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I still have the original book, AppleDesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group from 1997. It was around $40. when I got it new back then.

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MacRumors used to be a place of Apple enthusiasts who understood the company and celebrated it. Now, it's just a bunch of complainers.
Unfortunately, a large number of complainers are actually people who have celebrated Apple's existence for many years, and are probably so embedded in the Apple ecosystem that it's difficult not to be disappointed with the way things are going.
 
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MacRumors used to be a place of Apple enthusiasts who understood the company and celebrated it. Now, it's just a bunch of complainers.

You should know that Apple customers do have a right to be pissed off with their products.. What makes you think they shouldn't have the ability to voice their concerns about products that suck?
 
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I love that Apple is meant to be about design, but their recent products have been questionable. This book is meant to highlight the peak.

Two major design flaws about this book though —

It's not accessible -- it's not available for iPad.

Placing all the product descriptions at the end of the book is a fail -- there's nothing more annoying than jumping back and forwards from page to page to get a clearer understanding. Small descriptions in a light typeface positioned in a corner would make the experience 1000x better, and it wouldn't detract from the clean photography. Now if the book was available on iPad, you could do away with the descriptions on the page and show them only when the user taps the image.

A little more thought and this book would be worth its price tag, but sadly, like a lot of Apple releases of late, it misses the mark.
 
The Apple of today isn't very good as it was under Steve Jobs.

I don't think that is necessarily true .. Apple has starting to change when the iPhone hit big and that was well under Steve Jobs reigns still.

I actually think that the stuff Apple does nowadays is mostly fine .. I for ones have no problem with the MBP. I believe the big problem with Apple is the stuff they don't do. Like updating their Hardware and Software somewhat consistently and reliably. That is what seems to have changed, they do seem to care for consistency at all any more that is what does hurt not only but specifically Professionals.

I don't particularly care for Ive I must admit. iOS certainly has gotten better under he supervision and I am not convinced by his latest Hardware designs either. He is massively overrated and this book seems to stroke his ego more than anything. He should really focus on his job rather than glossy advertisement brochures like this book.
 
I love that Apple is meant to be about design, but their recent products have been questionable. This book is meant to highlight the peak.

Two major design flaws about this book though —

It's not accessible -- it's not available for iPad.

Placing all the product descriptions at the end of the book is a fail -- there's nothing more annoying than jumping back and forwards from page to page to get a clearer understanding. Small descriptions in a light typeface positioned in a corner would make the experience 1000x better, and it wouldn't detract from the clean photography. Now if the book was available on iPad, you could do away with the descriptions on the page and show them only when the user taps the image.

A little more thought and this book would be worth its price tag, but sadly, like a lot of Apple releases of late, it misses the mark.
Yeah it's a little ironic that a book celebrating the design of technology isn't available on the technology that supposedly is designed and optimized to display a publication like this. Oh jeez give me more caffeine, that sentence just went around in circles. I'm dizzy and have fallen over. :confused:

...anyway...I like your idea for both the paper form and digital form of this book.

But I'm just me...I'm far from highbrow and couldn't design a paper party hat or even know enough about design to know that one should never design a paper party hat in the first place. I'm sure there's a higher purpose to doing it this way that eludes me.

I was just in a newly redesigned Apple Store. Oh my eyes. Good lord, what have they done. :eek: It looks so depressing and kind of bleak like that horrid Sia performance at the keynote this year. Minimalism is great to a point but then it just gets taken too far and becomes bleak and bereft.

Oh well at least there's more space for customers to move around in and we don't fight over the iPhones anymore.
 
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MacRumors used to be a place of Apple enthusiasts who understood the company and celebrated it. Now, it's just a bunch of complainers.
You should know that Apple customers do have a right to be pissed off with their products.. What makes you think they shouldn't have the ability to voice their concerns about products that suck?
Certainly customers have every right to voice their concerns.

As a long-time MacRumors lurker, however, I used to enjoy reading the comments for their well-informed, balanced, insightful perspective. Criticism was often articulate, as was appreciation; I learned from both.

Nowadays, the top-rated comments seem to consist very largely of an endlessly-repeated litany of:
  • Tim Cook needs to resign, now!
  • The engineers were busy designing new watchbands
  • The engineers were busy designing new emojis
  • “Can’t innovate, my ass!”
  • “Courage!”
 
Certainly customers have every right to voice their concerns.

As a long-time MacRumors lurker, however, I used to enjoy reading the comments for their well-informed, balanced, insightful perspective. Criticism was often articulate, as was appreciation; I learned from both.

Nowadays, the top-rated comments seem to consist very largely of an endlessly-repeated litany of:
  • Tim Cook needs to resign, now!
  • The engineers were busy designing new watchbands
  • The engineers were busy designing new emojis
  • “Can’t innovate, my ass!”
  • “Courage!”

Exactly. These forums have become unreadable. I've tried to counter it by setting members like that to ignore on the spot. I must have ignored hundreds by now but there are too many of those trolls here now.

Unfortunately, even ignored members show up in the top comments under an article. The problem is that unoriginal comments like those are posted immediately without any thought given so they get the most views and therefore the most likes and end up becoming top comments. The deliberated articulate comments take longer to write so they end up in the middle pages, and get lost.

This site is broken @arn. Trolls are going to kill @MacRumors

MacRumors needs to bring back thumbs down comments. Hide ignored members from the top comments under an article. Allow MacRumors staff to feature comments. Comments worth showcasing would be featured under an article and could receive a special STAFF PICK star in the forum.
 
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I love that Apple is meant to be about design, but their recent products have been questionable. This book is meant to highlight the peak.
...
A little more thought and this book would be worth its price tag, but sadly, like a lot of Apple releases of late, it misses the mark.
That it does. In the same way as when in bygone times, bands would release a "greatest hits" CD (shiny silver round things latterly referred to as optical media...RIP), which was pretty much tacit acknowledgment in the industry they were finished as a creative force, having grown fat (hello Jony), complacent (hello Eddy), and bereft of inspiration, focussed only on a cash grab (hello Tim). A retrospective of their (distant) past work, in other words, for which they could cynically double-dip hopelessly misguided but loyal fans.

However, for the melancholic and nostalgic amongst you, here's a tip....hit up Amazon and order the far superior von Borries' 2011 book "History of Apple Design" (wait, it actually has background text accompanying the pics) and spare yourself the additional 200 bucks and accompanying sense of violation.
 
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That it does. In the same way as when in bygone times, bands would release a "greatest hits" CD (shiny silver round things latterly referred to as optical media...RIP), which was pretty much tacit acknowledgment in the industry they were finished as a creative force, having grown fat (hello Jony), complacent (hello Eddy), and bereft of inspiration, focussed only on a cash grab (hello Tim). A retrospective of their (distant) past work, in other words, for which they could cynically double-dip hopelessly misguided but loyal fans.

However, for the melancholic and nostalgic amongst you, here's a tip....hit up Amazon and order the far superior von Borries' 2011 book "History of Apple Design" (wait, it actually has background text accompanying the pics) and spare yourself the additional 200 bucks and accompanying sense of violation.
Thank you for the book recommendation. It is definitely more reasonably priced for most budgets.

I do hope that we haven't seen the peak of Apple and are instead on a plateau before they ascend again. They've made so many investments in so many countries. I can't help but hold out hope that the bit of a mess we are seeing now is the result of the upheaval they're undergoing in building out new headquarters and expanding their global strategy. In other words, that they are just experiencing growing pains.

My family's experience even now is that their products still compare favorably with the competition in most categories, though I can't speak to the situation with the laptops. They may be losing ground there. But let's face it, their competitors are still trying to get their acts together, too. In the field of high end smartphones, Samsung suffered big setbacks recently. Google advances in fits and starts and seems to have commitment issues. HTC may not survive much longer. The Chinese upstarts are still getting their foot in the door and while they please some, they tick off others.

I'm not convinced Tim is the wrong man for the job. I'm more convinced that he and Apple as a whole have stretched a bit too thin the last couple of years. I'm not sure if the people he needs to delegate authority to are the ones who are right for their jobs.

I sound like a broken record but I always come to the same conclusion for now...that I need to see what happens once the "Spaceship" is up and running and some of their new foreign R&D centers start bearing fruit.
 
MacRumors used to be a place of Apple enthusiasts who understood the company and celebrated it. Now, it's just a bunch of complainers.
It's almost as if some things have fundamentally changed!

Oh I know... they stopped "understanding". Yeah, that must be it. The guys looking for hardware upgrades and dealing with Apple gear pretty much 24/7 must be the problem!

Glassed Silver:ios
 
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