Dumbing Down Your Product

Although I have the previous generation of Apple Cinema Display (the 23" crystal acrylic) and so this is not an issue for me, Rush went on a rant today on his show about the new Apple Cinema's power button. Apple has indeed designed the monitor so that it can work with PCs and thus, the feature we Mac users have grown to accept as standard, that the monitor power button can also power up the computer, is now a thing of the past. The Apple ADC connector was brilliant (as most Apple innovations are) and although it did conform to a standard, the DVI connector found on newer PCs made it such that Windows users could not utilize Apple monitors with their machine. Apple is expanding its base by appealing to Windows folks and so they made the decision to abandon the very cool ADC connector (which allowed for all video, USB, and power to flow through a single cable) in favor of the dumber DVI standard.

The PC magazine, ZDNet raves about the monitor here but does note that it has one "con". That's right, the power button does not power up the computer.

Rush has put out an APB for a "hacker" to come up with a solution to getting the monitor to talk to the computer on power-up. I think the solution is probably something that Dr Bott sells but I have not had time to go through their product catalog yet, but they are industrious types over there so that seems like Rush's best bet.