Apple: When good things happen by accident

COMMENTARY-- Contrary to what some of my loyal readers might say, I'm not single-mindedly focused on pointing out Apple's flaws. Apple does a lot of stuff right. What's interesting to me is how often that right stuff has unintended positive consequences.

Example No. 1: the iPod. It's been half a year since I first got my hands on an iPod, and my initial reaction still holds true. The iPod is the first--and so far the only--MP3 player done right. And while the iPod has all sorts of cool features, one of its benefits isn't immediately obvious: It encourages you to listen to higher-quality music.

UNTIL THE IPOD came along, I encoded my CDs at a paltry 128 kilobits per second (constant bit rate). I did so because part of the time I was playing my music on a Rio 500, and that's the highest bit rate it could handle and still carry a reasonable collection of tunes. Now, I'm not a tube-amp-owning audiophile, but I do have fairly acute hearing and find encoding artifacts distracting, even when I'm listening in such noisy environments as San Francisco Muni trains. Soon, I just couldn't bear 128kbps any longer. So I broke down and re-encoded everything at 160kbps. That pleased my ears, but also reduced the amount of music I could carry with me.

Then I switched to the iPod. Despite having 5GB of space, I didn't smoosh as many songs onto it as I could. Instead, I re-encoded most of my music at 160kbps, but this time at the maximum variable bit rate. That means the encoder uses at least 160kbps of bandwidth at minium but can burst up to 320kbps if needed to provide more fidelity. I can fit "only" 800 or so songs into my 5GB iPod, but they sure sound a lot better.

It's a win all around: I get more music, and that music sounds better. Apple may not have been thinking "higher quality" when it thought different about the iPod, but that's the unintended consequence for me--and probably the most compelling iPod feature I've found. One other unintended benefit: I don't have to keep different MP3 repositories for the music I take with me and the music I play on my desktop Mac.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE of unintended consequences in Apple design: the new iMac's movable display.

Sure, the visual and ergonomic benefits of the LCD vs. the CRT are well known at this point--so where's the surprise? How many CRT users regularly use their fingertips to swivel around their displays to show its contents to someone standing nearby? More to the point, how often do I have to wrestle with my CRT to achieve the perfect viewing angle for the way I'm slouching at the moment?

Even with a relatively good swiveling base, I've found such maneuvers perilous. I invariably wind up knocking something over with the far end of the tube. In contrast, I move around the iMac's LCD all the time, adjusting it as taste, ambient light, and posture demand. It's no hassle at all, and the only real downsides are the fingerprint smudges along the display's transparent outer edge.

BEFORE THE iMAC, it never would have occurred to me that a display could be a dynamic object--until the easily swingable arm of the iMac came along. When I first saw the iMac, I immediately understood how easy it would be to adjust the display when I was first setting up the system. But I was still locked into my adjust-once mindset, and had no inkling about how often I would find myself adjusting the display.

I believe that form should follow function, which is why pleasant side effects like higher music quality and ease of frequent adjustment appeal to me so much. Those effects may not have been foremost among the Apple design team's list of priorities. But the secondary design effects are at least as important to me as the primary.

What unintended positive consequences have you discovered in your computing and consumer electronics products, regardless of platform? TalkBack to me below!