Pink? Seriously?

It’s been a bitter-sweet weekend for Apple. Technical problems have dogged the launch of both the iPhone 3G, and MobileMe. Problems with Apple’s activation servers left many early adopters, who had waited in line for many hours, unable to play with their new toy. Problems with 02 & AT&T’s retail systems compounded the sense of chaos, resulting in slow transaction processing at many stores. MobileMe’s launch didn’t fare much better. It’s taken several days for Apple to get their Me.com service to reasonably responsive state - far longer than their planned outage time.

In both instances, Apple can take some comfort from the fact that they have been victims of their own success - the interest in iPhone 3G has been off the charts. I’ve personally never seen anything like it. In London UK, there weren’t just queues at the Apple Store in Regent Street, but at every 02 and Carphone Warehouse store across the city. It was quite remarkable, and bodes very well for the long term success of the new device.

But now that the dust has settled, there’s one remaining thing that troubles me. One little detail which will bug me each time I use my Mac from this day forward. Yes, it’s that friggin’ pink iDisk icon that Apple have foisted onto my desktop. Pink? Seriously? That combined with the pastel blue and the cloud makes MobileMe look more like My Little Pony than a cutting edge IT platform. I had thought that things couldn't get aesthetically worse for the Mac than Apple’s new Star Trek inspired desktop pattern for Leopard, but it seems I was wrong. Let’s hope that Apple snaps out the their My Little Pony phase soon.