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Like many Apple products, it was a really neat service, but was a PITA to deal with internationally.
This and the photo prints service were the two that really made me ignore the pompous advertisements during the Keynotes. The photo books were also gorgeous, just extremely late, pricey, and dealing with UPS was utterly to exotic for the receiver. I ordered twice and gave up.
Learned to wait for what Apple would actually do outside of their bubble.
Pretty sure that, even though the source name is changed, the article has enough detail to identify them.
Possibly, but at least a cursory internet search of the person's name doesn't being up this article. Which is a good thing.
Wow, I can see this type of service becoming a big hit these days. Similar to LP and analog photography comeback.
There are several companies doing it. Here’s Touch Note:
https://touchnote.com/us/welcome/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/touchnote-personalized-cards/i...
Pretty sure those folks are just using a digital press and sending things out w/ a bar-coded envelope w/ printed indicia --- as noted in the article, it was the letterpress aspect which set this apart.
Well, sure. But GP says “this type of service” which is indeed available. The exact service would be outrageously expensive, and too few customers would buy at the required prices.
This is classic Steve Jobs. Sheer force of will.
Sheer force of stupid, no one cares if a bar code is on the envelope.
I dunno. Premium products are a difficult thing. I can't weigh in because I don't care about cards at all, I'd much rather receive a wedding invitation via e-mail yet people spend hundreds on custom cards on thick card, custom printing etc etc. In fact, some couples are insistent on getting their wedding invitation envelopes "hand cancelled" so they look crisp and clean when they arrive at their destination:
https://www.theknot.com/content/hand-cancel-wedding-invitati...
If you're one of those people I could absolutely imagine you'd care about a visible barcode on an envelope. They kind of have to be premium products because if they’re blah then people will just use evites, which are better in a bunch of functional ways. The product relies on its differentiators.
Clearly one person did.
Not only an untrue statement, but also a sadly incurious way to approach someone else's design choice. Yes, it was an enormous amount of work and invention to achieve a desired effect, but the effect is striking in an environment that is otherwise plastered with everyday visual clutter.
Minimalism is difficult and expensive to achieve. Some people consider that effort worthwhile.
Someone who cares about the barcode tends to care about other details. In some ways it's like the band riders that have silly things like no brown m&m's.
I literally thought of brown m&ms when I read your first sentence and have to say this way of thinking has to be some kind of mega baloney, no offense. I would be more concerned if someone actually spent time sorting brown m&ms because it means I'm dealing with people pleasers that waste time on nonsense, thus not having time for more important things.
As for the design details, the proof is in the pudding. If they sold well then the person with this idea understood the vapidness of his customers to the point of contempt. But I am reminded of how things like design evolve from being there to solve a problem to over time becoming the problem itself that needs solving and the actual focus. But I don't think this is a good way to deal with things.
From a systems perspective, the brown M&Ms are a "canary" (a.k.a. "sentinel indicator"). If a venue can't handle that or simply decides that it's "mega baloney" and ignores it, one can no longer assume that they've done anything competently, or at all.
This. Van Halen has stated as much - if there are brown M&Ms, chances are really high they haven't paid attention to detail, and a deep dive is going to uncover some serious problems:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-did-van-hale...
As an aside, I did think the M&Ms story was just a band being a diva until I heard them explain it like this. It's actually brilliant.
I am aware of the story and the theory behind it, I just don't agree. There is always something to do, and if you have a tightly run competent group, things go smoothly only because the team has a routine built on experience. If you throw a wrench in that and have someone waste time fiddling with m&Ms it will make the other important things worse. For me, asking for something like that and actually getting it would be more terrifying because it would be an indication that you're dealing with amateurs that don't have a routine and no experience. And also like I said, people pleasers that prioritize satisfying important people's whims instead of providing quality work. It's just been my experience those two don't really mix well, you either strive to be skilled at what you do and progress in your career, or you strive to make someone happy, and progress in your career. Think of the Volkswagen engineer that implemented the exhaust gas test cheating device. I expect qualified people to question nonsense, and to disagree. Skilled people are not McDonald's employees flipping a burger after the instructed 90 seconds or whatever. If you run your organization or team rewarding lemming like behavior, just following along with everything everyone else is doing, you will get a team full of lemmings. There's no way around that. How much you can accomplish with that depends on the task. For McDonald's it's fine, but then again it's a shitty product.
We can of course disagree, there's no harm in that.
One call: “hey saw the m&m requirement. Respect, but we aren’t doing it of course. See yall at the show.”
And as somebody who has been on the receiving end of funny riders, a simple message to the talent’s team indicating you saw it but that you don’t plan to carry it out is usually sufficient. All they care about is whether or not you were paying attention.
Not baloney. Someone who thinks they can decide what’s important about a production, not the production designer or manager, is likely to draw the line at the wrong place. Someone who faithfully implements detailed instructions is more trustworthy. A quick way to check if that’s the case helps to determine which kind of person oversaw the work.
I used to work as a developer at creative agencies and saw this all the time. There were developers who had a hard time believing that they should implement designs to the pixel because they thought a bit of padding didn’t matter so long as they got the important items right. They were almost always the ones who ended up missing important details (copy, working forms, performant databases etc.)
There's a related Steve Jobs quote:
"When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
I think this depends on your goal. You can plausibly make either a cabinet that is beautiful all the way through, or one that is beautiful on the outside without wasting money. Both are pretty reasonable choices.
It’s not just about the money, it could also be about being a perfectionist. Going that extra mile.
We are talking about fundamentally unreasonable people who make literally insane products. Some called them insanely great.
We don’t want reasonable choices. We want change.
Here’s to the crazy ones.
(It breaks my heart that most in Apple management these days are quite thoroughly sane.)
JUMP!
When you’re sending someone a personal card barcodes makes it look very impersonal, maybe even makes it look like junk mail.
The amount of work that went into getting regulators IN EVERY JURISDICTION IN THE WORLD to let Apple put the regulatory markings behind an info button in the OS (instead of printed on the device) just so that the back of the phone can be clean of all text and iconography except the Apple is absolutely mindblowing.
I appreciate it SO MUCH. I remember on the 7 or 8 when it happened how totally blown away I was.
Now there’s less visual/symbol spam in my daily view of an object I (and billions of others) use constantly. This stuff is way more important than people think.
I would maybe appreciate things like this, if manufactures made phones with solid grip and not by visuals or metrics like thickness measured at thinnest point. But as they are all of them go into bumper cases that hide whatever they have on the back.
And removing the indicator lights from most of their chargers! unlike the twinkling stars of other companies that blind you while you're trying to sleep.
Honestly only dumbasses wouldn't appreciate these small things that accumulate to a big difference, just instinctively downvoting from bumache just because it's Apple
I remember the moronic Samesung ads that made fun of the iPhone 4 or 5 for moving the headphone jack to the bottom of the phone.. not realizing that it made it easier for people it put in their pockets while letting a headphone or charging cable go straight up.
Less "sheer force of will" and annoying arrogance and stubbornness.
Reminder that Jobs is not a good role model. A lot of his decisions were erratic and based on what might as well have been undiagnosed BPD.
What part of this is annoying? They made the barcode invisible so the envelope looks better. That’s wildly unnecessary, but cool.
That’s what makes Apple different than other tech companies. They have an extreme attention to detail that extends even to their packaging.
Arrogance and stubborness would be insisting on doing things that are literally impossible. This is pushing people to go beyond "computer says no" attitude.
You mean maniacally focused on customer experience?
I worked on a similar project for a non-profit at a previous job. No letterpress though, which I'm kind of bummed about.
The software in this space is execrable (I wrote a TeX tool to do it based on a CSV and it would've been okay if they'd allowed it to run on the server as each order came in, but they insisted instead on ganging things up which added complexity and made the files large enough that csvtool in TeX had a hard time working through them), and dealing with the USPS can be quite thorny, but as noted, customer relations is a potential minefield and managing customer expectations could get really expensive (once we had to pay $800 to have a single card delivered same-day because it was that or lose the contract).
I also argued that we should integrate the preview, generating a pixel image of the actual addresses from the typesetting system so as to push the responsibility for address verification onto the customer, but even though we were doing that for custom order books in a separate project by a different department it was shot down as an unnecessary complexity.
As the co-founder of Sincerely (at this time in 2011), I remember this keynote very specifically because it felt like we'd been Sherlocked. We were busy building out Postagram and Sincerely Ink, both from-iPhone-to-printed-card apps. afaik we were the first app to do this, and we were at that time gaining a lot of momentum. I remember seeing the announcement for Cards and feeling a mix of fear and anger that it felt like Apple was using their clout to take our idea.
I seem to recall my co-founder being somewhat more optimistic about the whole thing. And sure enough, we found that the announcement really only seemed to boost awareness.
Apple Cards was an extremely limited and flawed product, and we already had some distinct technical and feature set advantages. It was clear Apple didn't have their heart in it nor know what they were doing. When they retired it shortly thereafter it wasn't a shock, and I ironically recall feeling somewhat sad.
The part of "founder-led" companies nobody talks about. For every groundbreaking tech project, there's 100 other people sleeping in conference rooms working on some rich guy's latest brain-fart that everyone knows will never work.
Hahaha precisely. The other part people seem to ignore is that there are bound to be projects with potential that are unilaterally killed early on because of the founder’s “taste” and ego.
I was once in a position to relay the sleeping-in-conference rooms situation to such a leader. The tone of surprise, confusion, frustration, and more than faint contempt in his voice as he said “everyone got paid didn’t they?” stays with me
Money solves all their problems, if it doesn’t solve everyone else’s then fuggem
Some of those rich guy brain farts turned out to be iPod and iPhone.
Wasn't apple near bankruptcy when they made those? Only saved by a Google-style payment from Microsoft to ensure Microsoft wasn't legally a monopoly?
There were a few years between those events.
The iPhone came about 6 years after the iPod, which itself was wildly successful so certainly Apple was nowhere near bankruptcy when the iPhone launched.
They also weren't on the brink of bankruptcy when they made the iPod either - the original iPod launched in 2001 which was ~4 years after the Microsoft investment you mention (that happened in 1997).
Apple actually launched the highly successful iMac (the colourful ones) back in 1998, and it was arguably the success of that which restored Apple to having good profitable. I.e. it was already well on the 'up' by the time the iPod launched and propelled them to even greater financial success.
Apple was "near bankruptcy" in the post-Jobs 90s period of the late 90s. Closer to the time of the 1997 CRT iMac, which was one of the first products Jobs launched after coming back. (And could be credited as the major turning point.) The iPod came out in 2001, along with the shift from the classic OS to OS X and launch of the iBook and an overall major product shift.
The iPhone was long after Apple was a majorly successful company that people wanted to emulate.
Microsoft also never just gave Apple money for no reason. They settled Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation by agreeing to continue to develop Office for the Mac and to purchase $150M in non-voting Apple shares, and both companies agreed to cross-licensing of OS patents.
No those came later, it was the colored translucent iMacs that got them back in track, then the iPod.
I completely forgot about this app. It was a few years later that I had my own experience of using a letterpress machine (and debossing) and tracing my finger on the debossed letterforms. I don’t have a letterpress machine now but now I really wanted cards with letterpress. I guess more than a decade of dealing with exclusively digital invitations and the sort made the pendulum swing the other way.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided… It’s the sound of failure.”
Ah yes, that notorious -96dB noise.
Surely tape saturation or the artifacts/tone coloring of vinyl records would have been a better example.
Such a pretty website / blog. You don't see many of these nowadays.
It's funny, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard fame) made PhotoCard - a very similar app around the same time:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-legend-bill-at...