Apple’s new product pages: WTF?

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
January 10th, 2006 • 4:22 pm

A number of announcements coming from Macworld Expo today, which will probably be analyzed to death elsewhere… But Apple also seems to have adopted a new design for its product pages on its web site. And it’s a bit scary.

For one thing, I think it’s the first time so many new product pages make such heavy use of QuickTime movies. For dial-up users, it means that the pages are pretty much unusable. If you go to the new product page for iLife ’06 or for iWork ’06 in Safari, you are greeted with a huge QuickTime logo and no content and no indication of what’s going on. (When the QuickTime plug-in starts loading a movie in Safari, there’s no progress bar or any indication of how long it’s going to take.)

Fortunately, you can bypass these useless product home pages by using the direct URLs for individual products, such as http://www.apple.com/pages/ (which actually redirects you to http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/).

But then the nightmare continues. These new product pages use a new design with a main area and then a menu of links to specific pages on the right hand side… These links look like regular hypertext links. When you hover over them with the mouse, the Safari window shows “Go to ‘http://…'” in its status bar, like it normally does for a regular hypertext link, with the URL link to the specific page in question.

But the only possible way to use these links is to simply click on them, which then only refreshes the main section of the window, without actually loading an entire new page or actually taking you to the URL indicated in the status bar.

If, instead of a simple click on the link, you control-click (or right-click) on one of these links and select “Open Link in New Tab” or “Open Link in New Window” in the contextual menu, Safari actually loads… the product page for Keynote 3 in a new tab/window!

Good Lord. I just want to read about Pages 2’s new features! I don’t need a “quick tour” in QuickTime movie format, and I certainly don’t want to read about Keynote 3’s features! Eeek.


6 Responses to “Apple’s new product pages: WTF?”

  1. ssp says:

    I have fast internet, so the QT stuff isn’t too bad. But those pages (and also the new Apple front page) are just by far too wide. Horizontal scrolling sucks.

  2. Michael Tsai - Blog - Apple’s New Product Pages says:

    […] Pierre Igot: […]

  3. Chris Grande says:

    I guess they heard you.. or at least agreed. The iLife QT intro is gone.

  4. Chris Grande says:

    Looks like they are changing everything around.

  5. Pierre Igot says:

    Well, the home page for iWork ’06 is still a QuickTime movie…

  6. Tr909 says:

    the quicktour doesn’t even work here (only shows quicktime icon to the right)
    And if i open http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/ directly it only shows this spinning startup thingy (doesn’t load anything, looks like only the redirect from the other page works).i too think the full-fledged demo’s should be linked to instead of on the product frontpages.

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