You know what’s even worse than logos on cell phone faces? Logos on laptops.
Do we really need to know that a laptop is “Powered by Microsoft!”, “Intruded by Intel!”, “Energy Star Compliant!”, “Enabled by Nvidia!”, or, God forbid, “Skype Ready!”?
Tellingly, PC makers’ websites almost always show their laptops without third party logos. So if PC makers know that the stickers look terrible, why do they ship them that way?
Money. That laptop you look at all day is valuable advertising space, and PC makers will be damned if they won’t capitalize on it. PCs ship with crap shovelware for the same reason.
A less obvious reason for sticker cruft is PC maker mindlessness: “We’ve always done it this way, everyone else does it this way, so why even think about changing now?” How’s this for a reason to change:
It’s almost impossible for PCs to differentiate themselves on the cluttered shelves of BestBuy because they all run the same operating system.
If all you can compete with is the look and feel of your hardware, the last thing you should do is screw up your hardware design and brand identity with crappy Skype stickers, especially when BestBuy’s dedicated (and very pretty) Apple kiosk is a few yards away.
Notes:
- As an exercise I counted the logos and symbols on my late 2006 MacBookPro. Aside from the keyboard, the only symbols visible to me while I’m working are the “MacBookPro” under the screen and the power button. On the lid is the Apple logo of course, and the various ports (headphones, USB, Firewire) have tiny symbols. On the bottom of the chassis is some “fine print”: FCC, made in China, the laptop model number, recycling symbols, etc. You know how most laptops have ugly “Compact Disk/DVD-RW+” logos on the optical drive? My laptop just has a slit.
- Daring Fireball calls using 3rd party logo stickers “boogering up“. Appropriate.