Slashdot Mirror
Early Apple Designs Revealed, Courtesy of Hartmut Esslinger
SternisheFan writes with an excerpt as carried by CNET of former Apple design chief Hartmut Esslinger's upcoming book, titled Design Forward: Creative Strategies for Sustainable Change. Writing of Steve Job's integration of design as an essential element across the company as a whole, Esslinger says:
"The company's [then] CEO, Michael Scott, had created different business divisions for each product line, including accessories such as monitors and memory drives. Each division had its own head of design and developed its products the way it wanted to. As a result, Apple's products shared little in the way of a common design language or overall synthesis
In essence, bad design was both the symptom and a contributing cause of Apple's corporate disease. Steve's desire to end the disjoined approach gave birth to a strategic design project that would revolutionize Apple's brand and product lines, change the trajectory of the company's future, and eventually redefine the way the world thinks about and uses consumer electronics and communication technologies." CNET shows off a few of those old designs (many of them appearing unsurprisingly fresh), but for much more of them see these images at designboom.
Whatever the design, it's if made in the Foxconn factory, I will never buy such product from slave labors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/business/signs-of-changes-taking-hold-in-electronics-factories-in-china.html?_r=0
If you really want to be honest with that attitude take a good long look at the labour practices of every manufacturer you buy products from. I think you'll find your list of acceptable brands will have to be drastically reduced. Every major manufacturer takes advantage of mistreated labor forces somewhere in the world and that includes most of the food stuffs you buy.
I'm glad you have taken a stand, but I'm sorry to hear you have eschewed all consumer electronics. How did you post the above comment?
Don't you understand? Only Apple has ever used inexpensive overseas labor. Android phones are made by happy elves on Main Street America in shops powered by unicorn breath.
It's all in the implementation. There is function, concept, and execution. How the three combine become part of a design language. Good design is often unnoticed and simply aids in the functionality of a product. That is often the goal. Unfortunately, too many "designers" copy design elements without understanding the language. Good design goes beyond aesthetics, and shapes the user's attitude about the product before they even use it.
of Mac Mini, NEC monitor, Logitech bluetooth mouse, Kensington USB keyboard, and Tivoli Audio sound system has absolutely no "design language or overall synthesis in essence" and yet works just fine.
WTF does this have to do with the article? Or do you just go around randomly posting this on most Tech articles? Or are you just an anti-apple troll?
Advertising decades old design ideas never brought to market? I pity the fool that can't enjoy a bit of tech history.
http://visual.ly/braun-or-apple
http://www.metrohippie.com/dieter-rams-top-10/
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
"Whatever the design, it's if made in the Foxconn factory, I will never buy such product from slave labors."
So you will never buy any hardware from....
Acer ......
Amazon
Apple
Cisco
Dell
HP
Microsoft
Motorola
Nintendo
Nokia
Samsung
Sony
Toshiba
Vizio
From Wikipedia
The distinguishing characteristics originated by the Snow White design language, in contrast to the original Apple industrial design style, include the following:
minimal surface texturing
colored a light off-white (Fog) or light gray (Platinum)
inlaid three-dimensional Apple logo, diamond cut to the exact shape
zero-draft enclosures, with no variances in case thickness and perpendicular walls
recessed international port identification icons
silk-screened product name badging
shallow horizontal and vertical lines, 2 mm wide, 2 mm deep, spaced 10 mm apart on center, which run along any and all of the surfaces of the product, some of which act as vents and setback 30 mm from the front and 4 mm from the back.
Fog products have beige accents and cables, Platinum products have uniform color (no accents) and Smoke gray cables
3mm radius, rear and 2mm radius, front corners
simple unadorned ports and slots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DX1iplQQJTo
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I will never buy such product from slave labors.
Before you go all holier-than-thou on us you might want to consider the full implications of what you are saying. First off, "slave labor"? I think you do not know what real slavery is so your hyperbole is really a bit out of line. Foxconn might not treat their employees well but its hardly slavery. They do not own their employees even in a figurative sense. Slavery is something far, far worse. I've actually been in a sweatshop in Chengdu where they were making parts for Dell monitors. I've seen dozens of manufacturing plants in China with my own eyes. I've seen all of this stuff first hand. There is NO electronics manufacturer that is innocent here. You will find that there is no alternative that is any better if you really look into this situation. Anything you can say about Apple/Foxconn you HAVE to say about pretty much any other electronics manufacturer as well as those for countless other products. You are actually saying that you will not buy a wide variety of products.
If you want to not buy products made in substandard working conditions, I respect that stance. But you are going to find it is not as simple as you think. There aren't any innocent parties and in many cases what we consider horrible working conditions are actually a step up from the alternatives. The important thing is that conditions continue to improve. There is considerable evidence that conditions are improving even if progress is sometimes painfully slow. There are more effective ways to improve working conditions than a silent boycott by yourself. Get involved with organizations trying to make a difference. They're out there if you really actually give a damn and want to make a difference.
It's an article about an interesting (for some of us) history of the genesis of a pretty damned successful tech company. Now if you would pull your head out of your "I hate anything Apple" ass for just a short time you might learn something about how business works. Or carry on with your ranting. (in 3, 2, 1...)
Because of their high profile among mainstream consumers, Apple is one of the only companies pushing Foxconn to improve working conditions. I'm sure there are public relations considerations driving Apple's moves, but singling them out as the OP did leaves him open to criticism.
I don't understand this - how are ventilation stripes a design language?
Can someone explain what the hell is snow white design language created by this guy.
Designs by the seven dwarfs?
> "The company's [then] CEO, Michael Scott"
Creative Strategies for Sustainable Change
That's what she said!
Steve's desire to end the disjoined approach
That's what she said!
bad design was both the symptom and a contributing cause of Apple's corporate disease
That's what she said!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
apple design is stylish and easy for the layman to use.
my mother has an ipad and the only "problem" she has with it is frequently forgetting which of about half a dozen very similar passwords she has set for her itunes account.
personally i prefer the freedom of an android tablet and the raw power of my linux laptop.
apple does not put out much that is truely unique and unheard of, but they manage to make state of the art easy to use and have a serious talent for UI. look at the ipod, and compare it to the interface of other devices of the time (and even quite a few now) which would have 5-7 buttons with unintuitive glyphs sloppily imprinted and difficult to see even in favorable conditions.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I recall these internet appliances that would allow us to cheaply access email and the WWW. Since so many were still using dial up, a land line phone was a common sense addition. Few imagined that cell phone rates would fall so quickly that phone calls would almost be given away, and what you pay for was data. This lead to the internet appliance that was not imagined, the smart phone, and the larger table on which we use Skype, which with we call anywhere for negligible costs, at least by developed world standards.
This is funny because so many said the internet appliance would never be viable. Maybe that was true in a very restricted sense, but not in a broad sense. In the same sense that there was no market for microcomputers.
Which is why I get so annoyed when people dismiss a concept because they do not like a design. Sure the Tandy 100, 200, PC-6 might not have been many peoples idea of a programmable portable device, but they had many of the ideas that people want today. A keyboard, programing on device, removable storage. It is interesting to note that many successful mobile devices do not include such features. But that is who progress works. We start by mimicking existing technology, then move to novel ideas.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
No matter how you feel toward Apple, those designs show how forward thinking they were. Keep in mind that most of those designs are from 1982. Two years before the Mac's debut, and at a time when we were all beating on our Atari 8-bits, Apple IIs, and Commodore 64s.
I'm especially intrigued with the split screen monitor designs. Dual monitors in 1982? Dual flat screen monitors? Pretty amazing.
And the baby mac resurfaces 14 years later as the iMac.
What, me worry?
Whatever the design, it's if made in the Foxconn factory, I will never buy such product from slave labors.
GPLHost-Thomas is a hypocrite. He's avoiding answering who made the computing device he used to post that message. But looking back through a few of his posts, we see that he bought an ACER laptop for his wife.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3274815&cid=42117409
ACER is a Taiwanese company who outsources it's manufacturing to Foxconn amongst others.
Caught red handed.