range of program complexity and power in the consumer software market reflects that.
I made the distinction between features and usability deliberately. In the context of my comment, a feature could be defined as "something the program can do," rather than "something the marketers will list as a feature," so in that context, easy and simple to use is certainly _not_ a feature. Like I said, there is a market for all levels of complexity and flexibility in software stemming from varying preferences and needs.
It's not a "this computer is a person or your friend issue at all".
It's a device for a human, so you use natural cues to tell the user something. Your computer is on, but it's in sleep mode, so here's signals that naturally signify sleep.
You should notice that it's MS that came up with that retarded paperclip and Microsoft BOB. There are cartoony characters all over its history. That's real cheap personality.
> Personally, I think we should not personify our computing hardware. It's a tool, not your friend.
Humans personify everything they interact with -- including simple hand tools. We like one better than the other; it feels like it has a personality. Of course, we know, intellectually, that it doesn't, but that doesn't matter.
We're hardwired for judging and feeling personalities. And faces. That's why car look like they have "faces" on the front and why people have historically referred to vehicles like ships, boats, and cars as if they are (at least) simple beasts rather than just things.
Computers are by far the most complex tool the typical person uses, and we treat interaction with a computer much like we treat interaction with a person from a psychological perspective. That's why it's so infuriating when a computer fails to respond to input -- it's the same mechanism that gets triggered when you're talking to a person who looks at you but doesn't acknowledge you in any way.
Apple isn't trying to make the computer your friend, it's honoring the implicit personification you're doing anyway.
I remember realizing that nothing on the iPhone ever, ever blinks into or out of existence. EVERYTHING transitions.
When you turn the orientation in the camera app, the little flash button and flip-camera buttons don't simple become horizontal...they fall down gently.
Actually blinking/transitions are two things I really prefer about Android over the iPhone:
1) Notification blinking: It is quite useful to have an indicator that there is a missed call/email/text message without having to turn on the screen.
2) Transitions: I run my phone with every transition disabled. I never found much value with the phone being unresponsive for 100 or so ms as it animates.
You just reminded me of those folding cellphones that were popular when cellphones first became really popular. They had this useless blinking led that just bugged the hell out of me!
Though on BBs, the blinking is a feature: it's your blackberry craving for your attention, like a cat pawing into your sides or your dealer calling your phone.
In looking at my ThinkPad it got me thinking as to why IBM didn't blink at all. And I'm not sure, but I have a theory. I have other devices that blink to indicate that something is happening to them, and I always seem to catch them at the state when they're not illuminated. And, while this state only lasts for a second or less, I often get brief anxiety that something isn't charging or whatever.
IBM went with the constantly illuminated moon. I've never laid down to sleep to it, but its worked as a great, at a glance, indicator that the computer is sleeping, and not off or on.
Another nice thing about that LED is that it's white (as opposed to bright green in a lot of laptops) and it's softened (meaning that you can't really point out the exact point where the LED is hiding, making the whole shape homogeneous).
I think this is an example of a decent patent - it's minor, but it's clever, non-obvious, and a clear improvement on the product, while not encroaching much on the solution space. You can still have a blinking light, or any of a handful of other solutions, just not a blinking light at a specific frequency.
It's a great idea, but no one else can use it. I don't like the fact of patenting even the frequency of a blinking led. It keeps adding constraints for competition, which is nice for Apple but I wouldn't celebrate it.
Well now I know why I spent a half hour just staring at that stupid light when I got my new MBP. There was something about the radiance pattern -- now I know.
Seriously though, that's a brilliant feature. Most companies wouldn't give the time or money for developers to come up with that.
The big place where I notice this is in the "flick" scrolling on Android vs iPhone. Android just has this very tiny jerkiness, a just slightly less natural motion. I can't even define what it is about the motion, I just know it is perfect on the iPhone and almost but not quite on Android.
(And for the record, I love Android and would gladly cast every iDevice I own into a fire if I didn't need them for work).
Somewhat related, Android does not bounce back at the end of lists. The list simply stops scrolling...which is rather ambiguous considering if the phone lags, it looks like you're at the end of the list...and then suddenly it starts scrolling again
There's a great scene in Objectified about the indicator light on a MBP (or, in that case, perhaps an Air) and how it appears and disappears when needed. Viz.:
The other thing I liked about that Jonathan Ives bit was how he went beyond the physical aspects and talked a lot about how much effort they went into the construction process as well. No one else in the documentary even mentioned that as far as I can recall.
It baffles me how anyone can program a server without worrying about disk access times, much less a service like Gmail. Similarly, what do designers spend all of their time doing if they aren't worrying about the construction process? Nobody cares how pretty your design is if you can't mass-produce it at low cost.
that's one of the things I really like. It's not just the breathing timing, in fact. They could've slapped on an LED that did this behavior. But they hid it behind the body, perforated tiny holes into the body, such that when the light goes out, you can't even make out that the light exists. Beautiful.
There's probably a really powerful argument how they don't even need the sleep light since Macs have the sleep thing so nailed down that it just works.
The guy who made it, Gary Hustwit, also made one called Helvetica, which is very very good, and is making a third (and final in the "series") called Urbanized, about urban design:
This is interesting, but I hardly think it is unique. I would expect Microsoft to have done lots of work with their mice and keyboards. I expect IBM likely did simliar work when coming up with the ThinkPad (a 15 year old form-factor, which is still the best laptop form factor money can buy). Even car manufacturers have very similar types of research.
It's cool to see the patent, but from what I know of various people who work in usability, this sort of thing is not at all unusual.
lenovo has a site where (mostly) david hill posts about the design of their products, including the thinkpad. hill worked on the thinkpad while at ibm and continues to at lenovo.
Lenovo went to a lot of effort on the battery/charging indicator, but they just managed to make it as complicated as possible. http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=79
What model (silver or black screen frame/keys)? I have older one (silver), and the thing is like a lighthouse in a dark bedroom. However, they supposedly fixed it in the newer models.
I dont think so. The ambient light sensor is next to the iSight camera. I'd wager the indicator light is most oft on when the lid is closed and the sensor unexposed to ambient light. It's just dimmer.
Yes, Apple have an eye on detail (but they aren't the only one on the earth, for sure), yes, they patent they findings so they can be the only kids on the block with that particular cool look.
my g5 imac won't go to sleep because the capacitors in it have leaked, periodically in its life cds have been trapped in it which wouldn't eject from the command line, i've had two old style keyboards that have broken completely because of small spillages on them, the mouse that came with the g5 was a worse at detecting movement than an older ms mouse.. i could go on. I bought it expecting engineering attention to detail, what i got was cosmetic attention to detail.
I've always been curious: does anyone else dart their eyes back and forth to determine if a light is blinking or not?I feel like it might be my superpower. I can spot 60hz no problem.
When I first saw the MacBook indicator, it was a lot of fun to finally see my talent put to use in an additional dimension. I remember seeing the modulation and thinking: oh cool, the entire duty cycle remains constant as they increase the on while decreasing the off.
From the patent ("Detailed Description of the Preferred Embodiments"):
"The electrical pulses as shown in FIG. 3 have varied pulse widths because of the operation of PWM, and their actual pulse widths depend on the associated sinusoidal duty cycle function. The PWM frequency used in this embodiment is 125 Hz. In fact, preferred frequencies include any frequency sufficiently greater than that can be effectively distinguished by the human eye. However, power consideration for portable devices further prefer PWM frequencies to range within, for example, 100-200 Hz. ... It was determined through experiment that increasing the duty cycle according to a non-linear function gives the most pleasing visual effect while a simple linear ramp does not seem as natural."
This is consistent with what I claim. I never sad the apple indicator light was 60hz, I was just using that as an example as it's a very common frequency; I notice it especially with antennae, bridges, buildings, etc.
Take a camera and set the shutter speed long enough so that you can blur the light, and you'll see the blinking effect that I do. The patent can claim it's not noticable, but it's pretty noticable to me. Interesting that they market even in their patents.
Yes... Motion pictures, for example, are 24hz-30hz, which is just enough to get rid of noticeable flicker, but still risks strobing during fast camera movements.
Another major factor in motion pictures is that each frame also contains a substancial amount of blur. This allows your mind to compensate for the lack of frames. I'm not sure how projectors work, exactly, but I suspect they also fade into and out of each frame in some way. That is, it probably doesn't operate like this: show frame -> clear screen -> show next frame.
LEDs and the like are usually set up to be either on or off (a square wave) causing the flicker much more apparent. Street lamps are sort of a hybrid, they "flicker" at 60hz, but their flicker is not a square wave, but rather a sine wave.
I wouldn't really call it a superpower, I have it too and it's more of a curse.
Also, the worst are cheap projectors that seem to alternate between red, green, and blue, so you see a rainbow every time you move your eyes between the projector image or your own notes.
It's so frustrating to me, but no one ever believed me about it, so I guess not everyone has this curse.
Yep, exactly. Progressive scanning is pretty bad. I also find it distracting at night while driving as more and more cars' lights, especially tail, are pwm'd LEDs. High frequency, but still they flicker.
Perhaps this exact patent of Apple is the reason why Dells are blinking faster. And not because they failed to copy Apple properly as the blogpost implies.
It probably is why, and it indicates that they failed to copy Apple properly: Apple chose the rate to correspond to a restful breathing rate. As I can attest from a quick test, 40/min is more like someone exercising, hardly a soothing assurance that the Dell is happily sleeping. Furthermore, blinking is not very smooth, either. Dell apparently saw the idea "visually indicate sleep mode". So what Dell has is a blinking indicator light that happen to mean "in sleep mode". What Apple has is a light that intuitively means "I'm happily resting and saving power. When you want me again, open me up and I'll be right where you left me." The first time I saw Apple's light, I immediately knew what the computer was doing. If I saw a Dell blinking a lot, I would have no idea if it meant "sleep mode", "charging", "charging in sleep mode". The blink rate might even be how quickly it's charging or how much it needs to be charged. So yes, Dell did a bad copy.
The first time I really noticed that Apple just has a different level of attention to detail than I, an electronics customer, am used to seeing was with my iPad.
I listen to foreign language lessons on part of my commute and have for several years. After I got my iPad I transferred everything there and started listening as normal. For some reason (don't remember why) I needed to stop listening. So I pulled the headphones out, dig the iPad out of my bag to pause the player since I don't want to miss anything. As I take the iPad out I'm expecting to hear someone speaking but they're not. I pause for a second but nothing. I open the case to make sure I didn't accidentally pause it somehow and check the volume. Volume is fine and some other app was in the foreground. I switch to the Ipod app and sure enough, it was paused. Seems so obvious but no other device I've owned did this (I've never owned an iPod or iPhone).
Another error I've seen: I had a Dell that had a pulsing indicator, and it had an acceptable frequency, but the LED behind it only had 8 levels, linearly powered. You could very clearly see the transition from levels 0-1, 1-2, and 2-3, after which (due to the linear driving) the transitions became very unclear, simultaneously making the transition annoyingly sharp and "pulling back the curtain" and letting you too-easily see the implementation details. Apple (and my current Sony VAIO) gets this right; I can't perceive the transition points between levels, and somebody properly accounted for the way we see brightness nonlinearly.
Doubtful, look at the profile in the patent. They need to hit a tightly specified current vs time profile. And a cap would be a separate component, and they are failure prone.
Apple is the best exmaple of a company that is lead by design. Their products aren't a confusing maze of options and complexity where anything goes, but instead holistic human-friendly devices that are a perfect balance between form and function. Not everyone will be happy with the compromise of "configurability" in favor of "usability" - but the incredible success of Apple products can not be argued with, society at large agrees with simple humanized technology, and will increasingly demand products and services that display good design traits.
At risk of getting massively downvoted (since almost everybody else in this thread who refuses to participate in the Apple lovefest is down -4 right now)...
I really dislike this community conflation of attention to aesthetic detail with "detail". Apple does fantastic work on aesthetics. Wonderful little details like the pulsing sleep led. Their hardware is generally pleasant to look at, their OS...though starting to show its 9 year old age still holds its own.
While important, and often imitated, aesthetic detail is a superficial kind of detail. And it's not wholesale "attention to detail" not matter how many breathless fan posts in blogs on threads there are. Apple products in general have a great many areas where they have piss poor attention to actual detail, and let it slide for years without attention and instead build a marketing campaign around the font they use on their keyboards.
They substitute shiny too often for substance and the vast majority of Apple fans fall for it, "ooh shiny!". There isn't even a single post here in this thread (and there are 171 right now) that says something to effect of "This LED thing is cool, but Apple drops the ball on <insert xyz widely known problem>". And that list of problems is long and ranges in everything from technical issues to hardware reliability to usability problems to yes...aesthetics. Instead we get north of 170 posts, all breathlessly agreeing that they wish Apple could have their child.
Aesthetic detail is "nice to have" but not a "must have". Detail in other areas are probably more important. And sadly, Apple often falls down in those areas. It doesn't really matter if my MBP is cut from a single piece of aluminum and the leds pulse at some certain rhythm when its asleep. It's far more impressive to me that when I open it up, it resumes in under 10 seconds (which BTW is thankfully one of those areas that Apple did turn the attention to detail gun on, Macs sleep and resume fantastically better than any Windows machine I've ever used). But it also matters to me if I have to send it back for repair due to manufacturing defect more often than my dell -- particularly if I've paid a huge price premium to have a pulsing sleep led, the damn thing better be more reliable than a $12 toaster...and sadly it isn't.
I'm certainly not claiming the opposite, that other vendors and software makers are better than Apple in the detail department. Just that Apple has many failures as well, but the community of Apple users religiously ignores those little problems without a peep -- a massive display of this phenomenon is on display here. They stop recognizing that their stuff is just stuff, and Apple makes stuff that's pretty nice to use, but in the end it's just stuff and it's full of flaws.
> There isn't even a single post here in this thread (and there are 171 right now) that says something to effect of "This LED thing is cool, but Apple drops the ball on <insert xyz widely known problem>".
Uh, yes there is. My post, which is currently right below yours (edit: well, it was), explicitly acknowledges that fact. I also wrote another comment about a Mac OS menu behavior that I dislike, which has been voted up, not down. mkramlich also mentioned his problems with iOS 4 on an iPhone 3G here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635018.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that Apple fans "religiously ignore" problems with their products. Do you actually spend time on the support forums, or various Apple-centric sites? I've never met an Apple fan that thought Apple was 100% perfect. Does every single thread appreciative of something a company is good at need to prominently feature criticisms of everything that company is bad at as well? Of course not. Your criticism is silly, and smacks of typical, petty anti-Apple resentment.
> Instead we get north of 170 posts, all breathlessly agreeing that they wish Apple could have their child.
You lost any pretense of trying to provide the voice of reason here.
To be honest I found the Apple community one of the most demanding around. After a new OS arrives, you can hear people complain of the smallest minutia.
For example I remember a post by a famous developer that complained when Apple introduced the 3D dock... because the prospective of the dock was not the same as those the HGI asked for the icons... and so it looked wrong.
In the same period, people also complained that the 3D dock didn't work well when the dock was put on the left/right of the screen... eventually Apple moved back to the old version for those cases.
There's been complains about font changes, about inconsistent looks, about too much colour or too little colour, and the list goes on.
Apple is wonderfully mimicked, never really copied. The company's aesthetic is truly unique and standard setting. We cam both be best friends over that. My mbp gets far too much use for a 4 year old piece of hardware. And it still resumes from sleep better than my brand new dell studio running win7 does.
I'm actually impressed that you can bring yourself to acknowledge minor bubbles in posts like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634581. But that same post waxed on to almost absurd levels of pseudo philosophical anthropomorphism. And that's the type hystrionics I'm talking about.
> But that same post waxed on to almost absurd levels of pseudo philosophical anthropomorphism. And that's the type hystrionics I'm talking about.
"almost absurd levels of pseudo philosophical anthropomorphism"? Are you reading that post correctly? When I said "Truly personal computers," I'm not saying the computers are like persons. I'm saying that they fit people to a far greater degree than any other PC I've ever seen.
>(since almost everybody else in this thread who refuses to participate in the Apple lovefest is down -4 right now)...
Don't lead with that crap. I usually stop reading when I see that.
Also its good to have the voice of reason but after reading through the rest of your comment all I see is a complaint about Apple fans and Mac's reliability. You mention <xyz widely known problem> but don't mention anything specific. Whether or not your point is valid it is a good point to make but non-constructive criticism doesn't get anywhere.
The printing system sucks. I have a large selection of printers, most of which cannot print the same paper sizes that the others can print; one of the sizes most commonly lacking is a #10 envelope. Because of this and the way OS X remembers your printer settings, printing and envelope is a very tedious chore. To do something as simple as this in Pages, I have to open the template, go to Page Setup, select the target printer, select the target paper size, change the page orientation to landscape, go to the Print dialog, select the target printer again, and finally click Print.
The OS will not associate the source document size with the actual matching paper size in the printer driver. If I don't go through all those steps, the envelope prints rotated off by 90 degrees. Saving a template with the Page Setup stuff configured does not preserve it either.
Apple's bug tracking system is pretty terrible too.
Since it is all private, and you can only see your own bugs, the most common result is that they mark your bug as a duplicate to some other bug that you can't see. At that point, you can't track the status anymore. The other option is that they just leave it in the open status for years. It's very frustrating.
Getting back duplicates is good - that means your bug is more likely to be fixed, because the duplicate count of external bugs practically determines their importance.
I'm primarily a Linux user, and (perhaps) thus not too concerned with appearance. But I'm very concerned with functionality, and I think Apple consistently fails to apply obvious little touches. I use my girlfriend's Mac quite often, and almost always leave angry at the interface.
Some of my hating goes towards applications (why does Acrobat insist on popping up windows off the screen? why does printing work from Preview but not from Illustrator?) but a lot of it goes toward the basic interface. In my opinion, it's very well polished, but not very consistent or well designed.
I appreciate the response. Yes, I tend to press "Cmd-W" about three times before I realize that I'm dealing with a dialog and not a window. Then I'll either reach for the mouse or press Escape.
Similarly, if I know that a window is in the background, I might manage to remember to Command-click (only needed on the links, not the icons in the title bar?). Occasionally when the stars align I can even copy text from a window without bringing it (and all other windows belonging to that application?) forward.
But my real question is why I should have to distinguish a small 'window' from a large 'dialog'? Shouldn't Cmd-W work in both?
And why should I have to distinguish between a foreground and a background app? Especially in the multi-monitor situation she has set up, it seems like it would be more 'polished' to have all the apps act the same.
This is ignoring the non-standard applications, and the absurdity that clicking on one window often brings many of them to the foreground. My point is not that there aren't workarounds that one can warp one's behaviour to, but that I don't think the mental model itself is that coherent.
The point is that this discussion here is about the specific posted story and related stuff. Anything else is OT here.
In almost every case, when some positiv story A about X is posted, some people feel the need for some reason to point out some unrelated negative stuff B about X.
If you want to talk about B, do that in the specific HN post, not in the unrelated post about A.
If you have the feeling that people have talked to less about B in general and there is no good post on HN about it, write an own story and post it.
I agree, it's a bit of a meta-comment on the sad state of the Apple user-community. I read through probably a full 100 comments in this thread and found myself become more and more annoyed at the lack of basic critical thinking on display. In particular, Apple's done an interesting thing with the LED scheme on some of their hardware. It's a nice touch. It deserves to be noticed. It's interesting that it has never really been copied. Perhaps Apple's industrial design is really a generation or two ahead of the rest of the industry -- that's noteworthy and praiseworthy.
But an interesting LED scheme is immediately extrapolated in the article and by the vast majority of the posts here as indicative of the overall attention to detail Apple puts into its products. I'm simply trying to point out that this extrapolation is nonsensical and wrong by bringing up that Apple actually is good at detail in some areas, not so good in others. Therefore, attention to the detail in how the lights blink is not necessarily indicative of attention to detail in all areas. That seems pretty straightforward and logical to me. Supporting my supposition that critical thinking is clearly not part of the grotesque fawning going on here, here is the kinds of responses I get for putting forward an entirely logical, critical statement.
dieterrams - who is about as gushing a fanboy as the Apple ecosystem can produce.
"Your criticism is silly, and smacks of typical, petty anti-Apple resentment."
"You lost any pretense of trying to provide the voice of reason here."
This is the same person who's response to the OT was "The moment I realized the LED was mimicking breathing (I first experienced it with a white iMac) was the moment I realized just how far Apple goes to make computers for humans. Truly personal computers." Very poetic and followed by a few dozen responses about how, yes, Apple is truly breathtaking and Ive and Jobs are geniuses, etc. etc.
epochwolf & powrtoch - who both asked a variation of the same question.
"Would you mind providing a few examples instead of citing an amorphous large list?"
And at risk of incurring more downvotes from the dieterrams of the world, I responded that no, I won't. All anybody has to do is use their products and read a bit of tech news. Apple's products are full of problems and issues. From lower than average hardware reliability for the industry to wireless signal loss, industry trailing video card drivers or just outright poor design decisions like various gafaws with their input devices -- even things that simple extended reliability testing should expose occur far too frequently and don't appear nearly as often in competitor's products like poor material selection. I shouldn't have to go and research and provide a list of all the nit picky problems Apple has in their products line-up.
Anybody who is paying attention should be able to see them if they aren't spending their entire day trying not to.
Ah, yes. The anthropomorphic elements of Apple's HCI design.
I think this is just Apple applying those same software HCI principles to their hardware design. It's merely one more tool in Apple's arsenal that their hardware competitors lack.
It's amusing watching the author use purple prose over a single blinking LED. I bet if Steve Jobs gave him a turd he would describe it as "that which makes the flowers grow, with a heady aroma".
A few years ago, a friend got one of the first of the x86 iMacs with integrated displays. Initially I thought it was a neat design but still didn't "get" what the big deal was about them and Apple's design ethos in general.
I picked up the small handheld remote that came with it, and frowned. "Hmm, OK, it comes with a remote media control. That's neat, but it's just one more rarely-used gadget that's going to get lost in the clutter on peoples' desks. What they should have done was, oh, I dunno, put a magnet in the side of the monitor frame to keep the remote out of the way when it's not needed, you know, like this..."
It's a self-deprecating device, used to indicate that the post was intended purely as a topical anecdote which should be taken or left at face value, and not as a general recommendation to buy stock based on individual product features. :-P
Another cool story: when the first bi-color red/green LEDs showed up at Radio Shack in the early 1990s, I designed a PWM circuit to implement a battery-life indicator that would glow green with a full charge and slowly fade through yellow to red as the battery discharged. The patent committee at Dell was paying $1000 bonuses for disclosures at the time, but I couldn't get them to buy into this one. There were objections to the effect that it was trivial, or some such reasoning. I agreed, and left the meeting with no hard feelings. No harm in trying, right?
Hold on a minute, are you slating Dell for not patenting something that is indeed trivial, or for not using your idea in their products? Because the former should be applauded.
I think the point isn't that they didn't think it should be patented, more that they really weren't interested in that level of detail generally.
It is trivial but lots of trivial things put together can make for the improved user experience that distinguishes products you can charge top dollar for from the sort of mass market machines Dell turn out.
At the time the bonuses were being handed out, engineers were running pretty much whatever they could think of up the flagpole. Nobody was concerned with the ethics of the situation. (In my defense I pitched only four disclosures at them, out of which only one was accepted for filing.)
Today, if you have a problem with the USPTO's policy of rubber-stamping trivial, obvious, and abstract patents (and I most certainly do), the proper targets for venting are your Congressmen. It's safe to say they don't read Hacker News (hint, hint).
Apple's UX quality and attention to detail definitely helped make me a convert. Or a re-convert: I started with Apple II+, then got into IBM/Microsoft PC's, then came back to Apple a few years ago.
This is why I'm frustrated by the UX of iOS 4.0 running on my iPhone 3G. It is plagued with these unpredictable freezes, especially in Safari, which makes it unusable sometimes. We're talking total UI non-responsiveness for anywhere from 15-120 seconds, right smack in the middle of you're doing something. Very let down by them in this area. I've already learned of an unofficial way to downgrade back to 3.x, however, I've been reluctant to do it because I have some legacy contract projects who want me to support 4.0, so I need to keep something running it.
Other than this issue, though, Apple provides an awesome UX and has been a no-brainer choice over Microsoft -- a company I had also noticed many times in the past was copying the surface aspect of what a competitor did, often Apple, but not getting the fundamentals right, and making themselves look like idiots.
Off-topic, but have you tried the 'disable everything you don't search for in spotlight' workaround? I've heard it works wonders, and the more you can disable the better. Not entirely sure why. You can google for the details (if there are any more than what I've listed already).
yes i did that. and have restarted and restored a few times. i still get the mysterious temporary freezes. i've read the Apple forums discussions, my impression is that all of the "fixes" reported by endusers (except rolling back to 3.3) are just lucky happenstance and/or the person in question didn't test it long enough afterward so was still in honeymoon period. thanks for suggestion though! (we should def not continue this thread since off-topic)
is breathing light really a requirement? I would prefer faster and cheaper computers. IMHO I find Apple computers to be equivalent of SUV's. You can get a descent laptop at nearly 20-30% cheaper from Dell/HP/ASUS.
Maybe only Americans can afford such frivolity. The difference in price between a good Dell laptop and Apple one is same as wage for 1-2 months for a middle class person in most parts of the worlds.
I own a MacBook. I'm an a limited budget, and yet I paid more for it than I could have for similar spec non Apple hardware. You know why? Because I like it.
My life is full of crappy cheap gadgets and things. Nearly everything I deal with on a day to day basis has been designed to be manufactured as cheaply and as quickly as possible, and it's evident. I like using my little MacBook; it's slim, it's light, it's beautifully built, it's aesthetically pleasing, it has a great keyboard, there's nothing else out there that comes close to the trackpad, it's full of nice touches and it feels like someone has put a lot of thought into it's design.
About the same time, my sister bought herself a Toshiba laptop that, on paper, was equivalent to my macbook, but it cost her about 25% less. The toshiba is almost twice as fat, has a horrid keyboard, an even worse touch pad, a battery life of about two hours and flexes like you wouldn't believe.
I guess it's similar to buying expensive clothes or paying more for a nice car (I have neither)
After a few years, my macbook has basically fallen apart, gotten stains that wont come out from book covers, the top case still cracking even after replacing it several times over. The build quality is pretty irritating. My girlfriends netbook of 2 years although works just fine and is of identical thickness. I would like a sony vaio Z series with it's 13" 1080p screen, dual SSDs and 3 pounds of weight vs. a macbook, but have to use it because of iPhone development.
I agree macs are beautiful and buying good tools is smart, but I love my Toshiba. It's a tank. It's been around the world with me, banged around on trains, planes, buses in second and third world countries, I've slept on top of my laptop bag with the sucker inside, and it still runs. It's got cracks in the case and the keyboard is battered, but it still runs. My old Toshiba was a tank too, it went five years before dying, and I run my laptops hard.
I love the aesthetics of a Macbook Air for instance, but I'd be terrified to travel with one the way I travel.
If that's how you see it, then yes, I guess I do. (obvious troll is obvious?)
The thing I've learned is that people often value things differently to how I do, and for reasons I don't often understand.
Personally, I find Windows to be a hugely annoying OS to use, and very limiting, but I understand that for almost everybody else it suits their needs fine and they like it. I'm a big fan of Linux, but I realise that may not suit everyone.
Same with music; you wouldn't believe what I listen to, and I don't imagine for a second you'd like it (hint: if an album doesn't have at least a few tracks that go for over 10 minutes, I'm not interested), and the reverse is possibly true as well.
What am I getting at here? Thankfully, we're not all clones of each other, and often personal tastes are very different. Expecting some stranger to justify their choices to you kind of indicates you haven't figured this yet.
Thank you for having one of the few reasoned statements of why you like a mac I've seen in this post! It's a breath of fresh air!
You like it simply because you like it. You recognize some people may not like it, and may like other things. And that's ok. You think your Mac is fine for you, and does what you want to do the way you want to do them and it may or may not be the case for other people and find that to be and alright way for the world to be.
Except macs cost less and are better in every way. It is kinda funny that you guys have been telling this lie for 20 years and you think people don't all know you're full of it. Pathetic, but funny.
That you can read a thread like this and describe the sleep LED behavior as "frivolity" nicely encapsulates not only why Apple does well, but why a certain segment of its competition will never grasp why it keeps getting beaten.
Apple can't do well for that segment of the market until those people start to take Apple seriously. Right now, the prevailing opinion among Apple detractors seems to be that all the little touches are "fluff" and polish that don't add up to any monetary value at all.
Evidence of this abounds: my favorite example is the multitouch touchpad that Apple uses. If somebody is saying something good about a pointing device on a non-Apple laptop, odds are good that they've never spent time with Apple's touchpad. It's that much better, but if you haven't used it and you don't trust Apple or anybody who uses Apple products, you'll probably never assign it more than about $5 of value, when experienced users would easily value it at ten times that. (That's why it isn't insane for apple to release a standalone touchpad for $70).
Fortunately for Apple, far more people have been willing to try the iPhone than have been willing to try their computers, and many of them have discovered that "not sucking" is worth more than a few hundred megahertz. The "halo effect" is real, and is not due entirely to people "buying in" to an Apple lifestyle.
The people who have strong technical or financial barriers to using Apple computers are far outnumbered by the proud Apple haters who haven't actually used a Mac long enough to appreciate the little things. However, unless somebody else starts releasing well designed computer hardware and software, Apple will eventually win over most of the haters through sheer ubiquity. (I expect that at some point, there will be a tipping point where hating Apple becomes uncool. If we pass that tipping point before Apple has serious competition, Apple will probably achieve a near-monopoly.)
> Fortunately for Apple, far more people have been willing to try the iPhone than have been willing to try their computers
Most people I know that have (and love) the iPhone today hated it before they tried it. I had a friend who kept saying his Windows Mobile phone was fine for all the stuff he needed, and there was no reason to get an iPhone. After he moved in with me in Vancouver (from New Brunswick) and saw how fluid it was for me to use my iPhone, and how I never had to dick around with it uselessly like he did with his just to get it to work, he switched.
Two years of me telling him it was great, and he didn't believe me. A week of seeing me use it changed his mind.
"If somebody is saying something good about a pointing device on a non-Apple laptop, odds are good that they've never spent time with Apple's touchpad. It's that much better"
Personally, I despise the acceleration curve Apple uses when I'm using a mouse with my MBP. I went through all kinds of contortions to deal with it or change it. I tossed out my mighty mouse after a couple months due to crud build-up and returned the magic mouse because it was virtually impossible to use without hand cramps or having it slide across my desk.
The only thing I really think is special about the trackpad on my MBP is its size, but I've found that the pad on my Dell just seems to work better with higher accuracy and less padding around and the ergonomics "feel" better to me.
I'd pay extra money for them to un-suck their pointy interface devices and software. They're really that bad.
Why I can't I hook up something like an iPad to my Mac as an interface device? Mirror the screen on it so I have some direct eye-finger synergy? I'd pay for something like that, with a nice capacitive touch screen.
I'm actually dividing the world between people who value good design in the things they use every day, and people who don't value good design. It's just a peculiarity of the market that Apple is the only computer company that is currently effectively targeting the former group. I realize that not all of the latter group actively criticize Apple and Apple users, but they are still likely to be surprised when they sit down and really use an Apple product.
What do you need faster for? Unless we're talking about gaming or rendering I would rather have a computer that loads Firefox half a second slower than one with a clunkier UI and less attention to detail.
>Maybe only Americans can afford such frivolity.
Tell us more about how you're better than us, please.
I resent that remark, because I own a Mac and drive an SUV, and the SUV is exactly the kind of cheap-falling-apart-crap that the Mac is the total antithesis of. Maybe it's possible to make a well-designed SUV, but mine is just awful. Latest example: the gas cap doesn't screw on and off like an ordinary fucking gas cap, it's a turn-1/8-of-a-turn-and-pull-out gas cap, with a lock. So, with all those moving parts, it broke and I had to spend like $80 getting a shop to forcibly remove the thing and replace it with another gas cap (non-locking, so it's more reliable). This is when it got permanently jammed--when it was only temporarily jammed, the only way to put gas in the damned tank was to rear back and kick it in the gas cap, which allows you to unlock and remove the gas cap in the usual fashion. This little fix permanently bent my fuel door out of position.
And newer SUV's are even worse. You can't even see out of the back of a fucking 08 Explorer.
The cost of owning a device is more than just what you initially pay. If you don't understand this you're never going to be well to do.
I have about 6 different brands of laptop, which I use as my desktop and carry with me on my long commute. Every one of them started having odd hardware issues. The latest was a Acer. Within 2 weeks the backlight stopped working. I got it fixed (no laptop for at least 2 weeks) and within another month it was broken again. It continued to be a problem until the warranty expired. I'll never touch another Acer product as long as I live.
Mac can and will have lemons like any company does, but their support makes me not have to fear this. That alone is worth any little extra I pay.
If you prefer cheaper computers, buy a used one or two generations back model. Simple as that. Better than buying crap just for the psychological satisfaction of having something "new".
Normally I would agree with you, but having owned both I disagree. I think the latest generation of Macbook Pro's are just heads and tails above the older generations.
Crap people buy crap computers. They aren't even thinking about it. It's like they don't think they are worthy enough, and so they're jealous of those of us with more Self esteem.
I don't think anyone is saying it's a requirement. Just a nice touch. Many people who work in technology are paid quite well and can afford to buy what they want instead of the bare minimum of what they need. I'd rather not be rude but since you went there why even buy a new computer at all? You could donate that money to one of those unfortunate places and feed a family for half a year.
Faster is just one part of the whole experience. Buy a ssd and put that as your main drive in a mbp and you will have a faster computer and one that is aesthetically pleasing. The trackpad on the mbp makes it usable as a laptop without any peripherals. The fact that I can have my mbp sleep and wake with a reliability is one of the largest selling points to me. Every windows computer I have ever owned has consistently failed me on this point.
Edit: I guess I should make it clear that I am agreeing with you.
The lenovo one yeah:) it also failed it's motherboard for no reason. Maybe by the time I got that one from work I was too gun shy to give it a thorough test of the sleeping abilities though.
You didn't even spell decent right, you wrote descent...
And anyways, I don't want a "descent" laptop, I want one that I actually like using. I have a Dell for work and a Macbook for home. There is absolutely no comparison, Windows ruins the experience and hardware is not the sum of the product. Specs are meaningless, it's how the product actually performs.
But how much does the timing of the blinking light add to the cost of a macbook? Would it cost $10 less if it pulsed 40 beats/minutes like a Dell? Of course not. Maybe only Cornell students like yourself can afford such false dichotomy. By the way, did you know that the difference in annual tuition between Cornell and an excellent public school like the University of Michigan is three years salary for a middle class person in someplace like Mumbia, India? Is an Ivy League education really a requirement?
I think many companies see the features (windows flying around in Exposé, brightly colored window management buttons, pulsing status light, etc.) but don't understand that generally Apple doesn't just throw something in for looks and has thoroughly researched and iterated internally on a particular solution.
At the expense of sounding fanatic, generally an Apple feature looks the way it does as a result of its function. (What is the problem: make window management easy. how is that solved: make all open windows easy to see by spreading them out). When other companies attempt to copy, they look at what Apple's solution looks like, not realizing what it _does_. (e.g. Areo Flip 3D: what should it look like: windows flying all over the place. what problem does this solve: ???)