Apple design’s luxury bubble
I enjoyed this thoughtful post from Garrett Murray, itself a link to a post by Louie Mantia about the departure of Alan Dye from Apple:
I sometimes think about what we lost along the way as Apple chased ultra-simplicity and luxury. Jony Ive spent a decade slowly removing any trace of personality from every product Apple released. Apple went from the original translucent-colored plastic aesthetic of the “Bondi blue” iMac G3 and the Power Mac G3 “Blue & White” to the more refined and unique design of the iMac G4 to… a bunch of aluminum rounded rectangles for decades. Chasing thinness, removing ports, simplifying everything down to metal and glass with no differentiation.
As Mantia wrote:
[Ive] and his team designed great products during the first half of his tenure at Apple. But as he became wealthier, he started to conflate good taste with luxury. Jony often described Apple products with words about craft, material, and precision, all things that appeal to a luxury market. Apple shifted away from making products “for the rest of us” and started making products that appealed specifically to rich people.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but they started making products that appealed to themselves. Because since Steve Jobs died, Apple, its executives, and its corporate employees got significantly wealthier. It wasn’t just Jony who took an interest in luxury. The whole company did. Anyone with even a little bit of power in the company started to dress more expensively. They all look like they could walk right out of a fashion advertisement.
Part of Apple’s appeal is “affordable luxury”. There’s no super-luxe iPhone for the billionaire class. But there is something about what Murray and Mantia write that strikes me as being absolutely right.
In the wake of Steve Jobs’s death, Apple elevated Jony Ive to a position of total design authority as a way of signaling to the wider world that the company was going to be okay after losing its co-founder and leader. In that era, there was a genuine fear that a company led by an operations guy was not going to be able to keep the magic going. (Certainly, that’s a narrative that current and former Apple designers have been happy to push ever since.)
The more I think about it, the more this (perfectly reasonable!) tactical decision has come to feel like the original sin of the Tim Cook era. An unchained and elevated Ive sent the right message to the world, and Ive really is a talented designer who built beautiful things. But without Steve Jobs to rein things in, Apple’s design sense got more insular, more obscure, more minimal.
It’s one reason I’m so critical about Ive, his overlong tenure at Apple when he was obviously burned out, and the fatal mistake of placing software design in the clutches of him and his lieutenants: I just get the sense that those designers became untethered from the rest of us, chasing idealized product dreams based on the expensive luxury brands they wore, drove, and otherwise used every day. Not that Apple designs ugly stuff, but there is undoubtedly an antiseptic sameness to a lot of it that smacks of a design team that has disappeared up its own white void.