There's no shame in looking good

All due respect to Matt Maroon, as always, but it's SUCH a snotty thing to dismiss a line of products because they're pretty. It's not only backwards thinking, it's snotty, too.

Pretty is often good. Ugly is even more often bad. It has often been that way, and it will often be that way.

"If you don't make beautiful products, its probably because you can't."

Or because your product is wooden pencils, or bulldozers, or parachutes, or test tubes, or transistors, or pillows, or ammunition. Various things resist beauty enough that all you get is the elegance of something that's efficient and reliable, which is not the usual meaning of beauty.

(Yes, I remember our host's SR-71 example. And good sailboats look nice too. But efficient submarines and high speed rockets aren't particularly pretty. Once simple design constraints become too extreme --- streamlining in this case --- it can become hard to satisfy the constraints in an interesting way.)

Various other things like books are borderline cases. A well-done book may have more appealing aesthetic touches than a well-done wooden pencil. But not so many more, because mostly its presentation should keep out of the way of the words. A particularly beautiful fire alarm or fire extinguisher is not necessarily a good idea, either.

Sun Tzu, is that you? :)

Let's fight about something else.

spending large amounts of money on products, be they sports cars or inferior laptops, to impress women is a ... (... not very effective) thing to do

Why do you think so? What would you think of the phrase, "Sexual selection and the Macbook Air?"

http://www.dbskeptic.com/2008/08/03/sexual-selection-and-how...

In many animals, sexual selection takes the form of elaborate ornamentation - often in just the male of the species. Two well-known examples are a peacock’s feathers and the brilliant red plumage of the male cardinal. Scientists like Robert Trivers have theorized that in most species it is the male that competes for female access because the female makes a larger contribution to the offspring. In one experiment, scientists were able to vary the relative contributions to offspring in Katydids and they observed that when the males’ contribution was more valuable, females began to compete for males.

However, there is significant cost to these ornaments. So why would the genes that direct the growth of ornamental structures not reduce reproductive fitness? After all, the energy that a peacock uses to produce his tail could be used to find a mate or produce sperm. In this example, there are two hypotheses about sexual selection. One is that the ornament is a signal that the male is healthy. After all, a sickly male can’t produce and maintain the elaborate ornamentation.

Well, that's what you said.

I suppose comments on HN are taken seriously and considered well thought-out comprehensing your complete thought. Ok, that's naive.

But it sounds insulting to say they need self-evaluation (which is what I think sparked the post).

I buy Macs because they help me get more shit done. End of story.

..with bright yellow recesses and red knobs all over the place.

The Thinkpad looks like a sexy lady in a black dress, but one who took meth for 10 years and is now sickly and diseased.

The only reason to buy a Mac is to run MacOS (and it´s a good one). But it´s not enough for me: I got used to manage my software with a package manager and Mac software management is jurassic in comparison.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/arts/television/04conan.ht...

http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/apples-mobileme-meltdown/...

Certainly they can't implement even all, or even a majority, of the requests they get.