I am in general agreement with Michael and what he has to say about camera ergonomics ever since I started reading LL, but this part of the article I take real issue with.
"As for the rest, I can only urge you to look at companies like Apple, who can manufacture an amazing 67 million new iPads in a one year period (as but one example), and yet who rarely have significant design flaws. And when there are firmware flaws, they are quick with updates. The reason is simple. Apple is, as a company, dedicated to excellence in both design and implementation. This is the reason why they are now one of the world's most successful and wealthiest corporations. They also are one of the best companies in the world at keeping new products secret, so any argument that having testers compromises secrecy is flawed at its core."Apple being very successful is indeed in part due to good design, but not because of good design for the end user.
The major reason Apple are so very profitable compared to other companies is that
their product design is concentrated in keeping costs down, often at the expense of the end user. Take keyboards on laptops, I'm typing this on the biggest MacBook Pro, yet it has the same compromised keyboard as the smallest Air and the wireless desktop option. No delete button, grief!! And even worse has modifier keys in a different place to my desktop keyboard, playing havoc with muscle memory. Which is particularly daft considering Apple only two keyboards sizes for all uses and yet they have a different layout of important keys. I experience less confusion going between my full sized Apple desktop keyboard and my 13" Sony Vaio than I do between my Apple desktop and my 17" MacBook Pro.
I have an iPhone and a Nano, but I threw away the earbuds that came with them as they are a single size and painful in use as they are way too big, thus unusable for me. I now have ear buds that take the standardised and cheap Sennheiser three sizes replacement rubber end pieces. Apple Mice are the same but the opposite problem, way too small and which lead to RSI on adult sized hands.
Single size devices to fit all sizes of humanity and varying sizes of laptop having the same tiny and compromised keyboard are simply cost cutting exercises which results in poor ergonomics, is really bad design. Hardly a case of form following function.
To my mind the worst design failing is making something pretty at expense of usability and sadly Apple do just that. But pretty sells far more products than ergonomics ever did.
As for fast firmware updates and the like, I avoid any Apple product until version 3 or 4 as if it's software, it's usually too buggy until fix .3 or .4 and if it's hardware, it's usually too compromised. I finally got an iPhone with the 4s which is so much better than previous models, yet at same time really inferior in many basic ways to my 4 year old HTC. It's also better than my HTC in other ways,
but and this is a big but,
it is the worst mobile phone I have ever had with regard to the basic ability of being a mobile [that's cellular to to North Americans
] phone and by a long way the most expensive mobile too. It drops calls all the time, sound quality is so bad people ask to ring me back on my landline and voicemail takes up to a week to arrive. As for Siri, it is an utter waste of time as it struggles with even well spoken British accents and a lot of Siri's service is restricted to the USA on the rare chance it actually understood you.
As for the iPad, a very useful tool in many ways but it is an internet device that doesn't recognize a large proportion of website content due to personal reasons at Apple, rather than end user concern. That is not good design to my mind.
Apple software is also as bad as many camera manufacturers stupid menu systems. Finder is possibly the worst software ever, without the ability to replace it with PathFinder, I'd simply bin OSX and install W7 instead and then buy a PC when it came to upgrade. iTunes - not quite as terrible, but again without script hacks it is near unusable in some very basic functionality. iTunes 10.6 is more like the original LR1 beta in terms of file management. And doing something as simple as add a track to a playlist in iTunes on my phone makes any camera menu system seem friendly.
In fact Apple's hatred of buttons and simplistic interfaces is very much like using a camera with fiddly menus, rather than dedicated physical buttons and control dials.