‘Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it’s pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I’m sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn’t like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed.’
So too it’ll be with computers. Eventually, most will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying computer is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.
superamit, stammy, rinich:
From Apple.com:
Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.
Bam! That’s their selling point! Somebody gets paid lots of money to write that sentence, and they earn it all, because that sentence will sell several billion of these things.
I don’t know that I agree with the “magic” component rinich mentions several times in this post. Delight comes from recognition, and recognition is a fleeting feeling. But I do agree that the price point is absolutely the most compelling selling point of the Apple Tablet*. It’s cheaper than an iPhone and works, and is friendly, out of the box. That’s amazing. The Latitude XT2 costs $2k. Apple is marketing this for the common man, and the prices match up with the intended consumer audience.
*I’m just ignoring the whole ‘iPad’ moniker. Terrible.
—Timoni
So, whilst I’m sure whatever it is will be outstanding in the aesthetic, my interest is less concerned with the reveal of a beautiful artifact, but to discover why I’m supposed to want one; the design of the product experience; the very reasons for this device to even exist in a world where tablet computers have been a stupid (or at best, niche) idea.
— benw
Exactly. Nobody’s excited about the idea of a new tablet device: everybody’s excited (or skeptical) about how Apple would manage to make us want one.
If you haven’t downloaded the MS Paint throwback Paintbrush for Mac already, well, what are you waiting for?
from Mike McGuiness, the iPhone/Blackberry debate rages in the Scribd offices.
