dougscrptr

The more complicated a product gets, the more technical acumen is required to put it together. Bad Web sites are built by people who know how to code HTML and JavaScript but don’t understand how people use the Web. Bad software is written by people who are experts at knowing how a computer works and how to write code to make it do what they want, but no idea about how regular people behave and how those people expect to interact with that software. Bad hardware is designed by people who choose the shape of devices and the placement of buttons based on the best way to lay out the internal circuit board, not by people who think about the most convenient ways for the human body to grab hold of that hardware and press its buttons.

Apple’s the kind of company that makes decisions based on people, on users, and then challenges its engineers to find ways to fulfill those needs. If iMovie edits your HD video in a snap, you don’t need to know that the video you’re editing has been transcoded to the Apple Intermediate Codec. Most people don’t need to know that Snow Leopard is using Grand Central Dispatch to split up threads and send them to separate processor cores — just that their multiprocessor-bearing Mac suddenly feels snappier. And people don’t need to care that their iPhone has a 412MHz processor and 128MB or RAM — they just want to tap on an App and have it load fast. It really doesn’t matter if it’s a microprocessor or a system of tiny pulleys hauled by gnomes that’s inside that shiny glass and plastic product. It just needs to work the way they want it to.