The Devil In The Details

Last week I realized my Lenovo X200s was capable of full day, zero stress computing on a single battery charge. Now that is a difference. A light (under 3 lbs) and sufficiently powerful (high resolution screen, 200GB drive, dual core 2GHz CPU) machine able to silently run for ten hours is a difference. Last Tuesday I was on a train with a friend of mine on our frequent 200 miles almost daily route form Krakow to Warsaw. The journey is enough boring that even if it was 7am, both of us took out our laptops and started some business activities. When his Dell died, my lenovo was showing 7 hours remaining battery life. So the next day when I went to the office, for the first time in my life I decided to leave the power supply at home. And I was able to continously work for almost nine hours and the battery was still not drained.

Not taking the power supply with me had another reason behind it. It is the most hated piece of equipment Lenovo has ever produced. They spend millions of dollars on their research budgets to come out with acarbon fibre frame to make the machine stiffer and lighter. They work for years to have a LED - backlit gorgeous and ultra- thin, ultra - energy efficient screen. They make a power supply even smaller than before. And then they throw in an ultra - thick, ultra - stiff, ultra - heavy three - prong power cord adding a lot of weight and volume to the overall package. Horrible. That is the area where Apple always shines.

The details. Mac OS X has never been truly superior compared to Windows. But is has always been better configured, with sensible defaults, and contained no OEM - bundled crapware with it. iPods form the very beginning have had the thinnest FireWire cords ever made. Power supplies have never had bulky cords and they even designed this clever connector based on magnets... The ultimate design for me for years has been the Airport Express wifi access point / router. Typical industry design used to be a router brick and a power brick. Apple combined both into a power brick. Very clever attention to details. And guess what? People have appreciated that and have been paying premium for Apple's attention to details for years.

While Lenovo power supplies are first coming to my mind when I think of careless rpoduct design, they are not the only ones. Sony is not that far off... With very poor WiFi in their otherwise gorgeous PS3, with bulky power spplies (take PSP as an example). Logitech usually shines with their excellent products but I coiuld never understand why they omitted the [Favorites] button both on the Boom and on the Transporter, making changing preprogrammed stations unneccessary difficult. LG lets you name inputs on their TVs, but when you display a list of them, it still ahows AV1, Av2, AV3... instead of XBOX, PS3, DVD Player. Despite iPhones and Blackberries paving a unified 3,5mm headset / microphone plug, none of the laptop manufactures cares to adopt it, sticking with dual green / pink plugs. The remote controlled, computerized stand heater in my car requires me to remember to manually set the fan to maximum the day before, otherwise it would not defrost the windshield even though it has all the other gadgets sensing inner / outer temperature and can calculate the time needed to do the job. I could go on and on...

As Daniel Pink points out in The Whole New Mind, consumers are happy to pay for good designs. We need more right brainers, with empathy and synthetic thinking. Even if the job is as simple as designing a power supply for a laptop...