Summary : Some people feel quite confused by Apple’s legendary stubbornness decision in product design and product categories, these products have become mainstream fashion and some became victims unluckily. CNN has published a report reviewing the most stubborn decisions Apple has made that gave birth to seven out of seven products.
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Some people feel quite confused by Apple’s legendary stubbornness decision in product design and product categories, these products have become mainstream fashion and some became victims unluckily. CNN has published a report reviewing the most stubborn decisions Apple has made that gave birth to seven out of seven products.
1. Integration of left and right button mouse
Apple's obsession with a one-button mouse dates all the way back to the 1983 release of the Lisa, the company's first PC to ship with a mouse.
According to Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, the late Apple co-founder insisted on a one-button mouse for simplicity's sake. The three-button mouse Apple saw Xerox demonstrate was too busy and confusing, Jobs argued.
Jobs was so insistent that people use the mouse, that he designed the Macintosh without arrow keys. But as with the arrow keys, Apple eventually relented on right clicking.
With the proliferation of Microsoft Windows, which embraced the right click, Apple eventually enabled users to CTRL-click to simulate a right click. It then began to support right-click mice with Mac OS 8, which debuted in 1997. And with the 2005 introduction of the "Mighty Mouse," Apple finally made a mouse with a programmable button that could be used for right clicking.
Still, Apple hasn't fully embraced the right-click. Its new "magic mouse" is capable of right clicking, though users have to program the mouse to do so. The company even jokes that that the feature is available "if you're coming from a right-click world."
2. Apple icon key
Like the one-button mouse, the Apple key was a unique Apple feature that gave many former Windows users fits.
The Apple key first appeared on the Apple III, and eventually made its way to the Apple Lisa and future Apple II PCs (which far outlived the ill-fated Apple III). The Apple key actually did not appear on the original Mac's keyboard, but eventually made it there after Steve Jobs' departure in 1986.
It served as a command key that had much the same function of the "control" key on a Microsoft Windows keyboard. To copy text, for instance, the Mac keyboard shortcut was Apple-C, while the shortcut was CTRL-C for Windows.
Confusing matters, Apple's keyboards also featured a control key. That meant any Windows user that had to switch between a Windows program and an Apple program on a Mac forced the user to switch between the Command key and the CTRL key constantly.
Apple ultimately killed off the Apple key in 2007, replacing the Apple logo with the word "command." Still, the functionality remained, and Windows users remain in muscle memory hell.
3. Disk drive
Apple has effectively killed off two disk drive formats, and may well be on its way to eliminating disk drives altogether.
In the early 1980s, the company supported the predominant floppy disk format of the time, selling "Disk II" 5-1/4-inch disk drives for the Apple II system.
But with the 1984 release of the Macintosh, Apple did away with 5-1/4 drives, opting to build a 3-1/2-inch drive into the Mac. The technology was extremely new at the time, introduced just over a year before the Mac went on sale.
That made the Macintosh among the first PCs to even feature a 3-1/2 inch disk drive, let alone have it be the only disk drive built into the computer. But the bet was right, and within a few years, the computer industry embraced the 3-1/2 inch drive as the new standard.
But Apple wasn't done shaking things up. With the 1998 release of the iMac, Apple got rid of the floppy disk drive entirely, featuring only a re-writable CD drive. It was a controversial decision, but one that, as before, was mimicked by all of Apple's competitors.
A decade later, Apple released a PC with no disk drive at all in the MacBook Air. Unsurprisingly, rivals are once again copycatting Apple's leap of faith, releasing "Ultrabooks" that feature no disk drive.
4. With Adobe Flash naysayers
Perhaps Apple's most epic fit of stubbornness was its very public battle with Adobe Flash, the add-on browser extension that allows rich content like video and games to be viewed.
In April 2010, Steve Jobs ranted about Flash on Apple's website, saying the software is "closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn't support touch-based devices." He said iPhones and iPads would never support Flash because "new open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too)."
Jobs suggested that Adobe focus on creating HTML5 tools instead of Flash.
A year and a half later, Adobe implicitly admitted that Jobs was right by abandoning its Flash software for mobile devices. Adobe moved away from its 15-year-old technology to instead embrace a universal standard for displaying rich media on the Web -- HTML5.
5. Using non-Intel chips
Apple's "road-less-traveled-by" approach didn't always pan out. One of Apple's biggest strategic blunders of all time was its failure to embrace the Intel architecture for its PC chipsets.
Apple chose Motorola's chips early on for cost considerations. But even when it was apparent that Intel, through its Windows partnership, was emerging as the standard PC chip architecture, Apple stuck to its guns.
Apple eventually formed an alliance with Motorola and IBM in 1991, which resulted in the inclusion of PowerPC processors in Apple computers for 15 years. Apple boasted that PowerPCs were faster than Intel's, but that never resulted in any significant sales increase.
That decision also meant that for decades, there was far less software being written for Apple's PCs, since software developers had to write the software for two different chip architectures. Apple computers also had to emulate Windows, since they couldn't run Microsoft's OS natively.
6. Menu selections
For nearly three decades, Macintosh windows were topped with a menu bar, whether a program was open or not.
For half that time, to select something in a Macintosh menu, a user had to click, drag the mouse down, and unclick to select. For instance, to save a document, the user would have to hover the cursor over "File," press the mouse button down, drag the mouse down to "Save" and then unclick on "Save."
According to Apple's "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines" from 1995, it was one of the few times that a selection was made by pressing a button and lifting a finger off the mouse rather than clicking.
Apple eventually changed its mind with the release of OS 8 in 1997, and Mac menus began to function like those in Windows. With last year's release of OS X Lion, Apple even did away with the menu entirely.
7. Natural-style scrolling
If you thought Apple's stubbornness was abating, the company released a fresh one last year: Natural scrolling.
In an attempt to make its new Mac OS X Lion software feel more like its popular iOS software that powers the iPad and the iPhone, Apple changed the default direction that users scroll on Mac trackpads.
Instead of scrolling the way we've learned to for years on a mouse: scroll down to drag the page down, scroll up to drag the page up, natural scrolling acts like the iPad or iPhone: scroll up to drag the page down, and scroll down to drag the page up.
Users can change that setting if they feel like their world has been turned upside-down.
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