Apple is rightly praised for the high quality of its hardware and the strength of its digital ecosystem. But Apple doesn't always get it right. I'm sure many Apple fans view these mistakes as exceptions, but there are so many examples. Sometimes "think different" isn't "think better." It's just wrong.
Stupidly, all these issues feel avoidable to me. Some feel purposeful, like Apple's almost antagonist push to make sense of its broken butterfly keyboards across too many years and too many Mac products. But others are just foolish. And in the worst cases--the three issues that impacted me during my current trip to Mexico City--it's just bad design. A criticism one should never be able to make against Apple.
To be clear, these are all current issues. I'm not going nostalgic here, holding a grudge because the original iMac mouse was like a bar of non-ergonomic soap. No, these are all 2024 issues, what I think of as "now problems."
Indeed, two of them are less than a week old. They're each minor in their own way, but because these are both new hardware releases, they're problems that Apple fans will be dealing with for the next several years.
Mac mini (2024)
The new Mac mini has been widely praised for its impressive components, fun new smaller size, and reasonable pricing. But Apple can't not be Apple: Despite this device's perfect VESA-mount possibilities, the company went back to the "form over function" well and put the new Mac mini's power button on its bottom, rather than marring its smooth exterior. It would have been so easy, and so right, for Apple to have made the Mac mini conform to the needs of this standard, but Apple doesn't do that kind of thing. And so we'll soon be swimming in third-party VESA mounts that will overcome this weirdness in unique ways that only add unnecessary cost and complexity. Apple fans point to this inevitability as a justification or rationalization for the device's pointlessly poor design because of course they do.
Magic Mouse
Of course, the Mac mini isn't the only Apple hardware to suffer from the "think different" disease when it comes to power. Some Apple Pencil models raise eyebrows because of the weirdness of their USB-C requirements, though that form factor makes it at least somewhat understandable. But when Apple released its second-generation Magic Mouse back in 2015, it didn't just learn nothing about ergonomics from that first iMac mouse, it also added a Lightning charging port (good) but put it on the bottom (bad) for the same reason the new Mac mini's power button is on its bottom: It couldn't stand to mar the design of the device. As problematic, the Magic Mouse can't be used while it's charging. Well, Apple released a new USB-C Magic Mouse last week. And yep, the power port is still on the bottom. The only thing worse than a bad design is a decade-old bad design, I guess.
My year with Apple
I spent an inordinate amount of time this year testing Apple products, after spending an...