Slashdot Mirror
Industrial Design Excellence Awards 2004
burgburgburg writes "The IDEA 2004 awards (Industrial Design Excellence Awards) have been announced. Apple won 2 Gold (for the iPod Mini and the G5), a Silver (for the iSight) and a Bronze (for the Apple Wireless Keyboard). Some comments: 'Like a modern touchstone the iPod Mini is a product people will love to hold. The designers skillfully integrated the satin aluminum case with flush controls and a simple touchpad interface to create a jewel-like piece of technology.' - Monty Montague, IDSA, Design Principal, BOLT. 'The G5 is impressive with visually lithe qualities and a host of thoughtful and innovative user features wrapped in aluminum. Its well-engineered technical features, such as its cooling system and internal component mounts, are honestly and elegantly executed. The G5's aesthetic is a pure and graceful expression of Apple's philosophical precept of leaving no detail un-designed. This is what results when engineering and design play nice with each other.' - Christopher Alviar, IDSA, Principal, CG/A"
This, of course, is not surprising news to most of us. What's confusing to me is the complete inability of other PC manufacturors to produce intelligently-designed computers. I mean, c'mon ... most PCs nowadays still require you to remove a handful of screws to get inside the case. And once you're inside, it doens't get any prettier. I have yet to see any other computer maker come close to Apple's design.
-- n
Is the Apple Wireless Keyboard a standards abiding Bluetooth device? Is there any reason I couldn't use one on a PC running Linux? I just wasn't sure that Apple had used the standard keyboard profile (or whatever it is called in the Bluetooth spec) or if they had 'improved' it in some way that would keep me from using it with another OS.
Going thew the site I have found some real good ones (Non Computer related) Like a Hammer I find it amazing that after millions of years of humans making hammers that they can still improve on it. It really gives me great faith in the advancement of science that we can improve anything for years to come. Also I found it odd that the best interface was for Mohawk Paper Mills While it is nice and all I didn't find the interface a wow that is so much more intuitive to use then any other site. But still I find it is nice that it won because I drive by the mill every day to get to work (With its huge smoke stacks billowing out tons of steam).
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well, the Apple-is-pretty (and Google-is-blessed, and SCO-is-evil) articles do serve one useful purpose: they remind us that the success of the personal computer and related techno-gizmos has brought powerful forces to bear on the nerdly world. It no longer matters how clean the code is; it matters how nifty the case is. It's no longer just enough to come up with a good idea; it must be marketed. And it's no longer as easy as creating something useful and sharing it with the world; now there are lawyers involved.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Since lots of design focused people may read this.
Build cell phones with the number pad at the top and the screen at the bottom. this makes using the keys on a small phone easy for western hands that are often bigger.
Charles Puffer
I love apple products. They're beautiful. And I'm just hoping I won't get modded down for what I'm about to say, given that this is the apple section.
However, of all the things there, I really think this one is the coolest. I want one of those!
And there's a cameo appearance by apple as well.
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
Actually the X Serve won it last year.
"Last year the company nabbed two Gold IDEAs (for its 12- and 17-inch PowerBooks) and one Silver (for its Xserve), while in 2002 it won five total: four Gold for its retail Apple Stores, its Macworld Conference & Expo San Francisco presence, its flat-panel iMac and its iPod; and one Silver for its revamped iBook."
Servers and rackmount cases are included - there's just a lot of lackluster design on these fronts.
Sun and SGI used to win IKEA awards for their servers and their blades.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I just got a G5 this week (my first Mac in years since a 6100) and I was blown away when I took it out of the box. I can't remember when I last saw a piece of computer hardware that made me just want to inspect its every nook and cranny. The CPU is such a beautiful example of form, function and fit. Simply gorgeous. Now if Apple would only rethink their keyboard and mouse designs - mine immediately went back in the box to be replaced w/ Logitech wireless hardware.
As for OS X - lots of good human factors engineering at work there as well. There are a few aspects of window management that I dearly miss from my Linux boxen though like middle mouse button paste and the window-embedded menu bars. The latter is a real pain on multi-display machines that force you to mouse to the other end of the desktop just to access a non-hotkeyed menu option. I've gotta spend some time surfing, because I have to believe someone's made a hack for the middle mouse button paste at the very least.
How, exactly, is shockwave "basic and simple?"
I would think that straight HTML would be the simplest (barring plain text, of course) - throw in some CSS and you could make a very nice site, *without* requiring a plugin of a modern, standards-compliant browser.
On a related note, is it my imaginaton, or is the purpose of the IDSA pretty much just to stroke the egos of of artists and the corporations that have hired them?
--- We are not in the 8th dimension. We are over New Jersey.
Have you seen the Creative Labs Zen Touch? It looks so similar to the iPod and also has a touch-sensitive scrolling interface navigation method. Even the screen looks nearly identical. It seems Creative Labs has done just what you said.
Yeah, yeah, I know the rules, but the moderation of the parent is pathetic. A hell of a lot of people do agree - we are sick of Apple stories, especially those as tenuously about Apple as this one. Yet it is moderator-censored into oblivion before the thought crimes can be seen by the children.
Criticising Apple is not a 'troll.' Criticising those who blindly love and follow Apple is not a 'troll.'
On the other hand, rampantly posting any piece of crap story that has the word Apple in it is a form of meta-trolling that pisses a lot of people off. Coming soon on slashdot... farmers predict 5% rise in apple harvest... Steve Jobs reported to be pleased.
OTOH, Apple tries to include the basics. This is not always possible, even at the higher price point. However, as you say, you almost never have to add a board to get basic connectivity. I was reminded of this recently when someone asked me if I my Mac was easy to network. This reminded me that Macs were always easy to network. Perhaps it was not a fast network. Perhaps in was not a widely compatible network. But everything was there for plug and play.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
... Like a modern touchstone the iPod Mini is a product people will love to hold ...
The reason for this is simple: iPod is pure Bar of Soap.
The "Bar of Soap" design methodology simply states: the most initimate 'implement' most people use these days, is the bar of soap. A bar of soap goes where no other implement goes. It is held and used in loving trust.
Design any consumer device to match the parameters of a bar of soap, and it will be loved...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
yone can blurt out a hundred of reasons why you may need the extra bays and slots. But the truth is that most people won't use them. External USB and Firewire devices are getting more affordable and closer to the prices of internal equipment (unlike 10 years ago where where was a huge difference) PCI slots are no longer as important as they were before especially with integrated Modems, Sound, Ethernet, and Video (Well Video is rarely pci based anymore) There isn't much need anymore for PCI like they use to. With USB memory sticks becoming very affordable with a large sizes (a 512k stick $80) There is not much of a need for extra 5.25 bays for extra Optical Drives for most uses.
/. saying that that was a step backwards, although it raised a few eyebrows at the time
I have to agree. Apple does remove things when they aren't needed. They got rid of the floppy drive.
I don't hear anyone on
Same goes for PCI slots. The bandwidth of Firewire (more than USB 2.0, which is a bit of a hack) plus its expandability in the future to 800 and 1600 MB/s means that most users don't need the speed of a PCI slot.
Note that they have done much the same on their iBooks and PowerBooks - Go find a PC card slot on them - because firewire and USB2.0 provide sufficient bandwidth to replace the PC card slot need. Plus all the above comments about integrated sound/video/ethernet/modem and so on.
The need for these older technologies just isn't there anymore.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Ooh, you must be a "web designer". It means the flashy stuff isn't text, so it can't be indexed and searched.
Ooo, you must be a "prick". There was once a time when PDF documents on the web could not be searched. Go write a utility to extract text out of flash, and there ya go. You can then find flash animations containing the squiggly lines you so desire.
>What would Apple be without the "elegant" design of the hardware?
They would be in the same boat that they are now... a competitively priced computer that has more functionality than the competition.. but without an attractive case.
>To me it would be an overpriced computer system...
I'm curious hy you would say that considering the fact that a Mac is typically the same price (sometimes less) than a comperably equipped PC. PCs allow you to buy less and therefore pay less, but that does not make them less expensive... but rather, more configurable.
>You really have to think hard.... is ease of use worth sacrificing features
No. Thankfully, buying a Mac doesn't require that you sacrifice features.
>(is full screen view in the free Quicktime player YET?
No, and yet there are many players that can play full screen mode. It's not as if Macs can only play one file format with one player.
>and... 2 mouse buttons anyone???)
Curious, why don't you offer the same conclusion for PC manufacturers? They can use a one button mnouse two... much in the same way that a Mac can use multi-button mice.
>and software availability (Linux & Windows--- Max Payne & Photoshop on the same computer.. imagine that).
Same goes for a Macintosh.
>Why pay $500-$1000 more for a computer and get less...
I don't know. Thankfully, you don't get less when you buy a Mac. You will pay more because you get more. A PC equipped with the same specs will cost you the same ammount. You can buy less and therefore pay less when buying a PC, but that does not make it less expensive... but rather, more configurable.
>Maybe once the Mac easy and simple world merges with the PC do everything cheaply world then I will be sold...
It is nad has been for quite some time. It appears to me that you simply have been stuck in the same rut for so long that you don't even see yourself considering a Mac.
>but right now Apple MACs are just pretty boxes to me.
It really is too bad you dont see it for 99% of all the other advantages it has.
>I hope this doesn't sound too anti-Apple
No. I think you're just ignorant.
They've never offered a bargain-basement computer because they want their brand to be associated with quality hardware. While sometimes their products suffer defects, in general I have found their hardware to be far above the industry average in longevity and ease of use.
According to your comment, the G5 has speed you might have to pay half as much to get in a PC. This is one of those price comparisons that is of course impossible to refute. Sure, there's a PC out there that runs as fast as a G5 and costs half as much. But the problem with such comparisons is that you can use whatever PC you want to represent the price point. Are all PCs truly created equal? Of course not. If you want to compare price based solely on processor speed, you're simply ruling out all of the other factors that go into selecting a computer.
For example, you take Apple to task because you don't want to buy and eMac or iMac, and you want something that the PC world provides in abundance - a box that lets me mix & match to get the features I want at a reasonable price. You're comparing the entire PC market against one company. Does Dell offer every single variation you'd like? Does Gateway? Does HP?
You also mention that Macs really are far more hassle-free.. I assume you're referring to the operating system. So even the top-end PCs suffer from more hassles. How do those hassles translate in terms of overall cost? That's tough to estimate, but consider that Mac users have truly insignificant security and malware problems when compared to Windows users.
Your comment about Jobs being overly concerned about the G5's noise is a bit odd. If he hadn't insisted on making a nice quiet new G5, would you have gotten on him for not fixing it? Apple doesn't always succeed in making the best overall user experience, but it's truly at the core of how they see themselves in the market. Of course they're going to try hard to make a quieter machine.
It seems to me that you're frustrated most of all with Apple's philosophy. Apple doesn't want to make low-cost, commodity boxes, because they know that in the long run that's an extremely dangerous game. Look at all of the "cheapest" PC companies that have come and gone over the years. Macs will never dominate the computer market, but Apple has never been in better shape and is continuing to innovate and expand into new markets. Just look at their forays into digital hub software, niche professional software, online music retailing, portable music players, server systems, and supercomputer projects.
They are very much a design-driven company. To them, and to a lot of their customers, a computer isn't just a tool. This is in Apple's DNA, just like sacrificing all to achieve marketshare is in Microsoft's DNA.
If you're willing to pay a bit less in order to get the PC configuration you want, you're forgoing ease of use, hardware longevity, far fewer malware and security problems, an extremely stable OS, all of the iApps, peripheral ease of use, and better overall design. That's your choice. But don't blame Apple because you can't get all of the benefits of a Mac at the super low-low price of $299. R&D costs money, and the bargain-basement PC vendor isn't spending any money on R&D or design.
I'm not an elist stuck on myself artist, and I'm not a designer. But I really prefer using a machine that works for me instead of against me and saves me time and money over the long haul.
As for Apple dying inside a decade, just remember what these other fine prognosticators said in their day:
"Stick a fork in 'em - this Apple is cooked."
Robert Thomson, Financial Post, 2/20/2003
"The iPod, with its backward-looking feature set and dramatica
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Yes Apple has historically been unusually aesthetically-focussed for an IT company. But it seems to me that the partial switch to becoming a free software company has allowed them to concentrate more on their core business: cool devices. At the very least their tentative embrace of free software has not cost them anything; and arguably they have better software to run on their award-winning (and staggeringly popular and profitiable) hardware than if they developed a wholly proprietary OS in-house.
Hopefully they will soon see they have nothing to lose by freeing the rest of their proprietary code.
It may be too much to hope that a competitor of Apple's, whose name I dare not breathe in polite company, will abandon their losing battle against software freedom and follow Apple's lead. I don't see that happening anytime soon. I'm just glad I don't have a vested interest in the future of that company, because it may not have one for much longer.