Posts tagged “hardware”

John Gruber spent some time with the new MacBook Pro:

It feels a bit silly to be excited about a classic arrow key layout, a hardware Escape key, and key switches that function reliably and feel good when you type with them, but that’s where we are. The risk of being a Mac user is that we’re captive to a single company’s whims.

Great that they fixed the keyboards, but I’m guessing repairability hasn’t improved. My 2014 MacBook Pro’s battery started expanding recently, and I was surprised to learn that a battery replacement isn’t a simple job, even for this older generation. The battery is glued in place, so replacing it means an entirely new top case, keyboard, and trackpad — and in my case a week without my computer. That’s bad design too, and a side of it that Apple isn’t getting enough flak for.

Terence Eden explains how different screen technologies, human biology, and fingerprint grease make “pixel perfection” a pointless goal:

There is no grid. There never has been. You can align to theoretical pixels - but as soon as the image hits a physical screen, it will be adjusted to best fit reality.

An obsession with pixel perfect rendering is futile.

Every Layout expands on this idea, specifically as it pertains to CSS:

Suffice it to say that, while screens are indeed made up of pixels, pixels are not regular, immutable, or constant. A 400px box viewed by a user browsing zoomed in is simply not 400px in CSS pixels. It may not have been 400px in device pixels even before they activated zoom.

See also: Ian Mallett’s Subpixel Zoo: A Catalog of Subpixel Geometry.

Kyle Wiens makes a great point:

[Dieter] Rams loves durable products that are environmentally friendly. That’s one of his 10 principles for good design: “Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment.” But Ive has never publicly discussed the dissonance between his inspiration and Apple’s disposable, glued-together products.

When a single broken key requires replacing a laptop’s entire top case, there is no denying that Apple has given too little consideration to the durability of its products.

I’m extremely curious to find out how (if?) Apple’s design philosophy will change with Ive gone.

Zeynep Tufekci is worried about what ownership means for always-connected products:

Today, we may think we own things because we paid for them and brought them home, but as long as they run software or have digital connectivity, the sellers continue to have control over the product. We are renters of our own objects, there by the grace of the true owner.

I worry about this a lot, maybe too much. Unless I don’t have a choice, I avoid any device that superflously requires an internet connection (or worse, a smartphone app) like the plague.

Casey Johnston’s butterfly keyboard saga continues:

I dread the Overton window shift that Apple now appears to be attempting to push, which is that its customers and their crumbs and dust and bad habits are to blame, and should bend themselves around the “sensitive” keyboard, keep canned air (not supplied by Apple itself) on hand at all times, as if this is a problem we’ve always had, and not one Apple singlehandedly created with a nearsighted design.

My 2014 MacBook Pro is still going strong, thankfully. (Knock on wood.)

Patrick Thornton:

The Galaxy Fold is the kind of device that a random user might think is interesting in the abstract. It’s a phone. It’s a tablet. It folds in half!

But good product design is not about letting your users design your products for you — it’s about solving users problems and making their lives better.

Ethan Marcotte:

Let me start by saying I generally avoid terms like “mobile,” “tablet,” and “desktop” in my work. It’s not that they’re bad; it’s because they’re broad. In my experience, terms like these confuse more than they clarify. Ask a roomful of clients or stakeholders to define “mobile,” and you’ll get a roomful of slightly different responses.

What I think is helpful, though, is breaking down the specific conditions or features that’ll cause our designs to adapt.

Mat Honan reviews the Pixel 3:

“We’re doomed,” a colleague texts me on Signal. A push alert from a well-regarded news site has more details on the alleged murder and dismemberment of a Saudi journalist. On Nextdoor, several neighbors report that their drinking water has tested positive for unsafe levels of pesticides. The Citizen app prompts me to record video of an angry naked man rampaging in the shit-strewn streets of San Francisco. Facebook is hacked and our information is out there. Everyone on Twitter is angry, you fucking cuck. You idiot. You tender, triggered snowflake. Everyone on Instagram is posturing, posing. You are less beautiful than they. The places you go are not as interesting. You should feel bad because you are worse in every way. The world is dying; come see it, come see it.