Just get the paperBook, I've heard it has revolutionary new battery technology that never needs recharging - but avoid the bookOS 1.0.1 update for now, I saw some reports of it causing issues like pages to randomly stick together or fall out.
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Here's Apple's New Coffee Table Book With Actual Products
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I wonder what this book will look like in the coming years. The long discontinued Apple Watch, a few iPhone and iPad pics, maybe a MacPad Pro.
Usually when a band puts out its "greatest hits" album, it's done making new music.
The next book will contain pictures of this book.
Absolutely nailed it. Exact same feeling here. Honestly, seeing the images of the candy coloured iMacs made me feel sad. After years in the wilderness of crappy, expensive Macintoshes (boy, did I get burned with a Performa 5200CD), I bought a lime green tray-loading iMac, and I never looked back...
...until 2016.
It's amazing what Apple considers to be worthwhile these days'. Ever since my first Apple product 33-years ago, I was proud of my Apple gear. Just recently I was able to purchase all new gear at the same time that included the new Apple iPhone, Apple Watch, and with clear reservations, the new MacBook Pro. After learning of the decision to cancel the AirPort product line, it's now abundantly clear that Apple is transitioning into something different. The way I feel today is that the products that I currently have will be the last Apple products that I will own. Surprisingly, I have no idea what they're going to do in that new gigantic spaceship facility so perhaps we'll all be surprised.
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Pretty soon this will be the only mac related product that Apple still sells.... MEMORIES of their former computer division.
Funereal indeed.
Comparing Apple's history against its contemporary existence is rather stark and sad.
Those images of the Mac G5/Pro are rubbing salt in the wound that is today's visionless consumer gadget company. The former diversity in design, smart engineering/usefulness, longevity, and product ecosystem has devolved into flat and dull monotony among a few objects still being actively developed and marketed (and leaving abandoned products in their online product lineup is insulting to their potential customers).
It's all about profit margins now, instead of designing a complete system of the most useful and beautiful tools for the job. But what's the job? Consuming the Internet? What do the engineers, photographers, and videographers inside Apple use for their work?
Apple's former flare for useful/smart design has been dumped and replaced by a pathological obsession with minimalism & profit. Well-thought-out and researched UI is replaced with cheesy/ugly/non-intuitive UI. An ecosystem of products to do actual work is being reduced to "look, we still sell computers" PR product... and watch bands.
Then they produce a book that celebrates what they no longer are. Weird.
Apple, the masters of business administration company.
Comparing Apple's history against its contemporary existence is rather stark and sad.
Those images of the Mac G5/Pro are rubbing salt in the wound that is today's visionless consumer gadget company. The former diversity in design, smart engineering/usefulness, longevity, and product ecosystem has devolved into flat and dull monotony among a few objects still being actively developed and marketed (and leaving abandoned products in their online product lineup is insulting to their potential customers).
It's all about profit margins now, instead of designing a complete system of the most useful and beautiful tools for the job. But what's the job? Consuming the Internet? What do the engineers, photographers, and videographers inside Apple use for their work?
Apple's former flare for useful/smart design has been dumped and replaced by a pathological obsession with minimalism & profit. Well-thought-out and researched UI is replaced with cheesy/ugly/non-intuitive UI. An ecosystem of products to do actual work is being reduced to "look, we still sell computers" PR product... and watch bands.
Then they produce a book that celebrates what they no longer are. Weird.
Apple, the masters of business administration company.
I got my book today, the smaller one and while it is certainly hefty and you can clearly tell it is worth it's price the images inside look more like drawings then photos and the ink seems a bit thin in general. Not sure if I got a bad copy or that is how they all are but it does seem they could have improved the print quality a bit.
I flipped through this entire book at a nearby Apple Store.
It's nice but not extraordinary. If you're just judging its physical properties (cover, binding, paper, inks, finishing, etc.), it's like hundreds of books that you'd find in a typical art museum's gift shop. This type of quality is par-for-the-course for similar coffee table tomes from publishers in Japan, Germany, Italy, France, etc.
The imagery is starts out okay, but quickly becomes monotonous. I think it is mostly from one or two photographers, so it feels a bit like an artist's monograph. It would have been more interesting to see a wider range of photographers contributing to this book.
Unsurprisingly, my favorite shot was not an Apple-commisioned photographer, but one provided by NASA. It is one of the few shots where the Apple product is recorded with the greater context of its usage (and maybe owner) rather than just an object of patterns and design.
More than anything else, that one NASA photograph shows how artificially constricted almost all the other photographs are in the book.
Nice effort, but I'd rather pile my coffee table with a bunch of out-of-print art books from the local used bookstore.
It's nice but not extraordinary. If you're just judging its physical properties (cover, binding, paper, inks, finishing, etc.), it's like hundreds of books that you'd find in a typical art museum's gift shop. This type of quality is par-for-the-course for similar coffee table tomes from publishers in Japan, Germany, Italy, France, etc.
The imagery is starts out okay, but quickly becomes monotonous. I think it is mostly from one or two photographers, so it feels a bit like an artist's monograph. It would have been more interesting to see a wider range of photographers contributing to this book.
Unsurprisingly, my favorite shot was not an Apple-commisioned photographer, but one provided by NASA. It is one of the few shots where the Apple product is recorded with the greater context of its usage (and maybe owner) rather than just an object of patterns and design.
More than anything else, that one NASA photograph shows how artificially constricted almost all the other photographs are in the book.
Nice effort, but I'd rather pile my coffee table with a bunch of out-of-print art books from the local used bookstore.
I really wish they'd bring back AppleDesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group by Paul Kunkel. Despite the awful editing (the text, while decently written, is rife with typos and grammatical errors), it's an amazing book that's chocked full of all of the various Apple concepts, designs and products that either never left the design stage, or almost made it into production (like Jaguar, the little-known internal RISC project at Apple that was basically supplanted by IBM/Motorola and the PPC). It also serves as an interesting backdrop to all of the drama that unfolded among Apple's own ID group, not to mention within the company as a whole.
I've looked around on Amazon, and used copies sell for almost the same price as this book ($249). For my money, AppleDesign is still the better book.
I've looked around on Amazon, and used copies sell for almost the same price as this book ($249). For my money, AppleDesign is still the better book.
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