Apple makes the iPod earbuds out of a special material that is actually resistant to getting tangled when you put it in your pocket. The power cord snaps in place magnetically, so when someone eventually trips over the cable, it doesn\u2019t hurt your computer or the cable at all. Discs eject by themselves, or with a key on the keyboard, not some clumsy button and pop-out holder. When you put your MacBook to sleep, the power light dims, and then glows, slowly, on and off. It doesn\u2019t blink, but rather it fades from lit to almost off, and back again. When the room grows dark, my keyboard lights up and my display gets dark so it doesn’t strain my eyes. The list goes on and on.<\/p>\n
Tonight, as I was untangling some random power cord with a wall wart type plug, I thought about why technologies as cool as the special cable types that Apple makes haven\u2019t trickled down to other products. Products not made by Apple.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s probably for more than one reason. The build quality of the device that came with this power supply isn\u2019t anything special, actually. It\u2019s not something Apple would have put out to begin with. And the wall wart plug is standard enough that I\u2019m sure we have another one laying around that would work just as well. They throw it in, and build their products to work with a generic interface. Apple essentially makes their own power supplies to some degree so they don\u2019t have to ship the typical shit that everyone else does. That\u2019s why theirs look so striking. They\u2019re white. Everything else is black.<\/p>\n
I would put it down to two reasons. The obvious one is that cheap products are going to be cheaply made – you get what you pay for. Sure, this is true. But the other reason is that Apple makes a point of patenting these inventions. They have literally hundreds of patents, as many corporations do. Steve Jobs claimed that Apple had over 200 patents just for the development of the iPhone! While I’m not sure if it’s true or not, it does make it intimidating to try to build something similar, for whatever reason.<\/p>\n
So I guess I’ll just have to deal with my tangled cords for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Apple makes the iPod earbuds out of a special material that is actually resistant to getting tangled when you put it in your pocket. The power cord snaps in place magnetically, so when someone eventually trips over the cable, it doesn\u2019t hurt your computer or the cable at all. Discs eject by themselves, or with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1509"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1509\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}