There used to be a series of ads around the theme “Carlsberg don’t do ‘x’ but if they did it would be the finest in the world”. Well, one of Apple’s latest products (which is a little different from their normal product offering) has made me realise that there should be a phrase “What if Apple Did..” as you know they’d get it right and would produce something so innovative and clever.

This mornings messing around with my Blackberry trying to upgrade the firmware made me realise just how right Apple get things. Actually, how Blackberry could ship a product that shows SMS’ all in the one thread and the author unknown truly amazes me. If I managed that team I’d sack them on the spot for releasing something so fundamentally broken. I gave up trying to mess around trying to upgrade the firmware (so many different restrictions). Their Apps store is also a total mess.

How does Apple do it ? Plug in Phone, download update, wait for device to reboot, done !

Apple released a battery charger a couple of weeks ago and it also made me realise just how bad normal industrial design is. Here’s the product:

Of course if we remove the oversized British plug and replace it with a US one, it looks a lot nicer:

Still might not seem much, until you compare it to Duracell’s latest charger:

Yep, Apple’s product is smaller than the PSU for the Duracell charger ! How can people design something so ugly and impractical (2 bits of product) compared to something so refined as the Apple product ?