GregoryBowers.com

Via Gruber:

Joanna Stern:

“I could go on and on about how much better the touchpad experience is on the Air, but the big question I’ve always had is: why? Why is it that other laptop makers haven’t mastered the touch experience and Apple has been able to make it work so fluidly, even with another operating system?”

Because no one other than Apple gives a shit about doing the hard work to get things like this right.

I’ve long been a fan of Apple products for reasons like these. With our recent transition from TeachStreet to AmazonLocal (you haven’t heard?), our largely Mac-centric company (I think all 7 of us owned and/or worked on a Mac on a daily basis… devs used Ubuntu boxes, but often brought in their MacBooks) found ourselves presented with fresh new HP laptops on day one. I had previously requested a Mac, like a good designer would, and knew my MBP would arrive in a few weeks (actually arrived the next day, lucky me). The look of others in our group was apprehensive at best.

Since I got my Mac very quickly, I keep getting questions from former TeachStreeters (How’d you request it? Does it work well with Exchange? Can I stare at it for a while?), and they tell me their horror stories. The most common ones revolve around the trackpad: I have to double tap to do a single click, the cursor moves up when I type because I’m touching the trackpad, etc. I only spent a day with the HP laptop, so I didn’t notice the same problems, but the sheer design differences are staggering. The Mac trackpad is well known for being a large, clickable pane of glass that looks like another piece of aluminum. Only one button, and that button is the entire trackpad. Other functionality is achieved through gestures and zones.

The HP trackpad, however, was about 20% smaller… but only if you included the buttons that rode the top and bottom. Right button, left button, then rather small trackpad, then right button, left button. I guess the idea was “Someone might need to click while maintaining their fingers on the home row on the keyboard,” but the result was confusing and cluttered.

An aside in the whole “Mac v PC in the corporate world” storyline is that of Microsoft Exchange. I was very excited last year (or so) when the Mac version of Office was updated, finally adding Outlook to replace Entourage as the mail/calendaring app. Visually and in general fundamentals, Outlook Win and Outlook Mac are finally nearly aligned. Except they’re not. Outlook was seamless running on my PC (for the whole day I had it), and Exchange worked flawlessly. As you might hope, seeing as Outlook and Exchange were made for each other by the same company. Sadly, Outlook for Mac, in at least my setup, seems incapable of connecting to the company LDAP (directory) service. Where on Windows, I could start typing a name—ANY name in the company—and it would autocomplete, replete with the user photos, Outlook for Mac wouldn’t even pull contacts from Address Book, let alone the LDAP. As a longtime Mac user, feature incompleteness of cross-platform apps isn’t entirely shocking to me. What is shocking is that Apple’s built in answers to Outlook—Mail, Address Book, iCal—all have better Exchange support, pull in requisite contacts, check contact’s schedules when booking a meeting, etc. But of course, then you have to deal with how horrid Address Book and iCal look in Lion. Small price, I say.