Apple design faux pas
Note: When I
first wrote this back in November 2000, I hoped it would form the
kernel of a Weblog on coverage of Mac OS X. But the article ended
up deploying OS X as an example of Apple’s unsung history of design
mistakes. OS X now officially exists, so I’ve turned this oddball
appendix of a page into a gripe session on Apple’s design
faux pas. Feel free to
write in with your own nominations.
- QuickTime 4
- Unusable but gorgeously symmetrical and translucent puck mouse,
attractive to executives who are not stuck using the damn thing
- Fixed now, and quite handily. So what about the millions of
puck mice in service?
- It belongs in a parody of a fashion photo shoot, not on a
desk
- Quasi-fascistic centred design æsthetic
- Centred Apple logos on monitors, clashing significantly with
left-justified menus in OS ≤9, leading to...
- Decoy, ornamental centred Apple logo in X, falsely resembling
functioning Apple menu of yore
- Centred Dock (definitive
ArsTechnica coverage), growing from centreline with each
addition, defeating the muscle memory (proprioception) you build up with the
spatially-oriented OS ≤9 (definitive
ArsTechnica coverage; definitive AskTog
coverage)
- Centred CD eject button, connected by flimsy strut to
left-mounted OEM eject
button
- Substandard keyboards
- Keyboards with no power keys
- Keyboards too small to type on
- Complete obsolescence and incompatibility of former
bulletproof, built-like-a-tank ADB keyboards, even with
ADB–USB adapters
- Rest in peace, Extended Keyboard II, Alps GlidePoint, and even
Apple Adjustable Keyboard
- Steve Jobs has been hostile to typing for decades; it took
years to get arrow keys and a Forward Delete key, itself vying with
the Power key as most vulnerable and expendable key; see keyboard articles
- Severe usability defects with the G4 Cube, a Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh
manqué
- Reset switch and all ports on bottom (and remember, you can no
longer use the Control-Command-Power reset key sequence
because there is no power key on the board)
- No external handle to turn Cube over
- Cube power switch on top, where you will rest the Cube to
manipulate cables
- Top of Cube cannot be covered without putting it to sleep
- Find me one designer on this planet whose computer isn’t
piled high with papers, boxes, remote controls, dildos, model
ships, replica Citroëns, and the like; mine’s got an
entire monitor on it
- Monitor incompatibilities due to new digital interface
- The multiple-monitor Macintosh is effectively a thing of the
past – itself a reason to keep me from buying a G4, even if I
inhabited a fantasy parallel universe with enough money to do so.
(Used G4 or G3 is still viable)
- Colour of front speakers on iMac
- Unheralded: they shouldn’t be body-coloured, so thank God
for Snow
- Gigantic icons, first in AppleWorks 6, now in OS X, that defeat
the purpose
- Aqua colour scheme (which, when defeated by switching to grey,
goes entirely unmissed; as editors like to say, “kill your
darlings”)
- Throbbing default buttons that don’t look or act like
buttons
- Think banner ads; will you even read the contents of
the dialogue box, “sheets” or no sheets, with a
sky-blue oval blinking in your face?
- A kind of ethnic cleansing in localization (op.
cit.)
Got your own suggestions?
Updated 2002.05.05
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Apple design faux pas
See also: X OS X, the
Straightedge Operating System