Mac book, whoa! Apple unveils $300 design tome Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Apple has unveiled its latest method for separating fanbois from their hard-earned money. The Cupertino creator of Sherlock has released a hardcover printed book called Designed By Apple in California that showcases Apple hardware designs. Sir Jony Ive says the book is aimed not …
- You can't just rip off a Braun design for a different product and have it work.
- You can adhere to Dieter Ram's design principals, but to do so takes time and effort. This is analogous to coding - just because good principals can be concisely written down doesn't mean that it is straightforward to produce good code.
- Rams wasn't working in a vacuum. He was part of a lineage, as contemporary designers are today. See the 'Zeiss Werra' camera from the early 1950's.
- The designs that made Ive's name didn't look anything like Braun's products.
The reason I'm defending Product Design (and not Ive per se) is that there is so much shit design out there, and it is irritating on a daily basis like a door handle with a sharp edge or a USB-A cable that only goes in its socket 50% of the time.
Buy one anyway,
You can rest it on the coffee table to impress any hipster friends, which is something you can't do with your wedding tackle (although I suppose it depend on how content you are, and your circle of friends).
'Buy more now, buy, and be happy' - THX1138
*CLEARLY* this is designed to be solely flopped out on the veneer of your local apple-store, to add some interest. Although maybe would have been wise to remove the 2nd-"samey"-half.
Selling it though?
Kind-of misses the point. I personally would love to get an insight into Apple's industrial design process - the people, the motivations, the conflicts, the resolutions - blunty what would make it interesting.
"Here's what we made".. that's not interesting, and devalues the process. Sure, "Steve liked it", is a process - but maybe a bit of vision would be of benefit in these cynical times.
THE BOOK OF THE MOVIE OF THE SOUNDTRACK OF THE EPIC OPERA OF CORPY APPLE AND THE HOLY GIMMICK
By Sir Johnny (Jony?) Ive (Yves?), designer famous for being designer at Corpy Apple.
Contains real ashes of Steve Jobs!
No longer uses medieval binding, now held together at the spine by special Apple Glue!
Get aluminium. Get glue. Make components accessible. ..no fuck that, let's make them take the flimsy glass plate off then the screen too, more glue. Deliberately cripple thermal sensor so you can't change hard drive. Put really strong magnets next to the screws that hold the screen in so it takes fucking ages to put them back in. Now the mac book. ..how many screws for the keyboard. 20? Nah...fuck em, make it 50 and get this, make em tiny. Make retina screen changeable? Nah make em replace the whole top half. Mix it all up in a blender. More aluminium. Bosch. Job done.
Love, Johnny.
Well, at least we finally know what Jony Ive has been doing instead of working on new Apple products.
> low-ghost ink
And a nod towards the workers at Foxconn. That's nice.
I currently run an Macbook Pro with 8GB and an after market 512GB SDD, to get the latest and greatest, I need to outlay £2699, plus £100 on dongles. Yet this model has a 4-5 week delivery time.
Who's buying these? Or is this just hyped scarcity?
Last year, I needed a stop-gap machine, I managed to get a deal on a 15.4" HP 450 G3 AMD Laptop for £80 all in, once trade-in £150 (a very old XP Desktop) and cashback £75 came through. It's really not awful, its actually an OK machine. Brushed aluminium finish. It had Window 7 Pro (or a choice of Windows 8.1 Pro). Runs Windows 10 AU 1607 fine.
The manufacturing differences between HP/Apple here are minute. Apple are getting almost evangelical in their belief People will keep on buying into this. I like Macs/macOS, but £2699 + dongles £100 is just taking it a tad far.
I genuinely don't feel that 'productive' as a cog within the bigger wheel to justify this expense, even though I'm perfectly entitled to order one.
"The manufacturing differences between HP/Apple here are minute. Apple are getting almost evangelical in their belief People will keep on buying into this. I like Macs/macOS, but £2699 + dongles £100 is just taking it a tad far.:
The differentiator is the operating system and standard apps, plus goodies like a free development toolchain.
IOW the O/S isn't really free.
Pre-1998 is covered by a hefty tome called "Apple Design - The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group". Can't remember how much it cost but it was a normal price for its size. It is full of information on the design of everything from the original Mac to the 20th Anniversary Mac, including many projects that never got into production. Lots of photos, but a lot of dense text too. It actually has real educational value for product design and product and software usability students.
Full of ideas, inventiveness and originality, including some awesomely daft ideas.
The total reverse of today's Jonny Ive's self-inflating fluff.
I had a similar book 'Digital Dreams - The Work of the Sony Design Centre'. It was full of concept sketches, design iterations and interviews - as well as product porn. The Esslinger-era Mac designs are cited by the designer of the PlayStation and VAIO range.
Apple's most famous designs from before the return of Jobs were out-sourced.
That would be the phase when a lot of the work was done by Frog Design.
Well, yes, literally it means that the book describes who they are by saying the opposite with a nudge and a wink.
I'm not quite sure where that takes us, except to conclude that Mr. Ives did well to go into design rather than any occupation that needs a good knowledge of English.
They like to pretend that rather plain shapes with generic insides (Jony doesn't actually do anything except appearance), mostly copied from Braun and Dieter Rams is their secret. But it's the marketing. The iTunes and record deals for iPod and the carrier data deals for iPhone.
Students of Industrial design would be wasting money on this piece of vanity publishing that can be got up in a slide show from Wikipedia if you really wanted.
I don't know why people keep saying "mostly copied from Braun and Dieter Rams" and why people believe it because it's utter bull-shit.
So many time I have tried to argue this fallacy but no - the know-it-alls say it is so so it must be true.
It isn't.
Have any of these clever-dicks - Mage for example - actually looked properly at Braun's designs?
I seriously doubt it.
I have here on my desk, a catalogue of Dieter Rams' work at Braun. As it's also a discussion of his work it also includes work by other designeers under his guidance at Braun.
There are only two items in it that remotely - REMOTELY - resemble anything that could have been copied by Apple. One is a rather nice desk-top cigarette lighter, the other is a hifi loudspeaker cabinet. Yes they are white and they have round corners - but there is also a lot of black on them just as there is on a lot of Braun's products. Black knobs, black switches, black grills.
I don't see anything like that on Apple products. In fact what I do see with Apple products is the continuation of Rams' design philosophy:-
"Product design is the organisation of the total of a product (form, surface, colour, product graphics) – in such a way that the product fulfils its given purpose as efficiently as possible. It should also conform to the factual conditions and requirements under which the product is to be produced and marketed"
Dieter Rams, 1975.
and
"Good design is functional or usable and practical design. But good design is also aesthetic design. As a designer I shun these discussions on the aesthetic quality of the product. I do so, even though I am a firm believer in the importance of aesthetic quality. The aesthetic quality of design is always a matter of nuances. Often, of only fractions of millimetres, of the finest graduations, or of the harmony between a number of visual elements. Changing a trivial element changes the whole impression. Reduce a product by one millimeter here it looks out of proportion; add a millimetre there, it looks clumsy. Only those who have had years of experience on the trained eyeI are capable of seriously participating in the discussions."
Dieter Rams, 1980
Rams has also publicly stated his admiration of Ive's work (but I can't find that quote).
However, just to shoot myself in the foot - I do think that the external DVD drive that Apple currently sells looks very Dieter.
>There are only two items in it that remotely - REMOTELY - resemble anything that could have been copied by Apple.
There's none so blind...
>Rams has also publicly stated his admiration of Ive's work (but I can't find that quote).
He said Apple were one of the few companies which still followed his 10 principles of design. Ive certainly makes no secret of it - he even wrote the foreword to Dieter Ram's last book.
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