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Apple is a hardware design company. It owns ideas not factories. And because it runs You, Badrou Zeggar and 458,992 others Like like this. its own operating systems, an intrinsic part of the design of its products is software. But this crucial area is showing signs of weakness as competitors copy its innovations.
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[ In the late 90s it was cool to suggest that Wozniak was the real genius behind Apple ] Apple has a history of design, but that is what almost killed it. At its nadir in the mid 90s, Apple was relegated to making niche products for graphic designat a time when design did not have the prestige that it does in today's more mature computer industry. In mature markets, qualitative value add becomes more important, and good design is measured qualitatively whereas technology is measured in terms of numbers. Today, people care more about the ergonomics of a laptop than how much RAM it has, but that was not always the case. And when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, people would still talk about Steve Wozniak's technical skills being the real genius behind Apple.
[ technical specs used to matter a lot more than design ] In many ways, the transition to today's design culture at Apple came about through it embracing a more geeky side. Before OSX, Apple's operating systems did not provide access to the command line, and there was a certain elegance to the packaging of software into three monolithic pieces: executables; control panels, and extensions. System 7 was conceptually more like IOS than OSX in that you couldn't tinker under the hood.
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[IOS shares the organizational simplicity of original Mac OS] What was under the hood mattered, however. By migrating to the NeXT machine's Unix-based operating system, Apple had a solid and robust engine that would appeal to developers, even if it was at the expense of some user experience complexity. While the workings of OSX were unselfconsciously techie, its look and feel was much less sober: the 'aqua' styling with its liquid metaphor. Reflections and glossy highlights were perhaps seductive, but they weren't restrained or minimalistterms that are often applied to Apple because of its style elsewhere.
[ the aqua' user interface style of OSX with its glossy buttons and liquid reflections was hardly minimalist ] At the same time as the operating system overhaul, Steve Job's return to Apple was signified by the playful design of the candy colored iMac. But this wasn't the product that really kickstarted the Apple of today, which is associated with monochrome modernism (even the logo ditched its color) rather than bright colors and postmodern whimsy. In 2001 Apple launched the Titanium Powerbook, a laptop that had both the outer and inner beauty of a sports car; if you spent much of your day in front of a machine, this was the one to own. Throughout the early 2000's the illuminated Apple logo became more and more ubiquitous at technology conferences as people switched from their company-owned desktops to these highly personal luxury devices.
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[The Titanium Powerbook, the product that rooted Apple's modernist design among tech
influencers - source] If the Titanium Powerbook was the device that signified Apple's rebirth, two other portable productsthe iPod and the iPhonewere the other pillars on which the world's largest company was built. And both of these were equally modernist, designed in the style of Dieter Rams' seminal work for Braun in the 60s and 70s.
[ Dieter Rams' work at Braun is the direct inspiration behind Apple's product design - source ]
beating, but increasingly, it is not best of breed, and products often show signs they have come
[ Does your granny use vi? OSX brought back the command line access, while IOS went back to one which didn't even multi-task ]
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unlimited GB via the cloud, and your phone's memory is merely a cache. There are a handful of apps on the periphery of Apple functionality, however, that show that Apple's design control is not total, since they belong to a completely different aesthetic than the house style.
[ Apple takes the Dieter Rams influence into its calculator interface ] Two of the utilities that come standard with the iPhone are the calculator and compass apps. The calculator shows a direct reference to the designer who most influenced Apple's hardware, Dieter Rams. It has an interface which is an almost exact replica of a vintage Braun calculator, produced when he was head of design there. It is vintage but modernist nonetheless. If this were merely a direct copy of something physical, the only argument for defending the calculator would be that it is somehow more appropriately modern. The reason this is not pastiche is that the braun calculator was designed with an easy to read keyboard, with clear but subtle color coding and well laid-out keys. This translates into the digital realm to produce something ergonomic.
[ Apple's wayward, fake brass and lacquered wood, compass app ] The compass, however, is designed to look like a historical nautical one. The bevel is fake brass and the background luxurious polished hardwood that's made up of 1s and 0s. Digital brass and polished wood doesn't cost any more than digital plastic, so the luxury is false. The effect suffers from the same thing that plagued American industrial design in the 70's. Jim Rockford's wood effect answer phone, teak-encased TVs or vinyl wood paneled cars. It carries across to other Apple products such as the ebook reader and Gamecenter. Note that BOTH of these designs are skeuomorphs, one taking plastic and reproducing it digitally and the other polished wood and brass, but the difference is that the Braun plastic design has some ergonomic use. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with skeuomorphs, the whole of classical architecture (wood represented in stone) is based on skeuomorphism, as is most software interaction (ie, the fake metal of chrome buttons). Microsoft has swung violently against skeuomorphism, away from the visual clues that fake metal achieves with Windows 8 in a way that is sure just to confuse people who may be unable to differentiate between buttons gizmodo.com/5952131/the-real-meaning-and-future-of-apples-mantra-designed-in-california 6/14
[ Technologists have suddenly learned the word skeuomorph, using it entirely pejoratively, but there is nothing wrong with skeuomorphism per se, all of western architecture and almost all successful interaction design is based on it - source] The problem of fake wood and leather in digital design is not skeuomorphism, but realism vs abstraction. If you try and make things literally look like objects in the real world you end up in the realm of something which is trying to be something else. There is a lack of honesty and self awareness about this approach and everything ends up looking like a video game. Video game design often imitates something in the real word because it is drawing you into a fantasy world. Interaction design is supposed to help your real world experience rather than immersing you in something else, and so abstraction is more ergonomic.
[ game UI - design to immerse me in the idea of being in control of something important and complicated, like flying a spaceship ] Interaction design is something you should be able to look at and understand, rather than gizmodo.com/5952131/the-real-meaning-and-future-of-apples-mantra-designed-in-california 7/14
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something that should conjure up an emotional association which stimulates your imagination.
[ Nest's excellent interaction design - a dial with a number - source ] As a rule, interaction design should be something you look at for what it is in its own right, not what is is associated with. There should be no Naked Lunch moment where you realize what's there is deceptively off putting. While it's true that Apple design has never been as amateur as, say, Microsoft's Windows games Solitaire and Minesweeper had all the design flair of a slot machinethese were clearly afterthought apps, but Apple's oddly incongruous software design aesthetic extends right into some of its core products.
[ the tacky and non-luxurious design of iCal where the stitching is supposedly based on the interior of Job's private jet. ] Because people hero worshipped Jobs, people have often assumed that it was Jobs that was the principal arbiter of Apple taste and that where it was lacking, he mustn't have been involved. Just as people would whisper in the 90s that Wozniak was the genius behind Apple as a tech company, people now assume that Jobs was the genius behind Apple as a design one.
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[ Jobs dressed like an architect from the waist up and like someone who couldn't care less about design from the waist down. Like his clothing, his design sensibility was probably divided unequally. - source] But in a recent article by Austin Carr, at Co Design, several people who worked at Apple claim that Jobs was indeed involved in some of the faux-realist products that don't sit well with the rest of Apple. According to Carr, for the design of the IOS game center, "Steve pushed very hard to have everythingthe felt-cloth table, the game chipslook like they would in real life" The heavily skeuomorphic design of some of Apple's software products may not have been because Jobs wasn't interested in them, but more likely because the teams that had brought modernist design to hardware were not the same for software. Jobs never claimed to be able to design or even articulate what he wanted from design, but he said he knew it when he saw it. Perhaps software teams at Apple, didn't bring him an alternative. Perhaps what Apple needs, above all, is a Jonathan Ive for software.
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[ Apple's cloud initiatives feel like they are about syncing (beaming information) to different
devices, rather than creation in one place in the cloud, which is the model of Google's products]
[ Total Control Retail, by design ] Perhaps the most revolutionary product Apple has ever designed is its retail store environment. Most retail design is about artifice, scenery design as a backdrop for products that try and sell you an idea, Apple retail design is about authenticity and customer service. Apple stores use solid wood tables, shot blasted steel, stone floors and toughened glass, and they devote a large percentage of space to education via the theater and support via the genius bar. If the design inspiration for Apple products is Dieter Rams, the inspiration for these high tech temples is the high priest of High Tech architecture, Norman Foster.
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[ If Dieter Rams is the influence behind Apple products, Norman Foster is the influence behind Apple retail design - source] Foster designed the form that became the inspiration for the most iconic of Apple's early flagship stores, creating a glass stair through a central atrium in a box like building, for the Carre D'Art in Nimes, France. This is the architectural precedent which indirectly influenced retail spaces such as NY 's Soho Apple store, which were created by a variety of architectural firms a decade later. Apple's headquarters takes this design influence full circle: It was designed by Foster himself.
[ Foster's Carre D'Art in Nimes is the inspiration for the glass stair Apple stores - source]
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Gillette realized that if you give people a really nice razor, cheaply, you could keep charging them a premium for refill blades that fit it. This is the way that the inkjet printer business works cheap hardware and expensive refills. Nespresso does it too.
[ Giant backdrops of coffee capsule refills at the Nespresso store in Barcelona with it's Apple like control over retail experience and Gillette-like business model of subsidized hardware and refills - source] Apple doesn't quite do this with iTunesthe software is still there to sell hardware, but the carriers sell Apple phones. Y ou sign a two year contract with a cell phone provider and get an iPhone for $200 rather than $700. This the Gillette model, but without the control that they usually exert by doing it themselves. Perhaps the logical end game for Apple is to become a network or content provider, collecting rent via the Gillette model of subsidized hardware. Although this is very unlikely to happen, if Apple were a carrieror even an MVNOit would have a complete offering that would give it strategic leverage to do a good job where it is weak (cloud) and where others offer a service which is inferior to the usual Apple level of quality. Regardless of the outcome, elegant design will become an increasingly important part of Apple, not just for hardware, and it may need the design sensibility of Jonathan Ive in other areas. David Galbraith is a designer and co-founder of several Internet companies including Yelp. He used to be an architect, working for Norman Foster. He's designed of all sorts of things from skyscrapers to software applications, but specializes in designing the obvious. He created the visual bookmark concept behind Pinterest, the one-line bios used by Twitter and Facebook, and co-created RSS. Photo by flickr user geekjustin, used under Creative Commons license.
You are following optiplex991s comments optiplex991 and 13 more Reply 5 hours ago
Cherokee_59 and 19 more Reply 4 hours ago " you'll see the equivalent of the price of a Porsche fly out the wholeevery minute in little $500 brick sized The door article is just stupid. Simply COMPARE packages." all Apple products with everything else on the market and you will know how good it is. Three hours ago I $500 Porsches anyone? Anyone? met a guy who asked me if I could show him where the SETTINGS for the camera of his Samsang You are following KinglyCitruss comments Galaxy xy are ... that was one of the first times i held one of these things in my hand. After dealing with it KinglyCitrus and 1 more Reply 3 hours ago for three minutes i knew (again) how well Apple This guy has a lot of trouble making his points, but I thinkproductswith designed. And whenever clarifying what I agree are him, so I'll take a shot at i start my office PC with W7 i feel like I am going back in time, I think he meant: Skeumorphism has a place in good design. Bad skeumorphism doesn't. People don't have compared to Friends). Also, skeumorphs that leather calendars, and they certainly don't have leather maps (Find MyOSX on my several Macbooks. are iterative and merely evoke real-world objects- abstraction, as the author calls it- are generally better than trying to copy the form of a real-world object to the letter.
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Day One is an example of an app with a design I absolutely love. It has flashes of the real world strewn throughout- a ribbon, a few cross-hatched surfaces, noise textures to create the feeling of brushed aluminum, You are following slaws comments and even their beautiful thick book icon combine to create an emotional connection that makes you feel like you're writing in a journal, not just putting text into a word processor. More Reply 5 hours ago slaw and 6 more Having grown up with "programs" and "applications", for some reason the use of "apps" to refer to desktop software bothers me. I can't explain it. You are following vygr-1s comments vygr-1 and 1 more Reply 3 hours ago I'll tell you like my high school English teacher told me: What is your thesis? You are following LordFarquads comments LordFarquad and 3 more Reply 5 hours ago You are following sunhawks comments sunhawk and 4 more Reply 4 hours ago "built by child slave labor in china" - apple Jesus H. Fuck, you came so close to not pulling the skeuomorphism card that nobody gives a shit about. But, alas, you did it anyway.
Yes, I know that Gizmodo didn't originally write this, You are following Matthew VanAndels comments but publishing something that perpetuates the bullshit is as good as doing so. Matthew VanAndel and 1 more Reply 4 hours ago You are following leimeisei10s On the subject of skeumorphism, by and large I'm indifferent about Apple's use. On one hand, it helps you comments distinguish what it is you are using in an almost physical, congitive-associative way... and with that being the goal, I'd call it a success. However, there are aspects of the skeumorphic designs themselves that I really dislike (not the skeumorphism itself, but the execution of leimeisei10 and 1 more Reply 2 hours ago it). This guy is an idiot. at 99c store and I don't want For instance, the Reminders app looks like a piece of trash someone bought Headoesn't make any arguments for intentionally avoid that app because as "they must that crap on my phone or anywhere else in my possession. I his points other than presenting themevery time I be true, Apple's just simply better". open it I feel like I'm using a cheap plastic-faux-leather piece of bargain store junk. More He leaves you at too many places saying "wait a second... says who?" but he never answers the "says who" part. Also, "UNIX Engine"... made me lol. Typical Apple fanboy who probably doesn't even know what Unix actually is, they just know that "it's the best ever because Apple uses it and it's not Windows so it must be great." It doesn't matter what you start with. If you take a Picasso and dump elephant shit all over it, is it still worthy of a spot in an art museum?
You are following ActionBlacksons comments ActionBlackson and 4 more Reply 5 hours ago How much are they paying you guys? This is embarrassing nuthuggery.
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