Err, I don't think extra development work has anything to do with either. Mac OS has supported multi-button mice for at least twenty years, I'd guess, and many applications have had context menus that could be activated by right-clicking.* The support has been there, a user simply needed to plug in a multi-button ADB, or later USB, mouse.

On the hardware side, I believe Apple has mostly used Logitech guts for their pointing devices. I had a three button Logitech bus mouse for my 8088 IBM PC way back when, so if anything, I'd say Apple has been paying Logitech for the minor bit of work necessary to keep cranking out pointing devices with fewer buttons than their normal fare.

Also, as I pointed out above, Apple has been shipping mice with left- and right-click support for quite some time. They just went out of their way to design that support into a mouse that didn't look like it had multiple buttons. Though Apple certainly didn't invent the mouse, they led the change in bringing it to the masses, and at the start, they just wanted to make the newfangled pointing devices as simple as possible. Later, they kept catering to users, some of whom, yes, feel their OS is superior to other because it doesn't require right-clicking.

It's a design thing, not an engineering thing.

Is it silly? Maybe. Using it as a reason to feel superior certainly is, but then I've seen equally goofy "my OS is better than yours" arguments from users of plenty of other operating systems.

As for the no-Bluetooth-keyboards-for-the-iPhone issue, I can't imagine that's engineering either. I can see Apple so determined to make the phone simple and easy to use that they deliberately block the use of Bluetooth keyboards. After all, having reviews mention that to really use the phone for email or whatnot, power users should skip the on screen keyboard and instead buy and pair a whole 'nother device might have hurt the "It's simple!" image. No Bluetooth keyboard support leaves everyone to work with the on screen keyboard for a time, come to accept it, and declare it, "not too bad, really."

Ta-da! Ugh.


* Or Ctrl-clicking. Or click-and-holding. Or...