Last Straw

People often falsely assume I advoc­ate and use Apple products because I think they’re trendy or because I’m some kind of gad­get freak.

The truth is our world is awash with badly designed, badly craf­ted things. Apple is one of the few havens in a sea of people and organ­isa­tions that don’t give a fuck about the details. Atten­tion to detail is why I use Apple products:

In July 2002, Apple filed a pat­ent for a “Breath­ing Status LED Indic­ator” …They described it as a “blink­ing effect of the sleep-mode indic­ator in accord­ance with the present inven­tion mim­ics the rhythm of breath­ing which is psy­cho­lo­gic­ally appealing.”

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.

It’s inter­est­ing how a lot of com­pan­ies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right. This is yet another example of Apple’s obsess­ive atten­tion to detail.