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Studying the design of everyday things

Buying your Mac with preinstalled software

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I was configuring a PowerBook through Apple.com today when I noticed that they present a radio button (in IE) and a Select box in Opera for choosing preinstalled software. The problem is, they only allow you to choose one item from the list (as select/radio elements are prone to do) but the choices are not either/or combinations. They are iLife, Logic Express, and Final Cut. All these seem like they are not mutually exclusive of each other and should be allowed to coexist together (although I admit- I know very little about the software). It seems to me when I was building my PB that I would want both iLife and Final Cut Express. But I could only select one item. The next page ("Do you need anything else?") did not present software that I missed out on the previous page.



Am I missing something? Does the preinstall of lets say, Final Cut include iLife? It's not immediately clear to me what's going on here.

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Comments

Anonymous 25. May 2007, 00:53

Anonymous writes:

You can actually select more than one item in that drop-down list. You just need to hold down the control button when selecting each item that you want

Eddie Lopez 25. May 2007, 02:18

That's not true.. of course, the screen doesn't look like that anymore, but if even you were right, it's still TERRIBLE design to make users hold control down to select multiple pieces of software, when there are much better solutions.

But the truth is.. it actually is by design (for some strange reason) I just checked this again, it's a slightly different implementation, but now they tell you that you can only install one software package (see the first line in the picture below). I don't know why they wouldn't want to sell more than one software package, but what do I know?

See:
http://files.myopera.com/Eddie_Lopez/blog/Picture%207.png

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