http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
Lick Me, I'm A Macintosh
What the hell is wrong with Apple that they still give a damn about
design and packaging and "feel"?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 1, 2003
Oh right like you even care.
Like careful sexy product design even matters and as if you give a twit
for packaging and aesthetics and user experience anymore in this overly
plastic bloatedly excessive landfill wasteland Wal-Mart dystopia we
call proud capitalist gimme gimme gimme America.
And OK maybe every now and then you sigh and give in and buy yourself a
new tech gadget, because you're just that kind of consumer lackey and
not really expecting much anyway but who the hell cares it's just one
more hunk of tech landfill but what can you do.
And maybe you buy yourself, say, a new Apple PowerBook, as I just did,
and it comes in this really quite beautiful sleek black box with small
elegant typeface and gorgeous subtle graphics and a strange and obvious
attention to detail and you think, pshaw, who cares, just another big
heartless tech corporation trying to smooth talk me, just another
suckass hunk of plastic and wire and metal to break down in a month and
be obsolete in a year and really, why should I give a damn.
And yet. You can't help but notice. Apple seemed to really put some
serious work into this, into the details, the packaging, the shape and
texture. The rich black box, the clean unobtrusive font, the silver
sliver inch-wide side-shot photograph of the PowerBook itself on the
box lid.
No screaming colors and no garish cartoon graphics and no massive
corporate logo and no bullet-point exclamation points listing the
outrageous features you'll never use and you're like, wait a minute,
what they hell does Apple think they're hawking here, art?
You can't help but handle the package with something approaching
astonishment and even a trace of reverence. Could this actually be
something interesting and reasonably cool? Could this be something
tactile and lovely and graceful that flies in the face of normal
mediocre dumbed-down consumer design and tepid IKEA kit furniture and
bland Windows chyme?
Could this be, in short, something that actually adds a modicum of
refined grace and simplicity and aesthetic warmth to the world, instead
of sucking it away like so many disposable DVD players and garish
LED-spasming boom boxes and 10-gallon drums of spaghetti sauce from
Costco? Nah.
And you open the gorgeous black box and lift the white cardboard inside
flap, itself adorned with clean offset typeface declaring "Designed by
Apple in California," and you are confronted with what is quite
possible the most thoughtfully designed and pleasing packaging you've
ever seen, not like you care about this stuff and hey it's all just
Styrofoam and garbage anyway, but still.
Cables wrapped in elegant tight slots on the sides. Small manual and
paperwork in the center. All clean and clear and meant for optimum
visual and tactile experience. Lift out the top half of the foam and
there's the computer itself, solo, centered, encased in beautiful
imminently touchable sleek aluminum, a subtle tech-fetish object par
excellence, wrapped in delicate foam padding and not cluttered with
crap and not requiring you to do anything but lift it out and peel back
the sheath and stroke the silver metal and turn it on.
And there it is. The welcome screen. An exquisite downtempo chill
soundtrack and the world "Welcome" swimming over the monitor in a
number of different languages and you think, what the hell is this?
Where's the pain? Where's the hassle and the misaligned factory molding
and the broken keyboard and the 3,000 setup steps and the sense that
I'm drowning in a sea of programmer jargon and plastic waste and
ubergeek hell?
This is what Apple does. This is what they are known for and why their
design team is so famous and why they win so many awards and why they
engender such passionate devotion from their adherents and why Macs are
still far, far superior to PCs and always will be. It's true.
Apple actually cares about this sort of thing. Which is odd. Which is
rare. Which is why they deserve gushing adulation now and then. They
actually put the time and energy and labor into creating a gorgeous
package most people will toss anyway, and why they include a first-time
welcome experience, with subtle music, with flowing lush clean
graphics, one that will never be repeated, just because.
This is the point. Detail and nuance and texture and a sense of how
users actually feel, what makes them smile, what makes the experience
worthy and positive and sensual instead of necessary and drab and evil.
These are the things that are nearly dead in our mass-consumer culture,
things normally reserved for elitist niche markets and swanky boutiques
and upscale yuppie Euro spas and maybe cool insider mags like I-D and
Metropolis and dwell. They are most definitely not to be expected of
mass-market gadget makers. This is why it matters. This is why it's
important.
Oh sure, Apple's elitist. This is the common line. Sure they're
slightly more expensive and cater to artists and designers and creative
types and people who actually care about such pointless stuff as fit
and finish and "feel."
And they command only a sliver of the PC market overall and despite how
their designs and innovations resonate across the entire industry and
in fact affect industrial design across all consumer culture, true
PC/Windows geeks just scoff and snort and go back to trying to patch
the latest of 13,876 "severe" or "drastic" security flaws in the
nonintuitive bug-ridden hell that is Windows.
Look here, at the packaging for the iPod . You ain't about to find this
type of artistic approach in any sort of mass-consumer package design.
Yes, it is one of the most expensive MP3 players on the market. Yes, it
is by all accounts the best and most elegantly designed MP3 player on
the market. And, yes, it is selling by the truckload. There are reasons
for this.
Fewer and fewer manufacturers of consumer landfill crap give a damn for
how consumers might actually, dare I say, care about the fit and finish
of the products they decide to allow into their lives. And this is
exactly the sort of nuanced stuff we so desperately need more of.
Is it just another goddamn overpriced radioactive instantly obsolete
tech gadget they suck you into buying via sinister marketing and
cloying ad copy and the sense that if you don't buy one now you must be
a Luddite dork? Sure. But then again, maybe, just maybe, if you look a
little closer, it doesn't always have to be.
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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday
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©2003 SF Gate