MattMaroon.com

Surprisingly enough, a comment I left on Hacker News became the basis of a blog entry on 37 Signals today. Hilarious. Even if my intent was totally misunderstood, I never expected a blog post to spring from it.

My quote about the design of the Lenovo x301 vs. the Apple MacBook Air was:

I’ve seen the 300s IRL, and while they look a little less sloppy than they do in photos, they definitely are not pretty. They’re very functional in appearance. If you’re buying a laptop to impress girls at Starbucks (in which case, you might want to do some serious self-evaluation) this ain’t the one for you. If you want to get things done while traveling, you can’t beat it.

The author read that as:

In other words, people only buy beautiful products to impress other people (and that’s a shallow thing to do).

Of course, only the penultimate sentence was quoted. And while I’d stand by the assertion made there (which was largely an exaggeration for humor) that spending large amounts of money on products, be they sports cars or inferior laptops, to impress women is a shallow (and not very effective) thing to do, I didn’t mean to suggest that that is the only reason people would choose a "beautiful product", or that making products beautiful has no value.

Of course better looking is better, and the people at Lenovo could probably take some design cues from Apple. And it might be worth a bit of their time. But I think Apple, at least with the Air, could take some cues from Lenovo.

"Better" is a subjective word, and I think that when it comes to ultra-expensive, ultra-portable laptops, Lenovo’s design is actually better. The functional aesthetic that Lenovo seems to prefer says to prospective customers "this is a laptop that is meant for getting things done." That’s what my quote meant, it’s the message that the design they chose sends out.

That aesthetic is as appealing to their audience (people who travel a lot, largely for business, and need to work in a plane or a hotel room) in some ways, as a MacBook is to college kids. It specifically says "if you’re a college kid whose world still revolves around girls, go elsewhere. If you’re a serious user who needs serious functionality and reliability in a highly portable package, I’ve got just the notebook for you."

Hence a "sexy" design aesthetic that would be more appealing to a younger crowd might actually be a bad thing for Lenovo (and even for Apple with the Air). The Air looks like you might accidentally snap it in half. The Lenovo looks like you could drop it out of your window and it’d keep on ticking. (And if my experience is representative, it would.) The Air looks like something you take to a party to spin tunes off of. The X300 looks like something you take into a board room.

And the people spending $3,000 on notebooks, and who desire them to be in the 3 pound range, are largely business users. They don’t care if it can fit in a manilla envelope, because why would you ever put a laptop in one? College kids don’t mind lugging the standard 5 lb notebook around. They’re young and strong, and it’s trivial compared to what else is in their backpack. So they’re buying the cheaper ones with  bigger screens and the more features anyway.

They (or their parents) generally don’t want to spend $2k more than they have to. They’re in entirely different age groups and income brackets from the people who want smaller notebooks. So while Apple designs products for them, and people who want to recapture a little of those days (which is awesome for the iPod) they’re missing their target audience in the same way that the iPhone is missing sales to Blackberry’s audience (which is the same as ultra-portables). And that (along with some serious bugginess) is a lot of why the Air has been a sales dud for them while Lenovo is minting money.

So it’s not about being opposed to good design. It’s about defining good design as the one most appealing to your target audience, and sending a message consistent with that. In that case, I think the Lenovo looks a lot "better" than the Air.

This entry was posted on September 16, 2008 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.