Of course there's no magnifying glass or it cannot be found, and then "hilarity" ensues at the security desk. Virtually nobody does, not without a magnifying glass. See?" No, the security officer doesn't see it. Me: "There's the serial number in teeny, tiny print. The few brave (foolish?) Mac owners like me have a much, much tougher time. Owners of laptops with easy-to-find and easy-to-read serial numbers breeze right through both ways. It's also fairly common when I have to enter an office building or other facility where somebody at a security (or "security") desk inventories all entering and exiting laptops by serial number. IBM ThinkPads were pretty damn stylish, and they had big, easy to read serial numbers in easy to inventory places. Apple has got typographic experts, so spend some effort making serial numbers easier to read within whatever (sometimes lame) aesthetic goals Apple is trying to achieve. There are still plenty of characters available to allow plenty of serial numbers for billions of products.įinally (and now that Jony Ive has left!), don't be afraid to make serial numbers easier to read (in larger type) on devices. This'll help even Apple's own support teams over the phone, etc., as they deal with consumers. The choice of typeface can matter a lot here - for example, to distinguish A from R - but some easy-to-confuse characters ought to be dropped no matter what the typeface. It'd be darn helpful if all these organizations could know, right away, when they've collected a serial number in their inventory taking that cannot possibly be a genuine Apple serial number.Īlso, Apple ought to eliminate all characters from serial numbers that can be easily mistaken for other characters.
(Only Apple would know for sure, of course.) There are all sorts of real world scenarios when businesses, governments, and other organizations need to take accurate inventories and when somebody transposes a digit or otherwise gets the serial number wrong.
I like this idea overall, but Apple really ought to include some sort of check digit mechanism, and publish the formula they picked, so that it's possible to determine with high confidence whether a supplied Apple serial number could actually really be a genuine Apple serial number.
0 kommentar(er)
