Jason Snell of Macworld on why Apple excels at product design:
Apple excels at creating products that the general public likes because the company is driven by design, not by engineering. Most tech products — heck, most products in general — aren’t as good as they can be because they’re put together by the people with the technical knowledge required to build them. And so the technical aspects of the product get pushed to the forefront.
Apple’s the kind of company that makes decisions based on people, on users, and then challenges its engineers to find ways to fulfill those needs.
Comments
Well, Apple products look pretty, but that doesn’t make them a good design. I think many of Apple products have rather inconvenient designes:
– Mouse — You cannot lift it off the table and continue holding down the mouse buttons.
– Generally speaking, too few buttons which trades usability for looks
– No hardware eject optical media button
– No delete key on their keyboards
– Apple portable players require users to use iTunes rather than allowing users to simply drag and drop files onto the portable player. iTune is the reason why I don’t own any Apple portable media players, by the way.
– Their OS also has a lot of annoying features, e.g. mouse acceleration, menu bar is tied to one monitor, window resizing can only be done from one corner… the list goes on.
So yeah, Apple some times has good ideas and some times they should pull their own head out of their a**.