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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 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 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.
We of course decided to keep going, somewhat rebuffed, and yet 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 know what they were doing. When they retired it shortly thereafter it wasn't a shock, and I recall feeling somewhat sad about it.