Pogoplug Ugly Ass Design

Friday February 12, 17.41.50

Friday February 12, 17.42.30

Boy, that’s one ugly, ugly industrial design *refresh. I have no idea what got into the head of whoever is attempting to design these things, but that first one? The small one on the right? Not great, but it’s basically not meant to be a flashy desktop thingie or to sit next to your flower vase. It goes in the wall, is all. And — that’s good enough. If there were to be an ID refresh? To make distinguish it? Would you throw on a tongue-licker pink brace? And make it bigger? It’s a *plug* computer, for crying out loud. Pogoplug, indeed.

I’m baffled.

If it matters, these are clever little plug computers under the Pogoplug mark — an incarnation of the plug computing reference platform — that, without much else, create a little puff of internet cloud for you and me, allowing us to avoid fussing with the more vaporous clouds steamed up by Google and Amazon and the like. For small group personal networks — they’re brilliant. That’s the start. Plenty of people are cooking up all sorts of new weird things for these to do. Running Linux makes them ripe for modifications and alterations.
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Tuesday June 23, 07.53.59

Yes, an old original iPhone car charger and…what’s this? The iPhone 3Gs cannot take the same charging accessories as the iPhone original!? So..basically the introduction of something new forces something old to be tossed out? Maybe there’s something that can be done with the old charger, but, I mean…really? Is this “Good Design” or adhering to those Green sensibilities that Apple is so often associated?

Think not.

Epic Fail. Epic, epic fail. I’m slack jawed. Shocking.

Why do I blog this? Something is always wrong. The whole smash barely works, seriously. It’s not uncommon to get Apple fetishists asking me why Nokia does not do things as cool. There are all kinds of good and bad reasons. But, one of the good ones that makes the most sense to me is that Nokia has to design compatibility (which it does not always do well, to be honest) across hundreds of its factories’ products, and with so much stuff out in the world that, every year if you put them all end-to-end? They’d wrap around the world more than once. But, if you make three or so phones and you can’t get them all to use the same charging specifications? That’s just really bad. Imagine, every upgrade has someone tossing some entirely opaque hunk of plastic and electronics into a bin.

(Oh yeah. Rem Koolhaus’ wonderful Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan is about the only happy thing in this photo.)

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