There is a distinct lack of coloration in today’s automobiles, with the majority seemingly finished in a shade that could be found on a greyscale chart. Things are no better in the
interior; nearly always black, beige or grey, colours that architectural and couture designers refer to as neutrals. To make matters worse, these shades are all too often matched to
the exterior pigment (i.e. black with black, silver with grey) to create insidious and mind-numbing monochrome vehicles that appear to have simply been dipped whole into a large vat
of colourant.
1937 Delahaye 135, ivory and navy blue with dark red leather
Things were not always this gloomy. From the dawn of motoring through the 1920s, cars were painted in a full spectrum of colours, often in vivid combinations. The world’s first motor
vehicle, the 1886 Benz Patent-Motorwagen was green, with its fully-exposed engine finished in bright red. At the Villa d’Este or Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance one sees a veritable
riot of colour that would likely be a bit shocking to today’s consumers: black with orange, yellow with orange, dark and light blue, dark and light green, red with blue, maroon with
red; the palette was limitless.
…
I’m not even remotely “into” cars but I loved this article… and I do think that it’s a bit of a shame that cars don’t exhibit the variety of colour that they used to, any longer. As a
kid, I remember that the old chap who lived on the other side of our street kept a remarkably old-fashioned but regal looking car (I’ve no idea what it was: I was only very young) in
racing green with maroon trim and leather, and chrome window frames. I used to think how cool it was that he got to have a car that was so distinctive and unusual, because it was
already rare to see things that didn’t just fit into the same boxy, bland palettes. Since then, things have only gotten worse: I can’t remember the time that my daily commute took me
past a car that wasn’t painted in an all-encompassing single-colour coat of metallic black, white, silver, red, or blue and with interior plastic entirely in one of two shades of dark
grey.
Hopefully it’s just a phase that we, as a society, are going through.
I’m a big believer in the idea that the hardware I lay my hands on all day, every day, needs to be the best for its purpose. On my primary desktop, I type on a Das Keyboard 4 Professional (with Cherry MX brown switches) because it looks, feels, and sounds spectacular. I use
the Mac edition of the keyboard because it, coupled with a few tweaks, gives me the best combination of features and compatibility across all of the Windows, MacOS, and Linux (and
occasionally other operating systems) I control with it. These things matter.
I don’t know what you think these buttons do, but if you’re using my keyboard, you’re probably wrong. Also, they need a clean. I swear they don’t look this grimy
when I’m not doing macro-photography.
I also care about the mouse I use. Mice are, for the most part, for the Web and for gaming and not for use in most other applications (that’s what keyboard shortcuts are for!) but
nonetheless I spend plenty of time holding one and so I want the tool that feels right to me. That’s why I was delighted when, in replacing my four year-old Logitech MX1000 in 2010 with my first Logitech Performance MX, I felt
able to declare it the best mouse in the world. My Performance MX lived for about four years, too – that seems to be how long a mouse can stand the kind of use that I give it –
before it started to fail and I opted to replace it with an identical make and model. I’d found “my” mouse, and I was sticking with it. It’s a great shape (if you’ve got larger hands),
is full of features including highly-configurable buttons, vertical and horizontal scrolling (or whatever you want to map them to), and a cool “flywheel” mouse wheel that can
be locked to regular operation or unlocked for controlled high-speed scrolling at the touch of a button: with practice, you can even use it as a speed control by gently depressing the
switch like it was a brake pedal. Couple all of that with incredible accuracy on virtually any surface, long battery life, and charging “while you use” and you’ve a recipe for success,
in my mind.
My second Performance MX stopped properly charging its battery this week, and it turns out that they don’t make them any more, so I bought its successor, the Logitech MX Master 2S.
On the left, the (new) Logitech MX Master 2S. On the right, my (old) Logitech Performance MX.
The MX Master 2S is… different… from its predecessor. Mostly in good ways, sometimes less-good. Here’s the important differences:
Matte coating: only the buttons are made of smooth plastic; the body of the mouse is now a slightly coarser plastic: you’ll see in the photo above how much less light
it reflects. It feels like it would dissipate heat less-well.
Horizontal wheel replaces rocker wheel: instead of the Performance MX’s “rocker” scroll wheel that can be pushed sideways for horizontal scroll, the MX Master 2S adds
a dedicated horizontal scroll (or whatever you reconfigure it to) wheel in the thumb well. This is a welcome change: the rocker wheel in both my Performance MXes became less-effective
over time and in older mice could even “jam on”, blocking the middle-click function. This seems like a far more-logical design.
New back/forward button shape: to accommodate the horizontal wheel, the “back” and “forward” buttons in the thumb well have been made smaller and pushed closer
together. This is the single biggest failing of the MX Master 2S: it’s clearly a mouse designed for larger hands, and yet these new buttons are slightly, but noticeably, harder to
accurately trigger with a large thumb! It’s tolerable, but slightly annoying.
Bluetooth support: one of my biggest gripes about the Performance MX was its dependence on Unifying, Logitech’s proprietary wireless protocol. The MX Master 2S
supports Unifying but also supports Bluetooth, giving you the best of both worlds.
Digital flywheel: the most-noticable change when using the mouse is the new flywheel and braking mechanism, which is comparable to the change in contemporary cars
from a mechanical to a digital handbrake. The flywheel “lock” switch is now digital, turning on or off the brake in a single stroke and so depriving you of the satisfaction of using
it to gradually “slow down” a long spin-scroll through an enormous log or source code file. But in exchange comes an awesome feature called SmartShift, which dynamically
turns on or off the brake (y’know, like an automatic handbrake!) depending on the speed with which you throw the wheel. That’s clever and intuitive and “just works” far better than
I’d have imagined: I can choose to scroll slowly or quickly, with or without the traditional ratchet “clicks” of a wheel mouse, with nothing more than the way I flick my finger (and
all fully-configurable, of course). And I’ve still got the button to manually “toggle” the brake if I need it. It took some getting used to, but this change is actually really cool!
(I’m yet to get used to the sound of the digital brake kicking in automatically, but that’s true of my car too).
Basic KVM/multi-computing capability: with a button on the underside to toggle between different paired Unifying/Bluetooth transceivers and software support for
seamless edge-of-desktop multi-computer operation, Logitech are clearly trying to target folks who, like me, routinely run multiple computers simultaneously from a single keyboard and
mouse. But it’s a pointless addition in my case because I’ve been quite happy using Synergy to do this for
the last 7+ years, which does it better. Still, it’s a harmless “bonus” feature and it might be of value to others, I suppose.
All in all, the MX Master 2S isn’t such an innovative leap forward over the Performance MX as the Performance MX was over the MX1000, but it’s still great that this spectacular series
of heavyweight workhouse feature-rich mice continues to innovate and, for the most part, improve upon the formula. This mouse isn’t cheap, and it isn’t for everybody, but if you’re a
big-handed power user with a need to fine-tune all your hands-on hardware to get it just right, it’s definitely worth a look.
A man threatened to sue a technology magazine for using his image in a story about why all hipsters look the same, only to find out the picture was of a completely different guy.
