A weird feature on the Macbook

Today I witnessed one of the most non-sensical hardware interaction on my Macbook Air. Seeing this from an Apple device was definitely appalling, and made me question if I’m the one who’s thinking wrong (Apple can’t be wrong about interaction design, right?)

So what happened? I turned off my Macbook Pro (the latest model)’s power by selecting the shut down option from the OS’s main menu. The screen went pitch black, but for some reason I felt like I wanted to see if the laptop got turned off indeed. For good measure, I clicked the track pad and I unintentionally gave it a little more pressure than usual (ie. force-clicked). Then, to my surprise, the laptop suddenly turned on, with the Mac OS’s unmistakable booting chime and the apple logo showing on in the middle of the screen.

Then I thought, oh I might not have actually turned it off earlier because it started rebooting apparently. But I thought I clicked the shut down menu correctly? Am I hallucinating?

I tried again. Selected the shut down menu correctly, double and triple checked, and after clicking the menu, the laptop shut down. Again I wanted to make sure it was shut down indeed so again I clicked the track pad to check (this time also force-clicked). Then, the laptop started booting again. It became evident to me that force-clicking the track pad works as power-on button.

I don’t understand why Apple made this decision. First off, it’s breaking the age-old paradigm of the power button’s role (ie. it’s the only button that turns on or off the device). Secondly, Apple completely ignored people’s behavior that seeks reassurance (ie. shaking the door knob after locking the door to ensure it’s locked). My clicking the trackpad had the intent of making sure the computer is turned off completely so I expected nothing to happen when I clicked the track pad but little did I know I was actually initiating the system’s booting. It felt like the door I just locked and jiggled the doorknob expecting to see the door’s firmly locked suddenly opens widely.

One could say that the force-click mechanism justifies this feature since force-clicking convey’s user’s strong intent and is thus fit for assigning actions that would go beyond what it usually does. Still, I can’t help but thinking that this was a result of whoever owns the force-click feature at Apple to add more features for the sake of owning more features so they can get points in performance review.

Of course there could be other justifiable reason and use cases that I’m not aware of, but this one was of the rare times I felt Apple’s design was genuinely bad.