As many of you who regularly read these pages may know, I’ve been porting over to Apple – part of that has been the painful process of find the best accessories. I say pain, because first of all you need to ID the right accessory (of which there is often more than one option), and then secondly, Apple do put a premium on all their products – including accessories!
However, one thought did occur to me the other day – and that is that the accessory range, particularly Apple’s own stuff is very well thought out. It’s well designed, well packaged, but it’s also modular – you can interwork components of things like docks, cables, and chargers very neatly.
Take a related (and recent) example – their newest LED Cinema Display has an integrated power source for Laptop charging, and combined AV leads. Very nice. There is a criticism that this means a lack of display ports for example, but when you are all about minimal design, you should expect that I think. In a similar way, the iPhone/iPod multimedia (composite) cable is also well put-together, and includes a USB lead section, plus mains adapter component. So all working towards reducing the number trailing cables.
For us Mobile users, some cables are still necessary (chargers, and you could argue headphones too, for fidelity of sound) – and to some extent are still the bane of our lives! So attempts by companies to reduce cables/connectors/jacks is always seen as good.
The power/data connector on devices moving toward mini-USB as a ‘standard’, and the headphone jack heading toward 3.5mm ‘standard’ are both welcome moves. But Apple have attacked things from an additional angle by making docks, chargers, and cables that serve more than one function.
For me that means a neater desk – which is something that with previous PCs and Mobiles has proved a real battle. Removing cabling from my desk setup is something I haven’t done in years (in fact I’ve added to it), so it was a nice experience the other night to be pulling out legacy desk components, due to the newer ones being truly multi-purpose.
What sayeth you, IntoMobile readers? Agree-th you? 🙂