Quote of the week: third nipple

“A signature of Apple’s design philosophy is not to just fire-hose features into a product. They like to believe that if they add something, it contributes way more value than what its presence will cost the user, and that the feature is consistent with the ‘story’ of this product. I’ve seen Android tablets with every kind of port and other hardware feature built-in. Mostly, their purpose is to be something that the marketers and the users can point to and say ‘See? Look what this has that yours doesn’t.’

Sometimes they actually enhance the device. Mostly, though, they’re like a third nipple. Good for conversation, but functionally useless.”

Andy Ihnatko. Feature lists are great, but they’re not everything. I’m keeping track of some Android fans that say, because the iPad is missing some items, it’s going to be a failure. They tend to concentrate on the wrong thing, like iMac haters did when Apple dumped the floppy disk.

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