> It’s interesting how a lot of companies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right.<p>I think many companies see the features (windows flying around in Exposé, brightly colored window management buttons, pulsing status light, etc.) but don't understand that generally Apple doesn't just throw something in for looks and has thoroughly researched and iterated internally on a particular solution.<p>At the expense of sounding fanatic, generally an Apple feature looks the way it does as a result of its function. (What is the problem: make window management easy. how is that solved: make all open windows easy to see by spreading them out). When other companies attempt to copy, they look at what Apple's solution looks like, not realizing what it _does_. (e.g. Areo Flip 3D: what should it look like: windows flying all over the place. what problem does this solve: ???)
The moment I realized the LED was mimicking breathing (I first experienced it with a white iMac) was the moment I realized just how far Apple goes to make computers for <i>humans</i>. Truly personal computers. This is the kind of stuff that gets people lining up for new Apple products, not some silly brand whoring or desire to be hip and fashionable.<p>Admittedly, they made the LED way too bright on the earlier MBPs, such that it would distract you if you were trying to sleep in a dark room. The newer MBPs have gotten the brightness just right, however.<p>Also, none of this ignores the fact that Apple routinely privileges superficial aesthetics over ergonomics, utility, etc. (Magic Mouse, hard edges on MBP, glossy displays), but that rarely stops the whole package from being the best on the market.
My wife can't stand having little LEDs on all over the place. We've hidden our wireless router, our battery charger and everything. One night my laptop was on the floor as we were going to sleep, and I said, "Oh! Let me put away my MacBook," and she said, "Don't worry about it, I find it soothing."<p>This is definitely a detail that is appreciated.
I'm surprised that not everyone notices that. The first time I saw a Mac in sleep mode I immediately realized that it was breathing in a relaxed manner. (It seemed so obvious I never even mentioned it to anyone, so I don't know if anyone else noticed.)<p><i>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.</i><p>As to why Dell didn't copy it exactly... perhaps they reviewed the patent and decided they would get in trouble?<p>Personally, I think we should not personify our computing hardware. It's a tool, not your friend. When my machine goes to sleep, its lights turn off. If I want to wake it from sleep, I press the power button. If it was off instead of asleep, I would press the same power button. No need for an LED to tell me what's going on.
I remember realizing that nothing on the iPhone ever, ever blinks into or out of existence. EVERYTHING transitions.<p>When you turn the orientation in the camera app, the little flash button and flip-camera buttons don't simple become horizontal...they fall down gently.<p>The damn thing never blinks.
In looking at my ThinkPad it got me thinking as to why IBM didn't blink at all. And I'm not sure, but I have a theory. I have other devices that blink to indicate that something is happening to them, and I always seem to catch them at the state when they're not illuminated. And, while this state only lasts for a second or less, I often get brief anxiety that something isn't charging or whatever.<p>IBM went with the constantly illuminated moon. I've never laid down to sleep to it, but its worked as a great, at a glance, indicator that the computer is sleeping, and not off or on.
Another nice thing about that LED is that it's white (as opposed to bright green in a lot of laptops) and it's softened (meaning that you can't really point out the exact point where the LED is hiding, making the whole shape homogeneous).
It's a great idea, but no one else can use it. I don't like the fact of patenting even the frequency of a blinking led. It keeps adding constraints for competition, which is nice for Apple but I wouldn't celebrate it.
Well now I know why I spent a half hour just staring at that stupid light when I got my new MBP. There was something about the radiance pattern -- now I know.<p>Seriously though, that's a brilliant feature. Most companies wouldn't give the time or money for developers to come up with that.
The big place where I notice this is in the "flick" scrolling on Android vs iPhone. Android just has this very tiny jerkiness, a just slightly less natural motion. I can't even define what it is about the motion, I just know it is perfect on the iPhone and almost but not quite on Android.<p>(And for the record, I love Android and would gladly cast every iDevice I own into a fire if I didn't need them for work).
There's a great scene in Objectified about the indicator light on a MBP (or, in that case, perhaps an Air) and how it appears and disappears when needed. Viz.:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0fe800C2CU#t=04m40s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0fe800C2CU#t=04m40s</a>
This is interesting, but I hardly think it is unique. I would expect Microsoft to have done lots of work with their mice and keyboards. I expect IBM likely did simliar work when coming up with the ThinkPad (a 15 year old form-factor, which is still the best laptop form factor money can buy). Even car manufacturers have very similar types of research.<p>It's cool to see the patent, but from what I know of various people who work in usability, this sort of thing is not at all unusual.
Speaking of attention to detail...<p>"12-20 breathes per minute" should be "12-20 breaths per minute"<p>"40 blinks per second" should be "40 blinks per minute"
Lenovo went to a lot of effort on the battery/charging indicator, but they just managed to make it as complicated as possible. <a href="http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=79" rel="nofollow">http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=79</a>
I smell a bit of fanboyism in the article.<p>Yes, Apple have an eye on detail (but they aren't the only one on the earth, for sure), yes, they patent they findings so they can be the only kids on the block with that particular cool look.
my g5 imac won't go to sleep because the capacitors in it have leaked, periodically in its life cds have been trapped in it which wouldn't eject from the command line, i've had two old style keyboards that have broken completely because of small spillages on them, the mouse that came with the g5 was a worse at detecting movement than an older ms mouse.. i could go on. I bought it expecting engineering attention to detail, what i got was cosmetic attention to detail.
I've always been curious: does anyone else dart their eyes back and forth to determine if a light is blinking or not?I feel like it might be my superpower. I can spot 60hz no problem.<p>When I first saw the MacBook indicator, it was a lot of fun to finally see my talent put to use in an additional dimension. I remember seeing the modulation and thinking: oh cool, the entire duty cycle remains constant as they increase the on while decreasing the off.
Perhaps this exact patent of Apple is the reason why Dells are blinking faster. And not because they failed to copy Apple properly as the blogpost implies.
The first time I really noticed that Apple just has a different level of attention to detail than I, an electronics customer, am used to seeing was with my iPad.<p>I listen to foreign language lessons on part of my commute and have for several years. After I got my iPad I transferred everything there and started listening as normal. For some reason (don't remember why) I needed to stop listening. So I pulled the headphones out, dig the iPad out of my bag to pause the player since I don't want to miss anything. As I take the iPad out I'm expecting to hear someone speaking but they're not. I pause for a second but nothing. I open the case to make sure I didn't accidentally pause it somehow and check the volume. Volume is fine and some other app was in the foreground. I switch to the Ipod app and sure enough, it was paused. Seems so obvious but no other device I've owned did this (I've never owned an iPod or iPhone).
Another error I've seen: I had a Dell that had a pulsing indicator, and it had an acceptable frequency, but the LED behind it only had 8 levels, linearly powered. You could very clearly see the transition from levels 0-1, 1-2, and 2-3, after which (due to the linear driving) the transitions became very unclear, simultaneously making the transition annoyingly sharp and "pulling back the curtain" and letting you too-easily see the implementation details. Apple (and my current Sony VAIO) gets this right; I can't perceive the transition points between levels, and somebody properly accounted for the way we see brightness nonlinearly.
I plugged my iPhone headphones into my MBP. The volume control works. The play/pause button loads, plays and pauses iTunes music.<p>The Apple Bluetooth keyboard has an option in OS X to show the battery life. It does not when connected to Vista.
Apple is the best exmaple of a company that is lead by design. Their products aren't a confusing maze of options and complexity where anything goes, but instead holistic human-friendly devices that are a perfect balance between form and function. Not everyone will be happy with the compromise of "configurability" in favor of "usability" - but the incredible success of Apple products can not be argued with, society at large agrees with simple humanized technology, and will increasingly demand products and services that display good design traits.
At risk of getting massively downvoted (since almost everybody else in this thread who refuses to participate in the Apple lovefest is down -4 right now)...<p>I really dislike this community conflation of attention to aesthetic detail with "detail". Apple does fantastic work on aesthetics. Wonderful little details like the pulsing sleep led. Their hardware is generally pleasant to look at, their OS...though starting to show its 9 year old age still holds its own.<p>While important, and often imitated, aesthetic detail is a superficial kind of detail. And it's not wholesale "attention to detail" not matter how many breathless fan posts in blogs on threads there are. Apple products in general have a great many areas where they have piss poor attention to actual detail, and let it slide for years without attention and instead build a marketing campaign around the font they use on their keyboards.<p>They substitute shiny too often for substance and the vast majority of Apple fans fall for it, "ooh shiny!". There isn't even a single post here in this thread (and there are 171 right now) that says something to effect of "This LED thing is cool, but Apple drops the ball on <insert xyz widely known problem>". And that list of problems is long and ranges in everything from technical issues to hardware reliability to usability problems to yes...aesthetics. Instead we get north of 170 posts, all breathlessly agreeing that they wish Apple could have their child.<p>Aesthetic detail is "nice to have" but not a "must have". Detail in other areas are probably more important. And sadly, Apple often falls down in those areas. It doesn't really matter if my MBP is cut from a single piece of aluminum and the leds pulse at some certain rhythm when its asleep. It's far more impressive to me that when I open it up, it resumes in under 10 seconds (which BTW is thankfully one of those areas that Apple <i>did</i> turn the attention to detail gun on, Macs sleep and resume fantastically better than any Windows machine I've ever used). But it also matters to me if I have to send it back for repair due to manufacturing defect more often than my dell -- particularly if I've paid a huge price premium to have a pulsing sleep led, the damn thing better be more reliable than a $12 toaster...and sadly it isn't.<p>I'm certainly not claiming the opposite, that other vendors and software makers are <i>better</i> than Apple in the detail department. Just that Apple has many failures as well, but the community of Apple users religiously ignores those little problems without a peep -- a massive display of this phenomenon is on display here. They stop recognizing that their stuff is just stuff, and Apple makes stuff that's pretty nice to use, but in the end it's just stuff and it's full of flaws.<p><i>just trying to provide the voice of reason here</i>
Ah, yes. The anthropomorphic elements of Apple's HCI design.<p>I think this is just Apple applying those same software HCI principles to their hardware design. It's merely one more tool in Apple's arsenal that their hardware competitors lack.
It's amusing watching the author use purple prose over a single blinking LED. I bet if Steve Jobs gave him a turd he would describe it as "that which makes the flowers grow, with a heady aroma".
<Cool story, bro><p>A few years ago, a friend got one of the first of the x86 iMacs with integrated displays. Initially I thought it was a neat design but still didn't "get" what the big deal was about them and Apple's design ethos in general.<p>I picked up the small handheld remote that came with it, and frowned. "Hmm, OK, it comes with a remote media control. That's neat, but it's just one more rarely-used gadget that's going to get lost in the clutter on peoples' desks. What they should have done was, oh, I dunno, put a magnet in the side of the monitor frame to keep the remote out of the way when it's not needed, you know, like this..."<p><i>snap</i><p>"Oh."<p>I bought 100 shares of AAPL that night.<p></Cool story, bro>
Apple's UX quality and attention to detail definitely helped make me a convert. Or a re-convert: I started with Apple II+, then got into IBM/Microsoft PC's, then came back to Apple a few years ago.<p>This is why I'm frustrated by the UX of iOS 4.0 running on my iPhone 3G. It is plagued with these unpredictable freezes, especially in Safari, which makes it unusable sometimes. We're talking total UI non-responsiveness for anywhere from 15-120 seconds, right smack in the middle of you're doing something. Very let down by them in this area. I've already learned of an unofficial way to downgrade back to 3.x, however, I've been reluctant to do it because I have some legacy contract projects who want me to support 4.0, so I need to keep something running it.<p>Other than this issue, though, Apple provides an awesome UX and has been a no-brainer choice over Microsoft -- a company I had also noticed many times in the past was copying the surface aspect of what a competitor did, often Apple, but not getting the fundamentals right, and making themselves look like idiots.
is breathing light really a requirement? I would prefer faster and cheaper computers. IMHO I find Apple computers to be equivalent of SUV's. You can get a descent laptop at nearly 20-30% cheaper from Dell/HP/ASUS.<p>Maybe only Americans can afford such frivolity. The difference in price between a good Dell laptop and Apple one is same as wage for 1-2 months for a middle class person in most parts of the worlds.