Apple Patents More Stuff, Continues Sliding Downhill

Apr 30 by Ty Dunitz | 2 comments

Hold your horses, guys – I don’t mean ‘as a company’. Apple is wonderful, we all love Apple. But where Apple is ‘sliding downhill’, truly, is in their interaction design.

I used to be a guy who liked to use his iPod from his pocket. Ever since the Touch/iPhone, I can no longer do that due to lack of tactile feedback, and now Apple has filed a patent application to bring this non-tactile experience to the Macbook Pro’s aluminum casing, of all things, in the form of ‘invisible buttons’.

…GHOST BUTTONS! Spooky.

Yeah, it’s still really cool (especially what appears to be a phantom Click Wheel build into the lower left of the keyboard), but I miss buttons. Regular buttons. Y’know how some things, like calculators and certain flashlights have buttons that you could just addictively press all day long? Apple should outfit their products with some of those. I bet sales would soar.

Or indestructable bubble wrap. Bubble wrap would work, too.

Bubble wrap always works.

[Via TechCrunch]

WRITTEN BY TY DUNITZ

Ty is an illustrator who stays up too late, and has to wear glasses. You can follow him on Twitter if you want to (@glitchritual), but he's just gonna throw your stupid PR crap in the garbage, so don't email him.

COMMENTS
  • http://www.pluginstudios.co.uk Kristian ‘L’ Matthews

    Haha. Love the humour here, I think it would be rather interesting to see these ‘ghost buttons’, although, not sure it would work, I regularly lean on this section of my MacBook Pro.

  • http://www.hipperdanderest.nl/ Cespur

    I love touch screens and stuff but this is just pointless.