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10/18/12 The Real Meaning and Future of Apple's Mantra: Designed in California

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DESIGN

The Real Meaning and

Future of Apples Mantra:Designed in CaliforniaDavid Galbraith

Apple is a hardware design company. I t

owns ideas not factories. And because it runs

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 com petitors copy its innovations.

1. Design is not hardware.

Announcing the launch of his hardware incubator at London's Royal College of Art, this month,

James Dyson (the vacuum cleaner guy) said something which may seem obvious but is

nonetheless very controversial: "Apple's success as a technology company is built on hardware.

The current fixation with digital is misplaced."

There you have it, the Internet bubble is a vacuum, as stated by the man who made billions

selling them. Apple is not like Google or Facebook, Yahoo, Ebay or Oracle or the other Silicon

Valley stars because it primarily ma kes physical things. And things, according to Dyson, employ

people and have a proven business model: You sell them.

Although, even in its beleaguered state, Facebook is worth significantly more than G eneral

Motors, it doesn't have a clearly defined business model and employs 3,000 people vs GM's

200,000. Stand outside an Apple store, on the other hand, and you'll see the equivalent of the

price of a Porsche fly out the door every minute in little $500 brick sized packages. This,according to Dyson, is the success of Apple as a hardware company. And it's certainly true that

people will pay for hardware. A book is a gift, an ebook not so much.

But is Apple really a hardware com pany in the sense that Dyson is championing, or is it a design

company? Its products don't say made in America, they say "Designed in California" and are

made in China. Apple employs 47,000 people in the US (mostly in stores) but 250,000 are

employed in China assembling its products. On the other hand Apple's success means indirect

jobs in the US. I ndependent estimates put these between 300,000 and 400,000. About 40-

percent of these are IOS developers, so this doesn't pertain to Dyson's argument that we must

focus on physical design. Even the Germans, who do make things, make a substantial portion of

their money making machine tools for China to make more things that are then not made in

places like Germany.

Design consists of the ideas that make things; it's not much different from software in that it

isn't tangible. By being a design rather than a manufacturing company, Apple is actually more

like a software company than a traditional manufacturing one.

2. Apple's design history.

OCT 17, 2012 2:24 PM 51,911 127

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[ I n 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 num bers. 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 w as under the hood mattered, however. By m igrating 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 w ere

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 m odernism (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 ]

3. Apple design today.

Apple's hardware is still best-of-breed. An iPhone is the best designed phone at any price, but in

terms of raw specification, products like the Samsung Galaxy SIII beat it in several respects.

Maybe Apple will produce a new groundbreaking device, such as the iPod or iPhone that has no

equivalent and gives it a huge lead again, but for now it looks like the touch screen phone is a

ubiquitous product w hich has many com petitors.

As the hardware standardizes, increasingly much of the value a dd in Apple hardware design is

software. From its beginnings, Apple chose the opposite path to I BM and Microsoft, making

both the operating system and the hardware. This allows it to integrate the two without

requiring inter-operable standards. I t also implies that where the hardware has to integrate with

the software (e.g. what's happened with default maps on a phone), the software is made by

Apple and often has to be better than people who specialize in whatever that thing is. This do

everything' approach is obviously a difficult and risky thing to pull off, but the potential payoff is

great. Software is important for Apple.

[ Apple Maps showed that even if you are the world's biggest company, its difficult to do

everything yourself ]

The 3 tiers of Apple software design

Apple's software design exists on three levels: the OS, the proprietary apps, and the

infrastructure that pulls together third party apps and content. At each level it must be w orld-
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beating, but increasingly, it is not best of breed, and products often show signs they have come

from the world before cloud computing.

Design Tier 1: the new OS that's more similar to system 7

IOS is a return stylistically to the pre-OSX days of an operating system that was focused on ease

of use at the expense of technological tinkering. You have to void the warranty to get access

under the hood, and the model of non-m ultitasking applications rather than browser based

software is in many ways a throwback to pre-web days. The difference between IOS and System

7 however, is that it works. The reliability of the Unix engine shows. At the same time, the both

OSX and IOS are more elegant than rival products. The IOS interface is controlled and well

designed in a w ay the Android simply isn't, from small details such as keyboard layouts and icon

designs, Apple's product is a qualitatively better.

[ Does your granny use vi? OSX brought back the command line access, while IOS went back

to one which didn't even multi-task ]

Design Tier 2: the apps

All of Apple's default applications, Safari, Mail, iPhoto, calendar, and utilities are not necessarily

best of breed. Is Mail better than G mail, Safari better than Chrome? Chrome is more fluid, has

some nice minimalist touches that it innovated before Apple (no separate search and url box)

but is architecturally similar.

Other apps such as the iPhoto are fundamentally different, however. They stem from designs in

a previous era where cloud computing did not exist and the belt and braces approach of local

syncing rather than caching was the norm. Nowhere is this more apparent than Spotify vs

iTunes: rent access to all the world's music in the cloud, streamed and cached locally, vs buyingand downloading music. G oogle's applications, on the other hand, were designed for cloud

computing from the start.

Apple still differentiates iPhone models based on storage capacity. A 64 GB iPhone costs $200

more than a 16GB one, for something that on Android involves buying a memory card for less

than half thatbut this differentiation becomes completely moot when you have access to
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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 w as 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 (w ood 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 w ay that is sure just to confuse people who may be unable to differentiate between buttons
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and content.

[ 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 w ood and leather in digital design is not skeuomorphism, but realism vsabstraction. If you try a nd 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
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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 w hat it is in its own right, not

what is is associated with. There should be noNaked 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 gam es

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 w as Jobs that w as the

principal arbiter of Apple taste and that where it w as lacking, he mustn't have been involved.

Just as people would whisper in the 90s that Wozniak w as the genius behind Apple as a tech

company, people now a ssume 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 wa s 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 I OS gam e 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 w ere 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.

[ Apple needs one of the above for software ]

Design Tier 3: Infrastructure.

There is a third level of design problem at Apple. It has to do with the platform. The product that

is the lynchpin of them all iTunes and the App Storeis a product w hich is a platform. In

some ways it's just as important as an operating system because it's the gateway to all of the

content and applications that help make Apple's hardware so vibrant. Unfortunately, it's one of

Apple's worst offerings.
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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]

4. Total control of the User Experience, Apple retail design.

So Apple is a design and retail company that designs and sells hardware. Of the 3 components to

a manufacturing business: design, build and sell, Apple does the stuff at both ends but not in the

middle, but where it takes most control is in selling. Most of its employees are involved in retail,

and the company focus is on supply chain, from design to fulfillment. Which is why the CEO

that Jobs chose to replace him, Tim Cook, has a background in supply chain management. But

even at the retail end, Apple is more about design than logistics.

Apple has redesigned the retail experience. Stores are not stores in the literal sense of being

warehouses of products; they are modernist gallery spaces for modernist products that are

displayed in a way that is more reminiscent of precious items in a museum that the aisles of a

supermarket.

[ 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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[ I f 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: I t wa s designed by Foster

himself.

[ Foster's Carre D'Art in Nimes is the inspiration for the glass stair Apple stores - source]

5. Apple's future design strategy.

Apple's uncompromising control is a mixed blessing. The software industry has operated for

many years by balancing open source with proprietary systems. Google is the principal

challenge to Apple here, from the Android Operating System to a suite of cloud based

applications such as G mail, Drive, and Maps. Google's approach is more open. As Twitter,

Facebook and LinkedIn exert increasing control over their social graphs, people forget that these

were built on invites via Gmail.

Apple has the edge on design excellence, the keyboard on IOS is just that bit better designed than

Android's which overall feels mess, but the biggest current advantage is vulnerable. Like

Microsoft's platform dominance in the late 80s there are far more applications on I OS than on

Android, and the App store is far better stocked than Google's equivalent, 'Play'. But you can't

help feeling that Apple's centralized control over the apps ecosystem lacks the richness of a

comm unity driven effort. The App store is Encyclopedia Britannica and it's vulnerable to a

Wikipedia.

The future for Apple is to increase the leverage of software vs hardware design advantage for the

devices that become difficult to differentiate from competitors such as Samsung. But a radical

option to the best way of doing this may come from what Apple are already indirectly doing and

Gillette made famous.
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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. You sign a two year contract w ith 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 netw ork 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 MVN Oit would

have a complete offering that would give it strategic leverage to do a good job where it is weak

(cloud) and w here 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.

38 discussions in response to David Galbraith

Reply

You are following optiplex991s comments

optiplex991and 13 more Reply 5 hours ago

" you'll see the equivalent ofthe price of a Porsche fly out the door every minute in little $500 brick sized

packages."

$500 Porsches anyone? Anyone?

You are following Cherokee_59s

comments

Cherokee_59and 19 more Reply 4 hours ago

The whole article is just stupid. Simply COMPARE

all Apple products with everything else on the market

and you will know how good it is. Three hours ago I

met a guy who asked me if I could show him where

the SETTINGS for the camera of his Samsang

Galaxy xy are ... that was one of the first times i held

one of these things in my hand. After dealing with it

for three minutes i knew (again) how well Apple

products are designed. And whenever i start my

office PC with W7 i feel like I am going back in time,

compared to OSX on my several Macbooks.

You are following KinglyCitruss comments

KinglyCitrus and 1 more Reply 3 hours ago

This guy has a lot of trouble making his points, but I think I agree with him, so I'll take a shot at clarifying what

I think he meant: Skeumorphism has a place in good design. Bad skeumorphism doesn't. People don't have

leather calendars, and they certainly don't have leather maps (Find My Friends). Also, skeumorphs that 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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13/14



The Real Meaning

and Future of

Apple 's Mantra:

Designed in

California

Giving the Elephant

a Pink Manicure: A

Night Out With

Mindy Meyer, the

Internet's Candidate

for Senate

Learn the Intimate

Details of Anyone's

Life Through the

Magical World o f

Their Trash

Deadspin NBA Shit

List: Anthony

Carter, The Quiet

Sinkhole Of Despair

Show all

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,

and even their beautiful thick book icon combine to create an emotional connection that makes you feel like

you're writing in a journal, notjust putting text into a word processor. More

You are following slaws comments

slawand 6 more Reply 5 hours ago

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-1and 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

LordFarquadand 3 more Reply 5 hours ago

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,

but publishing something that perpetuates the bullshitis as good as doing so.

You are following sunhawks comments

sunhawkand 4 more Reply 4 hours ago

"built by child slave labor in china" - apple

You are following Matthew VanAndels comments

Matthew VanAndeland 1 more Reply 4 hours ago

On the subject of skeumorphism, by and large I'm indifferent about Apple's use. On one hand, it helps you

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 it).

For instance, the Reminders app looks like a piece of trash someone bought at a 99c store and I don't want

that crap on my phone or anywhere else in my possession. I intentionally avoid that app because every time I

open it I feel like I'm using a cheap plastic-faux-leather piece of bargain store junk. More

You are following leimeisei10s

comments

leimeisei10and 1 more Reply 2 hours ago

This guy is an idiot. He doesn't make any arguments

for his points other than presenting them as "they must

be true, Apple's just simply better". 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 Applefanboy 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

ActionBlacksonand 4 more Reply 5 hours ago

How much are they paying you guys? This is embarrassing nuthuggery.
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14/14


A bou t Help Jobs Legal P r ivac y Permissions A dv er ti sin g Subscribe Send a t ip

Xbox Liv e Has Got A

Binder Full Of Awful

Debate Questions

The Unretouched

Images Victoria's

Secret Doesn't Want

Y ou to Se e

New evidence that

the Moon's explosive

bir th wa s weirde r

than we thought

Explore The Secret

Underside Of A

Modern Formula

One Car
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the real meaning and future of apple's mantra_ designed in california

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