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]