The Church of Apple divides the world into two kinds of people—those who love great design and will pay for it, and those who don’t understand the concept.
Apple products, almost without exception, are the best-designed industrial products of the last half-century. Nothing comes close. Jonathan Ive, the British-born designer and perhaps the greatest industrial designer since Raymond Loewy in the 1950s, gets a lot of the credit, but so does Steve Jobs. It’s Jobs’ conviction that design and function should be one and the same that makes Apple products so beautiful and useful.
If you’ve ever sent messages on a Blackberry, punching out numbers with your thumb on tiny keys, you understand. You’re doing that not because it’s the most efficient way of typing on a small device but because that’s the keyboard the engineers provided, so that’s what you use. That’s function at odds with design.
Even Apple’s failures, such as the Cube, have been gorgeous, though the public couldn’t grok them. As to those of us of the Church, we’ve bought into Jobs’ aesthetic and love Ive’s implementation. There is no in-between.
(Oddly enough, Apple may be the only large company in America that does no consumer research—none—as in zero, nada, zip. No polls, no focus groups. They design them the way they think we ought to want them and you can either buy them or call Hewlett-Packard).
But where are all the bells and whistles?
Their aesthetic makes me a little crazy: I love gadgets, as my wife will attest. If it has buttons and lights, I want it, and the more buttons and lights, the more I want it. I have a watch with four dials and a solar cell. I just bought a car with so much electronics, it took me a week to figure out what button to press to adjust the bass on the radio. (Actually, I had to bring in my teenage daughter, who had it all down in 10 minutes).
Yet Apple’s aesthetic runs directly contrary to this. The Mac PowerBook has the fewest buttons of any laptop, and nothing lights up. And while you can buy keyboards with lots of buttons and lights for your Mac, they come with the bare minimum because the machine works better that way.
Your basic Dell laptop was designed by an engineer for people ostensibly like me; the PowerBook was designed by a designer. Big difference. And I’m devoted to the latter. Weird. By the way, anyone know the person in charge of design for Dell? Didn’t think so.
Elegance = design + function
So, the iPhone, a triumph of design and function. They got rid of the keyboard. In fact, the iPhone has only one actual button, the thing you turn it on with. You perform every function with a touch screen, using beautiful icons larger than the mechanical buttons on your Blackberry and its ilk. The touch-screen isn’t an accident; it’s the whole point. It’s the Jobs-Ive aesthetic at work.
In the words of Thoreau, “simplify, simplify, simplify.” But unlike Thoreau, Apple only needs to say it once.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Is this true? that no other industrial design of the last half century comes close? You sound like you know what you’re talking about, but aren’t there other wonderfully designed things? My guess is that arms design is well done too, sleek and sexy and totally functional. Now there’s a depressing thought. But maybe like the kitchen things at Target, which are often pretty nice and functional too. Or are you just talking about design for computer/internet things? OK, here’s an actual question, is there anyone designing furniture that fits with the Apple aesthetic? Who designs the pews in the Church of Apple? I do think this has possibilities, a marketplace based on Apple aesthetic, all sorts of goods, smart, simple and fun.
tata
The Church of Apple actually has physical buildings, otherwise known as Apple Retail Stores. Someone was sufficiently obsessed with the look and feel of these stores to track down sources for the furniture and fixtures. There are no pews, but I think looking closely at the design of an Apple store might give you a good start.
For more information, see Build your own Apple Store where numerous products used in the popular retail outlets are identified.
Unfortunately to those of you who want to replicate the Apple Store atmosphere in your home, a quick check of those web sites reveals evidence that absolutely nothing used in an Apple Store, even a common Exit sign, is cheap. There are no prices given, but the visual cues on the sites practically scream expensive good taste. Just like the stores, come to think of it.
And to answer your other question, of course there are many other wonderfully designed things in the world. I can’t speak for the original writer of the piece, but I think he is referring to computers. And this is valid, since for many of us our computers are the objects that we spend the most time with. So if you think of the people who have made the greatest contribution to modern design, Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs seem to be it.
After all, how often do you think of the design of your electric shaver or coffeemaker, even if they are European design icons?
D
D
It’s better restated like so:
“From the introduction of the original iMac on 6 May, 1998 to the announcement of the MacBook Air on the 15th of January, from the iPod to the iPhone; no company on Earth has had a comparable decade of brilliant, innovative, and groundbreaking product design.”
I honestly can’t think of a company that comes close to the streak Apple has had. Have single designs come out that were great? Sure. Check out the (mobile phone) Au/KDDI Design Group in Japan, particularly the Neon.
Actually there are quite a few excellent looking Japanese mobile phones, but it’s quite hit and miss.
The Sony X505 and TZ laptops, not to mention the original version of the PS2. Sony, actually, has a mixed track record overall but once in a while makes great looking stuff.
There are a few high end speaker guys (NOT Bose) that consistently make elegant stuff.
Japanese, Swiss, and other watchmakers.
Etc…. But with a decade of high profile and consistent success Apple really does have a fantastic run going.