I’m going to start posting random thoughts on bad design I’ve encountered over the years. Most of these will be tech-oriented but I will occasionally give shout-outs to things like the incredibly heavy and awkward doors on my parents’ 1977 Ford Granada.
In 1998 a recently-returned-to-Apple Steve Jobs ushered in the iMac, a product line that continues successfully to this day. The original iMac was a daring and colorful all-in-one design that did away with a floppy drive (controversial at the time), made an optical drive standard and for the first time included USB ports, allowing Mac owners to use peripherals that worked with the broader PC market.
The iMac came with a keyboard and a mouse. This is the mouse (and I am far from the first to highlight its shortcomings):
It was often referred to as a “hockey puck” for obvious reasons. It is, perhaps, the only round mouse to ever go into mass production.
There is a reason for this.
Look at your hand. Is it round? To be certain, look at your other hand (apologies to any one-handed people reading this). You have probably noticed that your hands are not round. When you grip the original iMac mouse, it is an awkward grip, because its shape does not take into account the shape of the human hand. This is bad design.
Apple did learn its lesson, though it took two full years of people madly trying to keep the circular mouse oriented before it got replaced. Here’s the current (insipidly-named) Magic Mouse that ships with iMacs:
See how it approximates the shape of the human hand? Good work, Apple.
Spoiler: We’ll be revisiting Apple mice at some point in the future.