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.
I work in aerospace mechanical design, but I've begun getting into component design. I was wondering if anyone out there knows of any good design guides for working with plastics (I've always been a metals or composites kind of guy). Specifically things like designing quick snap applications, casings, and things like that. There seems to be a lack of the real sort of information out there that is useful for a designer. I'm struggling to find any information on important topics such as minimum sizing, tolerancing, stressing during assembly, etc.
So any advice for good design guides would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately, I wont be forking out €300 to find out if this one has the goods or not... ;)
"The irony surely must be that Apple actually have no idea who they are now, whilst trumpeting on about it.. "
Well, maybe in 10 years or so they'll be "the guys who managed to piss away a pile of 90 BN offshore cash and no one ever found out how and for what".
I like Apple computers, up until they started gluing stuff together. i own iMacs and Macbooks.
i found the retina MBP only just acceptable as you can replace the battery if you dissolve the glue.
However.
What seems to have happened now is that Apple have gone completely insane, and rather than 'Thinking Different' they are now indistinguishable from any other large faceless corporate entity.
In fact, i may argue that they have gone one step further, and become a parody of themselves, with no uber-controller to reel them in and say 'that's a stupid idea' and so the stupid ideas go forwards, unchecked, the rest of Apple only knowing about cellphones does not have the chops to offer another (possibly more sane) direction, and worse still, stupid ideas then flourish into wat seems an almost pathological quest to give the customers less, whilst charging more, spin the elephant in the room with extra BS, never admit you're wrong, and move on regardless.. that is what politicians do... i don't buy 'their' lies either, and Apple's free pass is running out very quickly too.
The insular bubble that Apple seem to inhabit continues to grow, and become unweildly and their detatchment increases, and design becomes 'more so' as the design team there have been high profile historically, and, post Steve, no-one really challenges them now, so they end up working carte blanche and it becomes 'Art for Arts sake' at the expense of the customer ultimately, forgetting completely the original ethos.. the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
I'm not going to mention (again) glued in parts or removal of I/O and OS bloat .. those things that matter us 'pro' users, no, Apple's abstraction from the real world is summed up perfectly with a book.
The BS continues apace however, fine Apple, print a paper book, but stop it with the BS, you're making yourselves look foolish and alienating your customer base. You can gouge the spotty 16 year olds for every pound or dollar their hipster iPhones can handle, that's what we expect of multinational businesses, but us who have been around longer have seen Apple slowly losing it's mojo and are tiring of the almost-insults you throw at us,one day we will not come back, one of the other firms will get our custom, and we'll fondly remember the days when there was an alternative, and we'll let Apple become the phone company they so much want to be, and we'll all switch to Hackintosh, Linux or BSD and watch as Apple's new motto becomes "Think Similar"
so much for a book ? i feel like Apple are insulting me, and i don't know why, but i do know, this BS must end, or i'm off..
If you are so inclined to want a book with pretty pictures of Macintosh computers (and some other paraphernalia), then I recommend Jonathan Zufi's tome 'iconic' [1]. The price isn't bad for a coffee-table book (£40 on amazon.co.uk) and a good deal cheaper than J. Ive's masterwork.
And it goes back beyond 1998 for all those who need ther Apple III fix.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/ICONIC-Photographic-Tribute-Apple-Innovation/dp/098858171X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1479297389&sr=8-1&keywords=iconic
"The book, replete with 450 images, will be offered in two sizes:
A 10.20" x 12.75" version that sells for $199
A 13" x 16.25" version that will set you back $299"
So that will be the iBook and iBook mini ... I assume that there'll be a version with 900 images available for $399 at some point. Plus next year it will be replaced by a new version printed on thinner paper.
No one's forcing anyone at gunpoint to buy Apple's highly priced hipster bling. Some of it I like the look of, some I don't. What people spend their money on is their business. We all work for our money in whatever industry we choose and we all have things we like to buy. Just 'cos some of us don't want to pay £800 for mobile phone doesn't make us any better than them.
I do photography as an amateur hobbyist, I shoot with well over £10k of kit. It's just a hobby for me, I don't sell any prints or make a single penny at it, I just love shooting photos for the thrill of it. Am I mug? Most people would say I am as I could have just bought a £150 pocket camera from Argos or used my mobile phone. However I work bloody hard during 50+ hour week in my day job, my family do very well out of my wage packet and they want for nothing, it's my bloody money and I'll spend it however I wish!
If people want all 17 different variations of the iPhone, MacBook or "book of Mac", it's their money, they can spend it on those things if they wish can't they?
"If people want all 17 different variations of the iPhone, MacBook or "book of Mac", it's their money, they can spend it on those things if they wish can't they?" --- FuzzyWuzzy
It is indeed, and they can indeed. But what part of that is a good argument for not poking fun at pretentious piffle?
I don't think anyone is saying they can't spend their money on iProducts if they wish. what I'm reading here and mostly agree with is disdain for all the pretentious bollocks that comes out of their mouths each and every time a product is launched.... there's also a good dose of lamenting an obvious decline in product from the perspective of long term users.
Now, if you don't mind my saying Fuzzywuzzys you need to take a bit of a chill pill, (get out there with your camea it's gorgeous out there this time of year that always works for me) because your post comes across slightly shrill and a little hysterical.
the book "iconically" describes who they are,and their spelling checker just came a cropper.
However, just the other day, I was reading a review of a new Apple Macintosh laptop. It noted that the RAM was soldered in, but you could choose to get the 13-inch one, at the time of purchase, with more memory than the base configuration.
That sort of thing - dating back to the 512 K Fat Mac - describes to me who they are, and explains why I am reluctant to even consider buying Apple products.
I just had a wonderful mental image of having something dull (policy and procedure manual for the department, say) on the shelf in leather-bound format, with a font that makes it appear as if written by 13th century monks. Occasional spots of gold leaf (well, shiny ink anyhow), and illustrations in a matching style....
Better still if you could have dust on the top of the pages to dramatically blow off before cracking the Tome Of Knowledge to look up something.
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