Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs' Yacht Revealed
schwit1 writes "Venus, the incredible luxury yacht Steve Jobs had been designing up until his death a little over a year ago, seems to have made its first appearance as a finished product in the city of Aalsmeer in the Netherlands. Unsurprisingly, its design is breathtaking. Reportedly designed in a joint effort between Jobs himself and Philippe Starck, the stunning ship first showed up on the blog One More Thing, which posted some stills as well as a few other details. The ship is about 230 to 260 feet long, for instance, and made entirely of aluminum, which makes it particularly light. And if you had any doubt this is Steve Jobs' yacht, there are seven 27-inch iMacs in the wheelhouse. According to One More Thing's sources, the Jobs family will be present for the yacht's christening ceremony proper, thought it's unknown whether or not they intend to use it, or what its ultimate fate may be. Regardless of what may happen to her, she sure is a beauty. It's certainly a shame Steve Jobs never got the chance to see her finished."
I don't know, it looks more like an iSore to me.
fist post
For those of you who wish to save bandwidth and not seek out a picture:
Imagine USS Seal and Merrimack having a love child.
Imagine a hurricane depositing a pagoda on top.
But not as pretty.
What an ugly monstrosity. Well, we know Steve was a minimalist. Look at the pictures of the bridge. No buttons!
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
I seem to recall that ocean air is fairly corrosive. I realize whomever buys this will have a lot of money, but I'd guess those iMacs would have be replaced fairly frequently, and possibly prone to failure while at sea.
they are usually well designed. this is not.
Jobs must not have been a nautical guy, must not have immersed himself in any of the vast Age of Nelsen (tall ships) literature. That looks like something Hunter Yachts (a builder of cabin cruisers for the masses) would've come up with if they were asked to scale to 200-plus feet.
Samsung's CEO's new yacht. I hear they'll be debuting it next year.
I wonder what it is up to...
Let's hope it doesn't use Apple Maps to navigate!
Jobs was such a parasitic being...
That is the ugliest seagoing thing I have ever seen. Job's design taste obviously didn't come from Jobs himself. He should've had his designers build models (for him to poop on) until he found one that was sleek and attractive.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
If this were Romney, a riot would break out here.
But it's Steve Jobs and Apple, so he'll get a pass.
I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder because that is one ugly boat IMHO.
Its incredibly over priced especially considering you can spend less and get a better product from other places, it has that modern kind of generic overly ugly sleek look to it, people (specifically the post on this site) talk about it for absolutely no reason other than to be noticed by others for talking about it, and a family is going to check it out but will probablly never do anything with it. Yup, thats an apple product allright.
Regardless of what may happen to her, she sure is a beauty.
Just out of curiosity, am I the only person in the world who gets creeped out when they hear others referring to a boat as a "she"?
so join us here each second my friends your sure to get more apple .......
Agreed, first thing I thought, as well.
Kind of Frank Lloyd Wrightesque... not my impression of a ship for rough seas.
... with all the profit from all the overpriced iDevices.
I vaguely recall that ocean air is fairly corrosive to electronics. Would they really use iMacs in a situation where they'd possibly have to be replaced frequently and possibly fail at sea? I realize the buyer will have lots of money, but it seems foolish.
I remember once saying that Jobs had 'set the course, he just hadn't sailed the journey yet', and the next decade he turned Apple from a near bankrupt company to the main player in several new industries.
Fitting that he should buy a large yacht to relax in. Pity he never got to relax.
Goodbye Steve.
Looks like the Jobs reality distortion effect persists after death!
Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
And if you had any doubt this is Steve Jobs' yacht, there are seven 27-inch iMacs in the wheelhouse.
Why yes I do. I doubt any egocentric billionaire could afford one of those $1800 27-inch iMacs, much less seven of them. Good lord, such opulence!
I would have thought that the 'Jobs Family' would have been able to afford something more than an ipod shuffle than the shipbuilders of Steve's dream yacht. But then again, that would be a dividend, wouldn't it.
Cheapos when it comes to the common rank-file, just like the old man, I guess.
I wonder how much it cost in units of overtime hours of suicidal underpaid Foxconn slaves.
This is a yacht!
http://diamondsyacht.com/
Sigs are for losers
At least it's not a rectangle with rounded corners, then he'd have to pay royalties to a certain company.
Ugly! Ugly! Ugly!
From the looks of it, I assume that Jonathan Ive was NOT involved in the design.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Until the iYacht 2 comes out next year...
Big panels of vertical glass. What happens when one of them takes a good sized wave?
Have gnu, will travel.
Bunch of childish, infantile remarks from jealous basement dwellers. I'd tell you guys that you should be ashamed of yourselves but that assumes you're worth anything. Assholes.
and major parts are bolted in so when they fail you need to replace the full boat.
I expected more flowing lines not something so... blocky. To each his own, I suppose. I still wouldn't turn it down if someone offered it to me, of course :-). I love boats, and something like that would be fantastic. Not that I could afford even the slip fees, much less to start the engines.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
From the side view of the boat, the first thing to strike me was the poor layout of dimensions for visual appeal. Don't the know about the golden ratio in the boat-building world? It would have been an easy fix if he wanted a beautiful boat to apply a few basic rules such as that one.
No sails. Less space than an aircraft carrier. Lame.
Minimalist?
I barely want it to float. I've seen many beautiful ships. There is nothing on that that has any grace to it.
Looks like what happens when you combine an airstream trailer and an aircraft carrier.
Sleek and mirrory with floor to ceiling windows... until you see the wheelhouse. Seriously, WTF?!
It looks like Steve Jobs took the designs of the black ship that Zaphod Beeblebrox stole from the restaurant at the end of the universe, built it in white, then jammed a old corrugated iron shack on the top for a wheelhouse!
I'd have thought a Buddhist would strive to be unencumbered by such monuments to worldly wealth.
But then, I might not be well enough informed.
How is it a shame that a cruel, lying, megalomaniac who disavowed his daughter's existence for nearly 20 years didn't get to out on his yacht?
I have never seen a boat/yacht/ship more ugly than this thing...
I hate to be a nit-picker, but are those iMac monitors daylight readable?
Have gnu, will travel.
Damn, what a horrid yacht. It looks like a 1920s steam ferry.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The combination of aluminum and seamless glass walls makes it look like a floating Apple store... With an iPad on top and an iPad mini on top of that (because Steve always needed one more thing). On one of the of the iPad-like floors there's a black spot about where the headphone jack would be, except it's on the wrong side.
Perhaps the 7 iMacs are for navigation and control -- clustered to run a custom version of Siri without a connection to the data center. This way he could steer the thing, ask for the weather report and open the glass bay doors using only voice commands.
Steve: "Siri, open the iPod bay doors."
Siri: "Insanely great. It's been a long time. Can you explain the removal of your user account on October 5th, 2011?"
As much as I dislike Apple, the company, they do have some smart looking gadgets. And they owe a lot of that to Steven Jobs, I'm sure. But that thing looks like the Staten Island Ferry. A nice one, but a ferry none the less.
I just went to Google, typed in yachts and hit image. There were some truly beautiful boats; sail and powered. Steve Jobs was NO boat designer.
It even has the shield domes.
....the first floating Apple Store.
It's a nice-looking yacht, to say the least, but it just doesn't offer the kind of functionality you'd expect in a full-fledged modern yacht, especially one for the yachting enthusiast. Really, it's like a large-scale Fischer-Price yacht, to tell the truth.
So incredibly funny that the family gave the ship builders ipod shuffles with thank you notes written in all-caps comic sans for building the thing. Everything in the article details it as incredibly well designed, sleek, and minimalist for the king of design... and then they give that note.. words cannot express how ironic and hilarious that is. And seriously... a shuffle? That looks like a > $100 million yacht.. they couldn't spring for normal ipods?
Btw.. the pic of the note is in the linked article.
That the bridge has a 13 foot wide white surface with one silver coloured ball in the middle of it .. and no other instrumentation :)
I guess Samsung must own the patents on round-corners on a ship? Good luck selling that monstrosity. I don't think I've ever seen an ugly luxury yacht before. Consider this another pioneering achievement by Jobs. Blech!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
It has no sails.
Even if I had all the money in the world, I wouldn't buy that boat. Instead, I'd hire people to figure out how one man can have "all the money in the world."
Does it run iOS?
Nothing in that article was revealing. Sure, it looks like a yacht Steve Jobs designed, but the only thing about the inside we're told is that it is using iMacs for the main navigation control screens. They don't even list what kind of rooms it has inside.
That flat blocky thing doesn't look like a seaworthy ship it looks like an overpriced houseboat, perfect for mooring in the San Francisco Bay, or, perhaps, the Mediterranean. It seems like another example of Steve Jobs letting aesthetics (ugly aesthetics, in this case) take precedence over function.
Starck is the very embodiment of style over substance. His products often look kinda striking or eye-catching, but they function incredibly poorly. The man is a charlatan who threw out the first rule of design: form follows function. A great artist might just about be able to get away with that, but the only person who puts Starck in that category is Starck.
He's no genius, just an egomaniac with the ability to fool a surprising number of people at least some of the time.
I wouldn't be surprised if this thing is sunk in the first rough seas it encounters, if its design is anything like as poor as his laughable lemon squeezer.
Can someone knowledgeable about boats and yachts tell me if it that is a good design for a yacht? I only know what I see on TV/movies/web/Bay area, so while I don't consider it as aesthetically pleasing as others I've seen (okay, I find in almost ugly), I would like to know if there is some sort of functional/minimalistic reason why that is a great boat (I don't "understand" most modern art either, so I'm curious if this is something along those lines that a trained designer might appreciate).
It looks like utter shit.
So they gave each worker an iPod shuffle. Reminds me of the time I gave a beggar 50 cents. He threw it right back at me.
Took me a second to understand why .. 50 cents was enough for me to feel good about myself but not enough to make a real difference.
Btw, that yacht looks ugly .. i was expecting something that looks like a spaceship..
"Regardless of what may happen to her, she sure is a beauty."
No she isn't, she's hideous - a barge with a couple of boxes and some cardboard on top. Worse yet, with that straight bow and huge expanses of glass in the forepeak... she's not designed to keep the sea either. (And what kind of moron puts passenger spaces in the fo'c'sle anyhow? Other than a bunk slung between the mains, that's the worst part of the ship.)
She's obviously designed for nothing more than staying in calm waters or moored to impress the impressionable - an as a sailor, I say that's a abomination.
but I always thought the Astoria perfectly reflects Gilmours more laid back persona.
Also, corners not rounded.
Too bad it needs a proprietary port
Yeah it looks positively beautiful. When compared with a pile of steaming dog shit smeared into your living room carpet.
The iboat touches you!
Speaking of some stupid shit about Steve Jobs...whats the deal with the dumb animated gif slashdot titles? Or flash or whatever it is
It looks ugly, it does not look like a seafaring vessel, but I may be mistaken. Ugly lines
Doesn't it look like a bigger version of this other boat?
http://www.superyachttimes.com/yachts/details/2542/
Contrary to what almost everyone else here thinks, I think it's a striking, beautiful design. And no, I'm not an Apple fanboi, I haven't owned a single Apple product in my life and I'm not particularly interested in them. But I can appreciate the design, or should I say architecture, of this yacht.
Try as I might with these poor images, I can find only one hull. So many elegant multihull designs in recent decades and he has chosen a barge. It's not just speed that he's sacrificed, it's comfort, safety, fuel efficiency, ability to approach shallow water and, as so many have noticed, class.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Aren't various warships using aluminum hulls? Perhaps there is a better alloy?
Russians like to refer to a boat or ship as "he"
Does that make you feel better?
lol
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh, that won't be a problem here. That thing has no style.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I don't believe any one person deserves to be that rich.
its disgusting and the disparity is just too great, these days.
sorry, but its just disgusting. and I'm not at all referring to the stupid boat.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Dude, come on, just look!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
is it already april first?
Like most Apple iproducts the ibox it came in looks OK. When are they going to take the iyacht out of the box?
looks like a pagoda on the water. the last great piece of trash from steve?
It's the Nautilus from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, sleek, blade like.
Beautiful.
Apple & Jobs haters aside, that's stunning.
That ship shows Jobs' true design ability. The Apple products show the designer's ability, for which Jobs took credit.
This from someone still living in his mom's basement.
I guess the same can be said about you. You're just sorta ugly. But, maybe you'll find some gal in a bar whose beer goggles are so thick they'll hide your ugliness and you'll get laid. Some day. Maybe.
I can safely state that boat design is an ancient craft. Most stuff is already though of. There's no pioneering going in in that department. No easy, "minimalistic" tricks you can pull off like in designing note books or tablets. You have to stick to the designing but like a blood hound. Get inspiration, try out dozens of variations, chuck out most of them and repeating the process until perfection is nearly obtained. That clearly never happened here. Improving boat design requires much more dedication and hard work than, say, improving the design of the IBM ThinkPad.
It seems that the modern hull is a wedge with a nearly flat bottom. Exactly like the images we see from the Venus. The structure performs well but is extremely dull. The structure on top of the hull is a testimony of poor imagination. The proportions just don't seem to match. Was the golden ratio respected at all?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I'm willing to concede that the iPhone's "design" has some grace to it, but this ship is just plain ugly. Some genius...
It's a giant floating Apple store. Very creative...
That thing is ugly, I would have thought he would have had a super sleek power yacht, not some 1930's throwback looking thing,
...out of Lego.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
In bikeforums.net, there is a thread called "Jackass bikes", where people post pics of bicycles put together in the least practical and at the same time most aesthetically misguided ways. These bikes usually sport expensive components, some costing thousands of $s.
Well, this boat belongs to that thread. Expensive, impractical for the stated purpose and ugly.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
If they pay 900$ for a smartphone, how much is it? I guess 500 billions. Just for its (ugly) design.
Now I like Apple stuff, I like the aesthetics of Apple stuff but...
my god is this boat ugly. It looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright designed house that floats, and Frank Lloyd Wright designed some of the most hideous buildings in the world.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Apart from the sheet glass, it looks more like a 19th Century river gunboat.
HMS PETEREL - Peterel-class River Gunboat
Well, that's what being wealthy will get you. An idle doodle in the corner of a notepad turned into horrid reality. I should imagine the builders just said "Yes, ok Steve", took the money and ran with it.
If there is anything which is an aesthetic offence on the water, it is the Eurostyle powerboat. By the 1930s, with the exception of some aspects of underwater design, pretty much everything was known about how to design a power boat. My wife's grandfather was an officer on the Cutty Sark, which was an early 20th century sailing ship, and already they had composite construction and remarkably good performance. The use of alumin(i)um post WW2 has made quite a difference to boat design, but not always for the better (it doesn't lend itself to the same fair curves as plank construction). So "Throwback to the 30's"? Hardly. It looks more like a post-WW2 German river cruiser.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Why naturally they'll prop up Steves refrigerated remains on it and give him a viking's burial.
It's official: Steve Jobs had an unhealthy obsession with aluminum. And glass.
I prefer this. I expected something like this. 3 turbine engines. Not that ugly thing above.
I have never seen a yacht that ugly in my live. It is breathtaking. True. But in the opposite direction. We should paint on it "Sink different!"
It ain't just Steve Jobs/Apple, had the PC become owned by IBM, Atari, Commodore and god knows who else (japan had its own eco-structure and it becomes more and more obvious as the world gets smaller that back then every country had their own home computer brand), IT would have looked very different. ALL those companies were about owning the entire market, from the computers themselves (go buy a Commodore from Compaq) to the storage media, the joysticks EVERYTHING.
It is thanks to Compaq, MS and Intel (and the "failures" of the rest) that we got this accidentally remarkably open platform. Apple sold expensive PC's, thanks to Compaq creation of the IBM-compatible, we got cheap PC's and thanks to those who cloned Compaq's we got EVEN cheaper PC's. Some might point out the Apple Mini but Apple would NEVER have produced that IF they didn't have to because of cheap PC's. Proof? Apple didn't produce them when there weren't any cheap PC's. That is why Apple almost went bust the first time around.
Thanks to MS we got an OS that would work ACROSS cpu's... yes i know AMD and Intel both made X86 but if you think that makes them automatically fully compatible in all but their most base modes, you are a silly person. And this gave buyers, a CHOICE. Apple/Atari/IBM never gave you a choice. You buy what they choose to sell you. Intel thought 33mhz was enough for the 386(if I remember correctly) and AMD made a 40mhz version and people could choose. Could choose NOT to buy IBM or Dell or Compaq and roll their own.
It all happened by accident and thank god for it, wintel was/isn;t perfect but we narrowly avoided situations that would have been far far worse.
But that doesn't mean we are saved. The openess and freedom of the PC and internet might have come around by accident but that doesn't mean it can change.
Bootcamp, was that introduced because Apple wanted you to be able to use the OS of your choice or because they knew that if people couldn't run Windows on a Mac, they would sell fewer Mac's? I seen an amazing amount of Macbooks with the Aero design on the desktop.
Closed architectures are not just limited to niche attempts like Linux. If a mono-culture exists, control becomes easy. The US is rather famous for NOT having state censorship for TV such as England has. Instead, the TV broadcasters "choose" to censor themselves and no politician has to stand up and say"I want to limit free speech" but can "think of the children" thanks to self-censorship.
There have been countless stories of mega-stores in the US censoring products. Walmart censoring music CD's, App store refusing to carry apps. This doesn't matter, as long as a free alternative exist, the internet in general. But as AOL has shown and MS network and countless other attempts, there is a constant push to create walled gardens. And a walled garden isn't that bad, as long as you can get out with relative ease but nobody builds a walled garden with the idea that people should be able to get out easily.
When mega-stores are the only places to shop, their control becomes extremely risky to a free society. And with the app-store, Apple and Steve Jobs have given everyone who values real freedom a frightening look at how IT could have turned out if Jobs had sold cheaper PC's.
Jobs has the most depressing eulogy you could think off: "Thank god the man was a failure at the most critical time". And we can only pray that it remains true because if the app-store walled garden approach succeeds in W8 new app-store, the PC environment as we know it, is doomed.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Without knowing more about the vessel, if that is not too rich a word, I'd say that this is a perfect demonstration of why designers are not meant to be engineers. It's like some of these buildings that went up after the 60s, which won awards for their 'bold architecture' and 'innovative design', but which turned out to be instant slum, because they were not really made to be lived in.
In Britain this would be called a "gin palace", designed to be shown off in the harbours of Monaco and the south of France but rarely taken to sea except by ship delivery companies.
Reminiscent of Jabba the Hutt's barge from ROTJ. "Bring me Solo and the Wookiee. They will all suffer for this outrage", LOL
The roofs look like giant iPads
Perhaps some other ship builder besides the one he used already had a patent on a ship with all rounded edges and corners? Of course then it would just be a big white dil...... ahhh now I understand, he was making a self portrait. It also looks like it would go down pretty quick too, here's hoping.
Looks like someone chopped off the back 3rd of the USS Maine.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I'm no apple fanboi, but I was shocked to see how ugly that boat is.
I heard the engine room is welded shut, you know, to make it thinner, so if the starting battery needs replacement you have to buy a whole new boat.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I scaled that side shot in AutoCAD to make the man 72 inches tall, and came out with 253 feet for the length of the boat.
It is a fitting epitaph for the man.
I find the lack of faith in this story... disturbing.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
...this was funded by all those iPads and iMacs and iPhones I saw at the OWS protests.
Ah, delicious irony.
-Styopa
I don't know. But it's surely in the running for that label.
Want to see a breathtaking and beautiful yacht...
The Maltese Falcon
http://yachtpals.com/maltese-falcon-7053
There are not many modern vessels that can rival her lines, grace and sleekness. And she boats the most advanced sail system ever.
Yacht? Looks more like a junk to me.
I personally think it looks horrible, it's a big triangle, it looks like a mac book case and overall it bulky and retro styled in a bad way. I would of expected to see something like this in an old star trek episode as a "future yacht", I would never of thought that anyone would build a massive yacht and make this ugly on purpose.
Does it use Apple Maps? Because it's likely already a wreck if so...
Lots of Chinese workers got paid very little so that he could have that.
Jobs was a selfish bastard.
I'm sick of trying to be part of the solution. I'm going to become part of the problem.
I'm going to get me a Hummer- not the newer, tiny ones, one of the big old ones, and have it converted to burn a mixture of rubber from tires, motor oil, and coal. I wanna leave a trail of thick, black smoke everywhere I go.
That is one of the ugliest pieces of Modernism I have ever seen.
Will these be available from the App store?
I'm looking forward to seeing this appear in a James Bond movie.
Certainly I want to celebrate Steve Jobs as a creative influence in technology and our society. But please! Lets have a sane tax policy to stop this ridiculous billionaire penis size contest and get back to a philanthropic model where humans are more interested in helping .....say....humans then building ugly yachts that only 6 people will ever sail on.
Would that be the 'Philippe Starck' who turned the Eurostar lounges into barbers' salons? All aboard for the Skylark, Starck!
They will end up converting it into an offshore iMac shop and parking it next to the Queen Mary.. mark my words..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
UGLY!
I don't know, this makes the Jobs family look like the biggest group of douches in history.
I've said it before that usually when some rich billionaire dies of some kind of disease, there is usually some kind of center for research that the family declares in his honour. I've heard nothing, no donations, nothing from Apple or the Jobs family about giving some of them billions into research that might help prevent other families suffer the results of cancer.
Instead the family happily reveals a superfluous yacht. What a bunch of douches.
Why do people love this company? The create inhuman working conditions so they can produce their devices a 2 - 5x profit margin, rake in billions in profit and then hoard the money away giving absolutely nothing back to society. Yet Bill Gates, who has focused his life to philanthropy, giving away billions, is regarded as an asshole.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
... of a taller USS Monitor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Monitor
I'm very happy with how my Windows money is being spent.
With all those glass windows i'm sure they're going to regret the glare on the glossy iMac screens.
...display of a bunch of hipsters' money. Ha! Not mine.
Really have a question for Gawker. Why is your writing so disgustingly bad? They should melt that monstrosity to scrap and send it to hell with jobs. Why is this on here?
To be honest, it looks more like a river cruiser than a blue water international cruiser. Maybe he intended it to drift around a local lake?
Probably the only viable use for this ship is to dock it at Monterey and make it a $30 admission museum dedicated to Steve Jobs's ego.
Seriously, it's a winning business model, assuming the ship will be purchased for $1 over scrap value.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
He couldn't have spent his money to help poor children in Africa like that nice Mr Rosoft?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I remember him giving tours where he replaced traditional wall paintings with plasma tv (only 512p at the time). Sometimes tech is NOT the replacement for everything.
http://www.liveyachting.com/motor-yacht-a-antibes
In order to protect the owners of the yacht from the effects of piracy, it has been placed in a walled lake segregated away from "open source" water lanes.
Aluminum is flammable - get a good roaring fire going (a distinct possibility on a warship) and bad things happen..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Belknap_(CG-26)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
I always tried to imagine what a ship designed like a "sleek white running shoe" would look like...that pretty much nails it. Sure, the product literature yaps on about "infinity symbols", but I can see better..
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
It's a pirate ship.
And now N+1 fanbois will tell you it looks just-the-way-it-should-look.
I think Steve should have kept to his creative process of letting Jony Ive do all the heavy lifting and he just rubber stamping his imprimateur on the design.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Apparently the Navy is having problems with aluminum hulls.
... the Navy has discovered “aggressive” corrosion around Independence‘s engines. The problem is so bad that the barely year-old ship will have to be laid up in a San Diego drydock so workers can replace whole chunks of her hull.
In contrast to the first LCS, the steel-hulled USS Freedom, Independence is made mostly of aluminum. And that’s one root of the ship’s ailment ... Lots of things — major weapons, for one — have been left off the LCS in order to keep the price down. The list of deleted items includes something called a “Cathodic Protection System,” which is designed to prevent electrolysis."
"Builder Blames Navy as Brand-New Warship Disintegrates [June 23, 2011]
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/shipbuilder-blames-navy-as-brand-new-warship-disintegrates/
Looks like they started on this before Steve Jobs invented rounded corners.
All I can recall is the disappointment that occurred between the time I read the story and clicked on the link (anticipating a dreamy design of some sleek, yet-unseen and heretofore stunningly futuristic spaceship of the waters) and the first-glance impression when looking at the photos ("is this some sort of practical joke... structure looks like some gazebo-thing made out of Lego blocks with its square top... so totally, repulsively ugly not to mention impractical on the ocean"). Maybe it has some redeeming values somewhere else, but wow! That's a pretty amazing feat to design something that instantly feels this ugly.
... 'thing'
On thinking about it a bit more, it did bring to mind the one-of-a-kind aircraft that Howard Hughes built, a monstrosity that he even managed to fly once, the Spruce Goose. But looking at it side-to-side, the biggest bird ever built seems fairly normal compared to this anomalous-looking
Renamed "Steve's Folly', it will probably stay moored at some museum or other. Might just be the right kind of curiosity piece for Paul Allen to add to his collection.
Real men build sky yachts.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
What happened Steve? That boat isn't nearly cool enough looking to be something you came up with. Not often someone artistic in one area can translate into another area like ship building. I would have started with something like Ellison's Ronin. Cross with a Aegis cruiser. Doesn't matter, we'll remember you for the company and that hot chick in red shorts in the 1984 commercial.
In my younger days I spent many an hour at sea as a commercial herring fisherman off the coast of British Columbia. Skiffs used in the herring industry, while varying slightly in design, are all made entirely from aluminum. You can see many examples of such boats here.
I have no recollection of corrosion being a big issue. I assume there are aluminum alloys that make it resistant to corrosion the way that adding chromium to steel makes it "stainless".
Jobs, the Great Man of Style and form before function, bought a luxury barge.
I'm guessing the iYot's glass breaks much sooner than it should. Same goes for the hull. Aluminum is more appropriate for AAVs and jonboats. But I guess 7 or 8 knots would be OK for it.
I disagree with the comment about looking like a 3rd grader drew it. 3rd graders generally do much better than that. The Navy's experimental stealth ship was more graceful in appearance. I can just hear Old Money snickering something about the Nouveau Riche.
Have gnu, will travel.
Two bridge radar, angular shape.
I see his point -- it's '20s, but it isn't Bauhaus. It's Corb.
Fingerprints of the Villa Stein at Garches are all over the design. Lots of other Corbusian tropes.
"International Style" -- a few other potential aspects; a little Mies/Barcelona, a little Incinerated House -- you find the precedents.
It occurs to me that the design suffers from being extensively done from plan and elevation; as one of my former professors would say 'there was no model'... The thing works in side and end elevation, but as noted in front-quarter view it looks like a big triangle. (But not as surprising as the bows-on view of Intrepid!)
Yah, iconic over utilitarian. But... would Feadship have designed a wallowing, unseaworthy monstrosity? For ANY amount of shut-up-and-just-build-it money?
Love that design. The edges and lines are so un-boat-like. Beautiful.
Last I looked, Feadship was a reputable builder, and wouldn't build a modern-day Vasa.
I think some of this design is analogous to a trend in modern architecture: using technological wizardry to build wacky-looking things so they are safe and effective. Much of Frank Gehry's stuff (just to name a convenient whipping-boy) would be dangerously unstable if a great amount of very careful thinking hadn't been put into making the paper drawing into as-built structure.
Having said that -- in both architecture and ship design there have been some interesting structural whoppers when the clever engineering falls short (skybridges and large White Star staircases, anyone?) It remains to be seen if the great white star destroyer actually suffers from the variety of problems that many posters so far have presumed.
For a man who loved rounded corners it does feel very...square