Apple worked with the US Postal Service and the Czech Post

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.

Possibly, but at least a cursory internet search of the person's name doesn't being up this article. Which is a good thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

JUMP!

When you’re sending someone a personal card barcodes makes it look very impersonal, maybe even makes it look like junk mail.

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.

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.