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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling that the Apple of old would have caught this instantly, when it was largely the boutique brand for creatives. Today's Apple? Not surprising at all.

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I'm not sure that's the case. This feature (which is entirely optional and can be disabled) is looking for skin. Metallic ink tattoos don't look like skin, and only a small percentage of people have such tattoos on their wrist. However, a massive percentage of people have hands that are shaped like hands, and yet the Apple of old made a mouse that doesn't seem to be designed for anything even remotely resembling a human hand.

They've literally always been form-over-function. They may have caught this issue and said "those people can disable this completely optional feature".

Their “puck” mouse design was intended to ameliorate RSI by encouraging a grip with only the fingertips. Unfortunately, nobody got the memo about the “proper” way to hold the mouse, and tried to grip the mouse the same way they were used to... which of course sucked. (And it was also difficult to guess the orientation of a round object.)

It’s definitely a bad design especially given the context of existing mice, and a case of poor communication, or insufficient user testing, or even hubris maybe. Your dismissive summary of their intentions is not at all fair, however.

I make no judgment of their intentions. Merely stating that even back in the day, Apple was known for making some questionable design decisions. Good intentions or bad intentions, it was not a highly functional mouse.

I do grip mice "properly" with just my fingertips, and the puck mouse still felt incredibly horrible.

The Apple of old (and by that I mean Steve Jobs) decided to tell people they were holding their phones wrong rather than launch a device which worked no matter how you held it.

No I mean a 80s and 90s hacker culture where weirdos were valued and guys with tats would be testing things. Apple today just seems way too button down, for good or bad.

Not only do you need a tat, but you need a tat covering the skin under the watch that's done with metallic ink. What fraction of people with tats have such a tattoo? I have a lot of friends with tats, but none that meet those criteria.

The iPhone 4 did work no matter how you held it, as evidenced by its long tenure (sold for 4+ years), and high sales and customer satisfaction ratings.

If you carefully held it in a very particular way, you could make it lose a couple bars. Jobs said: there's no reception problem, just don't hold it that way. It turned out he was right.

I like the way you found a new way to say "this never would have happened under Steve Jobs!" Nice work.

The Apple of old almost went bankrupt.

Depends how old you want to go. For me is Woz's AppleII kind of Apple which was exceptionally quality driven and economically was a great success.

For a long time they were incredibly successful while Woz and Jobs were active.

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