Figure 1: People Seem to Love More External Antennas.
I just had one of those moments when my entire career flashed before my eyes – I hate when that happens. We have worked hard to make sure that our wireless products have only internal antennas because our product design experts said that we needed a "clean" external design. That means no external antennas sticking out. As part of this design effort, we have become very good at making internal antennas perform about as well as external antennas.
I am now told that customers love products with lots of external antennas (Figure 1) because they perceive more and bigger antennas as meaning higher performance and I need to start looking at putting external antennas back on our products. I cannot win.
I have encountered this issue in the past. I used to make industrial PCs, which were defined as PCs with no fans. These units were cooled using heat pipes and gigantic finned heat sinks on their sides. They were the PC version of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. We worked to make them look as rugged as possible. I talked to many customers who said that the rugged appearance of the units justified the extra money they had to pay for them. It certainly was the opposite of Apple's elegant approach – the industrial PCs had no elegance about them at all.
I guess the product and the customer must be attracted at their first meeting, otherwise there will be no future engagement. Sounds kind of like dating ...
Don't forget the blinking lights. That means the computer is working hard, right? Especially if there are lots of them.
You could not be more correct! Marketing wants 13 LEDs on the darn things. Why not just put a small LCD on the darn thing and be done with it?