And Stay Out

Louie Mantia, in his post reacting to the upcoming departure of Alan Dye:

There’s no doubt Jony has good taste, by the way. He 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. [...]

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.

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.

I have an iMac G4 sitting on my garage workbench, and simply moving the display around is a source of delight. On a shelf nearby, a beaten up graphite "Clamshell" iBook G3 makes me smile every time I open it. Booting up Mac OS 9 and clicking around, listening to the old hard drive chug… is this simply nostalgia? Perhaps. But there is undoubtedly so much personality in the design of these products.