I wrote this comment for the blog but I am unsure that it posted correctly there:
BMW Motorrad is similar to Apple in many ways:
* Both were early players in their respective markets. Moreso than many other manufacturers, they have a lot of history to draw from.
* Both are known for their design and sense of style. A BMW motorcycle, like an Apple device, is almost instantly recognizable once you know the visual cues of each.
* Both are premium products at premium prices, designed against disposability. A BMW motorcycle and an Apple computer will typically outlast 2-3 of the average competitor's products, while costing about 1.5x as much.
* Both have absolutely rabid followings, winning the kind of fanaticism you can only produce by decades of selling beautiful products that perform beautifully.
The BMW turn signals map closely to the Apple 1-button mouse. Is it the most functional design? Nah. But the customers barely care. The design is functional enough, and it conjures the brand very effectively.
Here, both BMW and Apple "missed" the waves of standardization to user controls; their controls were always good enough from the start, however, and since the users didn't make a stink about it, both highly successful manufacturers left well enough alone.
Looking from our vantage point in the present, sure, someone moving to a BMW or Apple interface will notice a few differences (or, in your words, it will be "inconsistent with virtually every other"). But when you look at it from the point in time at which these interfaces were designed, both were groundbreaking and best-of-breed. Macs had a mouse when their closest competitors would draw some text like "C:>" and drool at you. BMW had foot-shift and hand-clutch when their closest competitors had suicide-shift and clutch pedals. It took another 40 or 50 years for motorcycles to agree upon right-hand throttle, even.
Personally, I don't buy the left-brain/right-brain argument you put forth, and I consider the danger pretty low because turn signals get the absolutely lowest priority when I am riding and need to react to emerging situations (that's pretty-talk for "when the dude in the F-150 aims at me suddenly"). I ride a Honda and I am pleased with the left-thumb directional controls, but I bet I could get used to a BMW pretty quickly.... and any donations to test this theory are gratefully accepted. But in any case, I think you need to see some more of the history behind the controls before you can use them as a UI teaching tool.
I agree with most of what you're saying here, particularly the historical roots of the design and the post does acknowledge the importance of the interface the BMW Motorrad brand.
But I think you make a false assumption about the potential order of operations - I'm not worried about signaling a lane change when I'm in the middle of an emergency, I'm worried about the emergency occurring when I'm in the middle of signaling a lane change. :-)
If you're not already covering the brake, there is no penalty due to putting the turn signal there. In my opinion, adding a linked-braking system to the pedal would do more to improve rider safety than moving the turn signal controls.
Too little and you might as well not do it, too much (and what is too much depends on a large amount of factors) and you're in a skid or you get launched over the front wheel.
The rear wheel brake is about 1/3 of the braking power, it is however quite safe to apply nearly all of that 1/3rd because the feedback is a negative one. The front wheel brake however has positive feedback, as you brake harder your front fork will compress putting more pressure on the tire increasing road contact and so on. Plenty of people that don't realize this and get on a double-disc brake bike and hit the front wheel brake too hard have found out that it is very easy to get flying lessons.
There are lots of patents on such brake linkages but I've never actually seen a bike that had one.
The front wheel does not need to lock to cause the bike to endo (back wheel raised). Simply preventing the wheel from locking up won't cure it IMO.
However, I can readily imagine using some gyroscopes to check that the bike is not flipping and if it's approaching a flip to release break pressure momentarily to keep the back end down. This would need to be very finely tuned as you'd rather endo into a stop with your tyre touching a truck than you would ride with two wheels down and hit the truck at speed. The amount of back-wheel air that you'd cope with will depend on the driver and conditions quite a bit.
Both front and rear ABS are very helpful in braking as hard as possible, and no more. From all I have heard, the modern systems are very good, if a little heavy. Ironically, it's the weight and size that keeps ABS off most bikes than can endo in the first place.
I doubt the author of the post ever rode a bike, much less a BMW.
Any biker worth their salt could ride either model and with little preference at that. My last bike (in a long dark past) was a Honda, with the left hand thumb arrangement, I can easily see why the BMW arrangement might be a little bit more convenient but so little that it really doesn't matter.
And if you're busy with your signals while doing emergency evasive maneuvers I hope you have your health insurance paid up.
Something else to consider - many of the newer BMW designs have moved to the 'standard' approach. Why make the move, given the 'brand' value already mentioned and the history behind the design?
3 reasons come instantly to mind - consistency, human physiology and safety. :-)
I can see the 'consistency' angle. After all, if 90% of the market does it one way being 'counter culture' is sometimes helpful sometimes a hindrance. User interfaces on motorbikes are a lot less easily customized than on websites after all.
I see some reasons why the BMW design is better, but there is lots of evidence to the contrary out there:
I got nine straight years out of my Mac SE/30, five from my (used) PowerBook G3 Lombard and five from my iBook G4. Also my second generation iPod works fine (aside from a dead battery which was mostly my fault) and my 4th(?)-gen iPod is in ship-shape. In fact, every Apple product I own aside from a refurb Airport Express will work if you plug it in -- that's two IIe's, a IIc, two SE/30's, a Quadra 840AV, a Lombard, a Pismo, two iBook G4's, an iMac G4, the aforementioned iPods, an Airport Extreme, an iPhone 3G, a unibody MacBook, and a MacBook Pro.
In my 21 years of Mac usage, I simply do not share your experience.
I agree that Macs will physically last longer than just about any other brand out there (other than the old IBMs), but the question I think is why you would want to keep a machine that long, and what good it will be if you do.
I had a 15" old-gen MacBook Pro. Ran like a dream, and physically much sturdier than just about any of the plastic crap out there. I had it for 2.5y before what I wanted to do outstripped what it was capable of offering and I switched to a unibody MacBook Pro.
That's what the previous poster is getting at. Yes, the Mac will remain functional for a long time, but what's the point?
Do you really need all that processing power or do you merely think you do?
I do just fine with a 2GHZ Core 2 Duo (1MB L2) desktop PC with 1GB RAM (I've even used it to run Windows Vista in VMWare on Ubuntu). Heck, you wouldn't notice the difference between my PC and my 1 year old MacBook with 2GB RAM and a 2.4GHZ Core 2 Duo (2MB L2), mostly because I keep my Ubuntu install in very good shape. If I was using Debian, Arch or Slackware, I could get even more performance out of this baby.
It's likely that I will not be upgrading this PC for a few more years. Thanks to cheap, low-end netbooks, operating systems are getting lighter. I expect this trend will continue for some time, and I intend to take full advantage of it, partly because I don't want to waste perfectly good electronics, but mostly because I want to see how long I can keep them running :p
Computers never get old. They just become incompatible with the state-of-the-art.
I've never owned an Apple product before last year, so I'm not making any comment about their durability, one way or another.
My point is this: go and survey today's Apple users, and ask them what they like about the products, or why they decided to buy. I'm willing to bet that "durability" will not be in the top three reasons.
Apple is one of the very few tech companies who has managed to meld its products into a fashion item, and over the last few years (since the first iPod, really), that is what made them as successful as they are today, NOT durability.
This also means that people want to replace their Apple products with shinier, newer models, long before they actually stop working.
I can't comment on BMW bikes, but I think the same is true of BMW cars - how many people buy a brand new BMW with the intention of driving it for 20 years?
"* Both are premium products at premium prices, designed against disposability. A BMW motorcycle and an Apple computer will typically outlast 2-3 of the average competitor's products, while costing about 1.5x as much."
I disagree with this. While the design of the a macbook is nicer than any other laptop I can think of, I had to replace the motherboard, optical drive, wrist rest, LCD panel, trackpad, and webcam before it was three years old. Granted I did use it extensively, but I don't think that my usage would have destroyed a Dell latitude or Lenovo Thinkpad any quicker. In fact, I am expecting my current Dell E6500 to last longer than may macbook did.
My original macbookpro is still alive and well and withstood very heavy use. Granted, I needed to replace the battery a few times, originally because mine was within the serial # range of defective batteries, but each time those changes were covered by my warranty. The computer is now almost four years old.
I suspect that you can find someone with an anecdote describing a perfectly functioning mac and one that exploded. The same such anecdotes likely also exist for people running Thinkpads, Latitudes, et al.
When it come to anecdotes... I've got a powerbook and an ibook both still alive and kicking after close to 5 years and apart from the battery that I had to replace, they haven't had any problems (despite using them a lot)...
On the other hand my 2 years old macbook is starting to make some strange sound (the fan probably needs to be changed)...
I think that anecdotes are only that and in my experience once you have a problem with a laptop it's usually going to be more than one problem...
BMW Motorrad is similar to Apple in many ways:
* Both were early players in their respective markets. Moreso than many other manufacturers, they have a lot of history to draw from.
* Both are known for their design and sense of style. A BMW motorcycle, like an Apple device, is almost instantly recognizable once you know the visual cues of each.
* Both are premium products at premium prices, designed against disposability. A BMW motorcycle and an Apple computer will typically outlast 2-3 of the average competitor's products, while costing about 1.5x as much.
* Both have absolutely rabid followings, winning the kind of fanaticism you can only produce by decades of selling beautiful products that perform beautifully.
The BMW turn signals map closely to the Apple 1-button mouse. Is it the most functional design? Nah. But the customers barely care. The design is functional enough, and it conjures the brand very effectively.
Here, both BMW and Apple "missed" the waves of standardization to user controls; their controls were always good enough from the start, however, and since the users didn't make a stink about it, both highly successful manufacturers left well enough alone.
Looking from our vantage point in the present, sure, someone moving to a BMW or Apple interface will notice a few differences (or, in your words, it will be "inconsistent with virtually every other"). But when you look at it from the point in time at which these interfaces were designed, both were groundbreaking and best-of-breed. Macs had a mouse when their closest competitors would draw some text like "C:>" and drool at you. BMW had foot-shift and hand-clutch when their closest competitors had suicide-shift and clutch pedals. It took another 40 or 50 years for motorcycles to agree upon right-hand throttle, even.
Personally, I don't buy the left-brain/right-brain argument you put forth, and I consider the danger pretty low because turn signals get the absolutely lowest priority when I am riding and need to react to emerging situations (that's pretty-talk for "when the dude in the F-150 aims at me suddenly"). I ride a Honda and I am pleased with the left-thumb directional controls, but I bet I could get used to a BMW pretty quickly.... and any donations to test this theory are gratefully accepted. But in any case, I think you need to see some more of the history behind the controls before you can use them as a UI teaching tool.