The Back-lit Keyboard

Is it a good thing when designers start nit picking? I think it is. Steve Jobs was a designer who liked to make sure that everything that his company ever designed was perfect. He commanded his team of designers like a battleship captain and it paid off extremely well for him and Apple. I guess there really is no price for perfection as today Apple can afford to charge exorbitant amounts for ordinary devices. The Japanese do this just as well as Apple. This can clearly be seen from their huge market share in the automotive industry as well as the fact that they are able to charge more than other companies who make similar products. 

I guess this perfection in design can be traced back to the quality movement in the 60's and 70's when after making shabby and badly designed products for decades, Japan decided to put product quality at the top of their list. Another industry that this worked out really well for the Japanese was the home appliance industry. Sony, Toshiba and Panasonic are all companies founded and based in Japan. 

One of the products produced by this revolution that affects me directly is the laptop and one of the design intricacies that I personally enjoy is the back-lit keyboard. Perfect for finding keys when you are lost on a keyboard, the back-lit keyboard has changed the game forever. No more hunting for keys in the dark, no more pressing backspace when you actually wanted to press enter, a back-lit keyboard can be any computer user's best friend. One of the flaws however is that the computers do not take external lighting conditions into consideration. Computers today should be able to use their cameras to look at the environment's light setting and be able to adjust the brightness of the back-lit keyboard automatically.

Apple Mac Charger and Charging Port

In my opinion Apple products are ridiculously overpriced so much so that a laptop with similar specifications to a 15 inch MacBook Pro (Price: $1,999) can be bought for $1,100. I could go on all day about how much Apple overcharges its customers by but there is another side to this whole story. Whatever Apple does, whatever product it develops, whatever the finished product might be, it will always conform to the highest standards set in the industry and then some. Even the tiniest details will be perfect to the point that Apple could set the Germans and the Japanese to shame. Case in point the Apple MacBook Charger.

Whereas chargers for laptops are generally bulky and disproportionately large, MacBook chargers are small, efficient and convenient. One could even call them a work of art. Firstly, Apple has wasted to space in this piece of hardware. The cable attached to the power supply can be detached and stored by itself whereas the cable that connects to the computer can be wrapped around two flap like pieces of plastic that open up on two sides of the charger. Since being mobile is the main purpose of the laptop, Apple has handled this aspect incredibly well. There have been some complaints about the thickness of wire that connects to the power supply but industry standards require a certain thickness in order to deal with heavy currents expected during high power consuming processes. 

Finally, the cherry on top of the icing. When one steps on the charger cable on a normal laptop one of two things happen. Either the laptop comes crashing down to the ground or the cable breaks or gets damaged. Apple though has been extremely smart about this problem. Instead of having a pin that gets inserted into the laptop to keep the cable in the port, Apple uses a magnet which keeps the cable attached to the port. As soon as the force on the cable exceeds the magnetic force, the cable comes out of the port without damaging anything. This truly is a work of genius on the part of Apple. Not only have they employed the use of Occam's Razor and used the simplest solution possible, but their strategy of improving on even the simplest detail over and over again till it is perfect can clearly illustrate why they hold such a dominant position in the global laptop and computer production market.