Rounded & Rooted

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I picked up a post on Medium today, from last month, about the apparent doldrums in which Apple seems to be becalmed of late, and I have to say I can't disagree with any of it. Since the death of Steve Jobs and the departure of Jonny Ive, there has been little advancement of note in either hardware, OS or software design language, only 'evolutionary tinkering', sometimes good, sometimes bad: nothing outstanding or remarkable. It's as if Apple product has reached its 'white goods' phase, like fridges and cookers: utilitarian, albeit with much flair and great build quality; a bit like Bosch anything or Neff cookers, Smeg fridges or Agas or Roll Royces. Pretty much as if 'we have refined our wares to a point where there is nowhere left to go to improve on our wares'.

Except that we all know that as progress is made on the technical side of product development, this should be de facto followed by changes in the design language of the products themselves: even if only superficially, to reflect that actual development is going on under the hood, at the same time keeping the products looking fresh to the consumer. Apple's design language has always been strong, much like the Braun style developed by Dieter Rams, or the Olivetti typewriters of the fifties and sixties by Nizzoli or Sottsass: all of which looked complete and finished in their time. As did the original Macintosh of 1984, the original iMac of the nineties, the Mac Minis, later iMacs and MacBooks in their respective times. 

Throughout Apple's history, great design has been front and centre, but it has always moved on incrementally. We have now seen little to no real change in design philosophy from the company for half a decade at least. Technically, however, we have seen tremendous leaps in hardware design and performance, reflecting the achievements of the industry at large. That the aesthetics of Apple products - though beyond compare in my book - have not moved similarly with the times, is a tad baffling to me. The Medium article reflects on the continued evolution of Apple's design aesthetic throughout the non-Jobs years, when they were a company struggling to keep up with the PC/Microsoft hegemony of the period, despite the margin of technical/aesthetic design superiority they held throughout those years.

I agree that the company produced many, many great computers during the eighties and nineties, many of which I personally used and loved, particularly the PowerBook Duo - also mentioned in the Medium article - which I absolutely loved using back in the early nineties: a combination laptop/docking station with proper monitor that was simply a perfect meld of form and function: a combo I miss to this day. However, I don't think, as in the article, that a mash up of Apple's current design language and that of its innovative past is where it should go next: we need someone else of the calibre of Rams, Nizzoli, Sottsass or Ive to take up the cudgels and develop something entirely novel for the next decade's Apple product.

The one design cue that has to stay, however, is the rounded corner - the round-rect of the earliest MacOS: this feature is absolutely an intrinsic part of the Apple DNA, dating back to the earliest point-and-click Macs of the mid-eighties and which has informed every iteration of Apple design, software and hardware to date. Without that, it ain't Apple, I'm afraid: like the Bass Triangle, the Mercedes Star, the Audi Rings or the Hoover logo, it is an absolute signifier, and can't be changed, along with the apple with a bite taken out of it, which are both synonymous with the company and its products. Without those, Apple will lose that essential Apple-ness...

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