sinisterdesign said:
but go too far & you're no longer cool. cool/uncool is a fine line. there are tons of examples of this, i'm sure, but Skechers comes to mind. i remember when i bought my first pair in San Fran back when i was working for Apple. they were big & chunky and everyone thought they were so cool & interesting. 6 or 7 years later, you can go to Sears or someplace & pick up a pair. sure, now they have a much larger distribution channel, but they've lost the cool appeal. i wouldn't buy a pair now for that exact reason (call me a fashion snob, w/e). 😉
Two things: first, you *are* a fashion snob... Second, I'm guessing that those Skechers weren't *that* well designed to begin with... Maybe they were "cool" as in "fashionable"...
See, a 6-year-old iMac G3 is *still* a cool machine, as a cube, or even a Pismo PowerBook. It all comes down to design quality, not some subjective sense of "coolness". The *thing* itself feels and looks cool, but it's not because of looks alone... It's because of the combination of that old principle, "form follows function", with some cutting edge materials, thanks to ingenious industrial design. Add some great software that integrates seamlessly with the machine, and you're all set: you have one truly *cool* product in your hands.
Want two better examples, as you could argue that those products still look "cool" because they were designed back when Apple was still a "cool" company? The iPod... Look at it... It's all over the place! Yet, it still looks cool, very cool. And what about the iPod Shuffle? Apple opted for cheaper plastics and a no-screen approach, yet, the damn thing is as cool as every other Apple product (I own both a 1GB Shuffle and a 3G 20GB iPod, plus an iMac G5, and had an iMac G4 before this one, so I know what I'm talking about). Why? Because those key components - good looks, and perfect functionality - are all there... It's the whole package that counts, not the fact that it's supposedly a "status symbol" or whatever!
That being said, I won't stop using Macs even if Apple grabs more than 10% of marketshare, or licenses OS X or whatever, just because their products lose some of their abstract "cool" appeal. As long as the quality of their products doesn't decrease, and as long as they don't stop being innovative, I'm fine with that, IMHO. And so far, Apple doesn't seem to be resting on its laurels in both their hardware and software development, so I sense a bright future for our favorite company.
🙂
P.S. - In case you didn't notice, for me, "cool" != cool... "Cool" is what most people thought that the iPod was all about, thus calling it "just a fad"... Cool is what it really is, a f*ing great and revolutionary product, period (and it really runs much cooler in your pocket than a PM Dual 2.7GHz G5 - or a Pentium 4, for that matter - would on your desk
😀 ... Why didn't Apple go with ARM instead of Intel?
😛 ).