Appledesign
"To celebrate Apple's twentieth anniversary, AppleDesign provides a rare inside look at the Industrial Design Group, examining the role this small team of creative individuals has played in the rise of Apple from a Silicon Valley garage to a billion-dollar corporation. It details the formation of the Group, outlines their method for turning great ideas into even greater products, reveals many design concepts and products that never reached the marketplace, and offers a glimpse at the triumph and turmoil than results when creative desire meets (and occasionally collides with) corporate reality." "With more than 400 color illustrations and detailed discussion of more than 100 products, design concepts and works-in-progress, AppleDesign provides the most thorough examination of a corporate design group ever published." "From the Macintosh to the PowerBook, the Newton MessagePad, the eMate and the just-released Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, Apple's designers have given us some of the most compelling and enduring products of our time. Their work not only enriches the lives of more than 50 million Apple users worldwide, it influences the computer industry at large, providing strong evidence for those who argue that industrial design is as powerful and relevant an art form as painting, sculpture or architecture."--BOOK JACKET.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
7mentions
7people
2009–2024years
43% recommend57% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The book mentioned in the article, AppleDesign, is full of great photos (of prototypes and shipped products) and interesting stories from that era. It covers the entire Frog Design era in great detail. Highly recommended, but unfortunately quite expensive these days.
- I think 'Revolution in the valley' could qualify, it's not really a coffee table book, but the stories are so short you can pick it up and read one in a few minutes.
There is also 'Appledesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group', it's old and out of print but it's got some really interesting prototypes in there.
As others have mentioned there is also Dieter Rams book and Core Memory.
Might I also suggest Knuth?
- Schiller wasn't, he was medium-level in marketing; but Ive was fairly senior. His team were churning out great designs -- there's a book called AppleDesign that showcases the work, the majority of which didn't make it into production because Apple simply didn't know what it had.
- You can trace the iphone back to, concretely, the newton but even further back if you check out the concepts that got them to the newton. There is a 1997 book called 'Apple Design 1997 The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group' that shows a ton of concepts and a few 'communication device' concepts (video and audio phone integrated computers). Sadly out of print, and quite expensive for a paperback 'coffee table' style book https://www.amazon.com/Appledesign-Apple-Industrial-Design-G...
Some pictures from inside, including one concept integrated with a telephone handset: https://twitter.com/jamesthomson/status/798542140435480576
- This YouTube video on A/UX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI is one of the best things I've found about the subject. (It has a usable transcript.)
On the subject of what happened with Big Mac, the Macintosh II and NeXT, https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-prec... and some of the articles linked from it https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triu... https://www.aventure-apple.com/le-big-mac-apple/ (Google Translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https:/... ) is the best intro that I'm aware of, though there are some additional, important bits of information in Steven Levy's Insanely Great ch. 9 ( https://books.google.ie/books?id=Y6ZQAAAAMAAJ&dq=insanely+gr... ) and the Isaacson bio's ch. 13 ( https://books.google.ie/books?id=JT6FCgAAQBAJ&printsec=front... ). TFA links to some of these, but it missed some of the information in them. (Unfortunately the Adventure-Apple piece needs one big caveat, that it mostly doesn't cite any sources.)
There's also yet another whole strand of Macintosh-adjacent Unix in the Network Server products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVAdrdkyoA .
Some key points from these:
* I have little idea how well-founded Apple's detailed legal complaints were, but the overall claim that "Jobs had done research for a next generation product and taken the key staff, namely Page from Apple to make it reality" is almost surely absolutely right, and NeXT was conceived an attempt to do Big Mac outside Apple using the Big Mac team from Apple. One thing that TFA and the LowEndMac miss is that Jobs, apparently, wasn't the instigator: according to Isaacson, Rich Page and other Big Mac people contacted him and begged him to launch a new company when Big Mac was cancelled. (ISTR seeing this confirmed elsewhere, too, but I don't recall where atm.)
* TFA says that "[a]ll that I can find of the Big Mac project is this insanely low resolution image" showing some hardware and a screenshot of the GUI, but it links to an article which features this glamour shot of what was apparently an industrial design for Big Mac: https://i0.wp.com/www.aventure-apple.com/wp-content/uploads/... . (And this is cited: it's apparently from the Appledesign book https://www.worldcat.org/title/appledesign-the-work-of-the-a... .) The resemblance to the original G3 iMac from over a decade later is obvious. Beyond appearances, some other hardware similarities include a lack of internal expansion slots (according to Levy's book, Jobs maintained his opposition to "slots" through his departure from Apple) and a focus on external expandability instead: the G3 iMac was an early adopter of USB, while Big Mac apparently had Apple Desktop Bus. In fact, according to the Adventure-Apple piece ADB was originally developed for Big Mac under the name of Front Desk Bus (though as usual I see no reference to substantiate this). The single most obvious divergence is that Big Mac couldn't display colour, though no doubt this is because of an underlying similarity: the Big Mac project was trying to hit a roughly G3-iMac-like price point in the mid-'80s.
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- Oooo that's good info, thanks! I seem to recall reading it somewhere, perhaps as context after the publication of AppleDesign: https://www.amazon.com/Appledesign-Apple-Industrial-Design-G...
Really appreciate your correction here!
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