“The first Macintosh. The titanium PowerBook. The iMac. The iPod. It’s easy to think of Apple’s major design triumphs. They’ve shifted our conceptions of how a computer should look and feel, and changed the way we interact with technology — and listen to music and connect with friends. Some innovations are small — like the trash icon or the placement of a trackpad. Apple makes wildly imaginative products with a consistency few companies rival,” Burt Helm reports for BusinessWeek.
“Of course, look beyond stunning breakthroughs, and you’ll see some equally dramatic flops: The Lisa, Apple’s first crack at an easy, user-friendly personal computer, tanked with its $10,000 price tag. Or the Newton, the first handheld, which debuted in 1993 and fell out of production in 1999,” Helm reports.
MacDailyNews Take: The Newton MessagePad 2100 is still the best PDA ever made.
Helm continues, “‘Idealism is a major part of Apple,’ says Andy Hertzfeld, an original Macintosh team member. ‘The company operates for artistic values rather than for commercial purposes.’ Apple’s products always start first as design vision — and then tackle its feasibility. As a result, sometimes the challenges can seem impossible. After the design is worked out, says Jory Bell, a designer who worked on several iterations of the PowerBook notebook computer series, ‘then you sign it off with Steve [Jobs]. Only after that is there negotiation over whether the laws of physics will actually allow [that vision] to happen.'”
Full article here.
BusinessWeek’s slideshow of several former Apple designers and engineers and their work here.
Related articles:
Steve Jobs and Apple Computer designer Jonathan Ive take home coveted D&AD design awards – May 26, 2005
Jonathan Ive: at Apple ‘we make money to support our desire to make nice things’ – October 29, 2004
Fast Company: Apple Computer’s Jonathan Ive ‘Master of Design’ – June 04, 2004
iMac, iPod designer Jonathan Ive named ‘most influential person on British culture’ – February 12, 2004
Did Jonathan Ive ‘almost single-handedly’ save Apple? – September 19, 2003
What happens when Steve Jobs dies? – August 20, 2003
I love my Macs. They always make my PC using clients go ‘oooh’ and ‘aaahh,’ especially when they see that 30 inch Apple display.
Great industrial design is half to two thirds of what makes Apple products great. The rest is the OS X.
I wouldn’t have anything else.
Don’t knock the Newton!!
It may have been big, relitive to today’s standards, but it was way ahead of it’s time.
The biggest problem with the Newton was that it was ahead of it’s time. Consumers at the time were not ready to use PDAs.
By the way the new iPod phone will be white and silver like the ipod and not the black one that we have been fed in pictures
I assume that the remarks about “design vision” coming first refer to a functional design (read: goals, like “my powerbook idea will allow more comfortable typing by setting the keyboard back,”) and not a visual aesthetic design (“the new powerbook should have the keyboard set back, so the front will be more bleakly industrial-looking.”)
Otherwise, I have to give (even more) mad props to the engineers for having to squeeze their good stuff into purely artistic edicts like, “it has to be semispherical.” *That* is no way to run a business.
The Newton reloaded:
Yes, Death to Microsoft, Death to the Pocket PC & Death to Palm.
So, P.C. Apologist, what exactly are you doing that is contributing to the industry?
Cloudwall –
The computer hardware industry? I invest cash. How’s that relevant?
Boy, I sure am glad that PC Apologist is here to tell us (and Steve Jobs) the proper way to run a business. Steve really needs your help. </SARCASM>
I hate all computers. But since I have to have one to but food on the table, I prefer Macs as the lesser of the other evils. I also hate iPODS (i.e., music)but own one. I hate sex too. I now limit each to three times a week.
*grrr*
when will they finally stop saying LISA was a flop. Oh, its businessweek, sure they only look at the numbers sold.
Look deeper, moron. Theres much more in this box than someone like you can understand.
Oh Burts Hell forgot that worst computer ever, this.. Next thing steve tried, which was even more expensive and even less usable. Sure.
Conceptually, the Newton 2100 in fact is one of the best, still. if not the best.
Jimbo –
I was pointing out that the remarks quoted were probably misleading, suggesting that visual aesthetic came before function. That’s either *not* the case (most likely), of if it is, then Apple is crippling its potential severely.
I take it you disagree? Do you think the road to the most reliable and efficient hardware runs through the visual design decision first? You think someone draws & inks a picture, gets it approved, and THEN the work starts on what it’s supposed to do?
The newton was, is and will be the biggest (smallest) boat anchor ever released by Apple. (Besides its entire Mac lineup.)
The personal/home computer…digital landscape, call it what you will.
Everything worth porting to the digital world will eventually show up.
Apple knows this by virtue of the thier method of making consumer
designs that are worth paying for, which keeps them in business.
This is not something new, but Apple got it and used it for the
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”confused” style=”border:0;” />
personal/home computer. Do these Apple’s want to network? They
are, like the birds and the bees.
CT =======]————- Beautiful losers
Of course Lisa was a flop. We could only listen to her semi-coherent anti-Intel rantings for so long before telling her to STFU and go away. She hasn’t been seen in quite awhile.
Oh, they were talking about the COMPUTER! Never mind…
Im surprised they didn’t mention the Cube. A great great system that couldn’t find a large audience. The one it did find is forever in love with it.
Thank you, hammer.
I love my Cube (with 17″ Crystal Display). I produced 15 monthly issues of a glossy tech magazine out of downtown L.A. on that machine — layout, photo color correction and editing, illustration and more. It was a total workhorse, and when the magazine when down (on the heels of the dot.com bust), I bought it cheap from the company.
I love it to this day. The Classis OS has never corrupted, all the original software is still intact, and I’ve never had any kind of hardware failure — not even the PRAM battery (yet).
I’m also running Panther on it. Truly an underrated machine.