Nobody who has spent more than a few minutes around me can fail to be aware that I live in a state of perpetual doodad acquisitiveness and experimentation. My life is filled with doodads. Also gizmos, thingamabobs, and whatchamacallits. I require the absolute best in some of my doodads (computers, for example) while in other aspects I’m somewhat less demanding in my tastes (waffle irons, say, or hot-dog-steamer-yogurt-maker-popcorn-poppers.)
Recently Apple—blessed masters of doodad heaven—released, may the saints bless them, a radical new mouse. The “Magic Mouse” dispenses with buttons, rollers, switches, flippers, etc., in favor of a sleek piece of curved white plastic. It’s touch-sensitive, like Apple’s fabulous laptop trackpads. You scroll, for example, by drawing your finger down the length of the mouse. No wheel to get clogged.
It’s a beautiful little thing that would pose a mystery to just about anyone not acquainted with computers. It looks so…well, non-techie. Which is, when all is said and done, a very good thing. For Apple, whiz-bang gizmos that look cool but don’t do much of anything are evidence of design stupidity.
Consider Apple’s laptop power connectors. The recent model MagSafe connectors sport a tiny LED light right located near the laptop end. If the light is amber, the battery is charging; green, the battery is charged. Simple, elegant, utterly to the point.
My Dell Studio XPS laptop, quite a nice machine in many ways, sports a bright blue LED collar around its power connector. But the light doesn’t do anything. It tells you that the power cord is plugged into the wall, I guess, but it gives you absolutely no information about the battery condition. It’s always blue. Furthermore, it’s big and bright and kind of obtrusive. In short, it’s just there to look cool, but truth be told, the laptop would be better off without it.
I’ve come to realize that Apple takes design simplicity very, very seriously indeed. They aren’t just in it to create cooler-than-thou gizmos, although they certainly manage to do just that. The lack of clickers and buttons and flippers and lights and the like on an Apple product is a design philosophy. If they can’t justify something being there, out it goes.
Which explains the amazing simplicity of the Magic Mouse. It does everything a mouse does — i.e., moves the cursor around the screen, allows you to left- and right-click, double-click, and scroll both horizontally and vertically. Furthermore, because it uses a multi-touch surface, it can be programmed to do just about anything else you might want it to do. The very uncluttered simplicity makes it almost endlessly versatile, much like the simple glass screen of an iPhone that allows the gadget to act in almost an unlimited number of ways.
Elegance is possible in anything; all you need is a desire to avoid fat, sludge, clutter, and crap designed to entertain the monkeys but of no use otherwise. Ix-nay on the childish stuff.
Perhaps Apple’s old tagline (“Think Different”) might be emended to read: “Think Adult.”