- December 7th, 2007
- Filed in
No company on the face of the planet has been heralded for it’s excellent design more than Apple.
Sometimes when they’re pushing the design envelop they’re off the mark and their products end up making better fish tanks than computers.
In their effort to always push the envelope of industrial design they sometimes fail, but they always seem to do so gracefully. You can’t succeed without failing every once in a while and Apple is no stranger to flops. No one can argue their designs don’t have aesthetic appeal, but sometimes it seems practicality bears the burden.
So recently when a friend and coworker was foiled by Apple design I realized that Apple’s stellar design team wasn’t as flawless as we all sometimes think.
The situation occurred when Bill and I were talking about developing .Net applications on our Mac’s. Bill does a lot of work with .Net and I wondered why he still worked mostly on his PC at work when he could have all the Mac-goodness and develop .Net in his Parallels installation. This discussion lead to grievances about his lack of right clicking ability making the whole idea too much of a pain than it was worth. Bill has a mighty mouse and has had one for quite some time and was never aware that it indeed was a two button mouse. How could this happen? Seems that his macbook was defaulted to this (one button config) configuration unbeknown to him. So why didn’t he ever realize that his mighty mouse was a two button mouse? I think it’s pretty simple, Apple’s industrial design team did nothing to tell you “Hey this is a two button mouse because it looks like a two button mouse”. In fact, the only difference between Apple’s One-Button Mouse and their Mighty Mouse is the little scroll wheel (known as the nipple pictured below).
One-Button Mouse
Mighty Mouse
Don’t two-button mice look like this?
Any recent switcher would loathe the one-button mouse (I know I did), it’s just not what they’re used to and if you ask me, it’s always been a past problem with Macs. Two-button mice are the way to go and should always be set that way by default with each new shiny Mighty Mouse that ships. Move forward with your new-found user base and rejoice!
So to avoid future confusion I’m creating my own version of what a mighty mouse should look like using Photoshop wizardry. I call it the Mighty Kyle. I love my mighty mouse - it’s the best mouse I’ve ever had, but it sure doesn’t look like a two-button mouse, I think the Mighty Kyle sure does.
I can still hear the echoes of Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign, I say a better slogan would read “Think Different, For The Sake Of Being Different”.
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I’ve been living in Boston, just a few miles from Fenway since September ‘06. In that time I’ve never tried to get to a game, but this morning I was determined to get tickets to opening day and a couple more games.
