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Worked on a photo print pipeline around that era and the shipping side is always the part nobody plans for. Color profiles, trim bleed, and then a whole customer service load when a card lands late for someone's birthday.
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.”
Isn’t there variance in how long a venue’s contractual obligations will take to fulfill? One weekend someone needs you to spend X hours coordinating on sound and lighting, the next weekend it’s .5X hours? (Correct me if I’m wrong here if someone knows.) If they get the M&Ms right and they triaged appropriately, seems like a little indicator they scheduled enough people to work long enough to make it through the whole rider.
No cop out here with “oh just tell them you’re ignoring it”, treating the whole doc as a serious thing to get through or they can find another venue that will.
Edit: apparently to even deal with Van Halen you’d have to deal with not three 18-wheelers of gear, max, but three times as many! So you’d need way more hours I bet. Also an alternative that might rub some less the wrong way: some redditor (or liar) claims they’d put something really dumb mistake in their riders and good venues would essentially bring it up first thing.
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.)
Assuming that is an actual Jobs quote, it's pretty on-brand for him. Carpenters don't make furniture.
That's typical executive lack of awareness of the skills and roles of the little people charged with fulfilling their grand vision.
Also funny that a plywood back is often preferred because it holds the squareness of the furniture without the issues of wood movement you get with solid wood backings.
JUMP!
When you’re sending someone a personal card barcodes makes it look very impersonal, maybe even makes it look like junk mail.
But this is not a personal card. It is a credit card. Who in the world would even notice this detail?
This whole exercise sounds like a minimalist circlejerk that was only possible in a ZIRP environment.
Why did interest rates matter to Apple, a company famously averse to extended or significant borrowing?
It is a personal card, not a credit card.
This isn't about the Apple Card. It's about an iOS app called "Cards" which lets you physically mail personal cards straight from your iPhone.
Oof, serves me right for not reading the article! Thanks for the correction :)
I think many failed/aborted projects only seem stupid in retrospect because we assume it proof they could never have succeeded .. but many ridiculous things can and do succeed and find their place. It fizzled after his death without anyone championing it with persistent care and constructive iterations. It may well have ultimately failed, regardless, but it certainly lost its motive power.
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.
Speak for yourself, I don’t use a case.
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.
MagSafe chargers have lights though?
Well. Apple reuses the branding. The MagSafe chargers for Mac do have indicator lights, while the MagSafe chargers for iPhone do not.
The magnetic chargers for Apple Watch also do not have lights. Neither do the USB-C cables for iPads and AirPods. I assume the newest AirPod cases still have charging lights though.
Since we lost the on-MacBook charging lights (RIP).*
Apple Watch: set watch on charger or tap watch screen to check status. Same for iPhone. Tap AirPods case to see charging light as well.
*Guess I’ve survived without this, but it was a bummer my first Mac without it.
Really good point that those indicators are on-demand rather than always-on.
Succinct summary.
Ooh, “Your Apple Watch is fully charged.” notification on iPhone, that’s nice too. (Can sometimes just charge while showering/etc. and not think about it though.)
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.
The problem with Steve Jobs and his insistence on doing things his way is that other people were like ants to him. He made other people's lives hell when they had to follow his borderline insane orders. He'd yell at people, belittle them, insult them, and he got away with it every time because he was a billionaire and those other people depended on their paychecks.
And it was often for details that didn't matter. Like the exact shape of the curve of the plastic housing of some long-forgotten iMac. People just want computers that work and that don't look like total crap, they don't even notice the corner radius or whether the motherboard (excuse me, "logic board") is aesthetically pleasing according to the genius that took one class on calligraphy at Reed College.
He got away with it because the results were unique and valuable.
I like these comments that basically say working for Steve Jobs was hard. They carry a legend that is almost creative writing. Every year Steve Jobs becomes more of an evil genius villain-bastard hobbit-creature spreading the seeds of every sadistic personality disorder.
You mean maniacally focused on customer experience?
Can't believe they got USPS to do a custom stamp in 2011.
During my time at Apple one of the coolest talk I attended was about the process Apple went through to send a camera to the International Space Station and train astronauts how to use to use it to capture footage to be used as a screensaver in one of the earlier Apple TV versions.
It's not as complicated as it seems from a technical perspective. Stamps have been UV-tagged since the 1960s as an anti-counterfeiting/automated detection measure. In the analog era, you shine UV light on a letter and if it it glows enough, it's got a stamp.
Modern processing machines (AFCS) capture both a visible and UV image of the mailpiece, so it's fundamentally changing the image processing software to have it look for the barcode on the UV side if it can't find one on visible. The downstream DBCS sorters already read secondary barcodes that are applied by the AFCS which happen to be in UV ink.
Further, USPS benefits from the same idea to hide a barcode for marketing (junk) mail. When combined with a handwriting-like typeface, it makes letters look personal and gets people to open them more. Same psychology where mailers apply a bulk-rate stamp instead of using a permit imprint.
It's a very Steve Jobs/Apple case where it sounds like a minor detail that requires crazy advances, but under the covers, it's very technically feasible, and importantly, can exploit economies of scale.
What’s the latest on the roomful of people who read nearly-impossible-to-read addresses? Was dwindling last I heard—mad respect to them. You see some of those envelopes, complete chickenscratch or water damage, and somehow they get them to their destination.
In the 50s, when they started to use machines to sort mail, there were keyers at every facility that sorted mail. I believe there are still are still some local keyers on parcel sorters, where it's harder to "lift" the image of the address on a large box.
For letter encoding, they used to have 55 centers, in 2014 it became one, in Utah. A large part of it is OCR getting better and deciphering most handwritten addresses.
Another part of it is simple consolidation: it's trivial to send images over networks, and due to how mail has to be sorted together for dispatch, the demand tended to be peaky. Consolidation lets you exploit different timezones. (Slowing down the mail also gives a big benefit because you can spread the load over the whole day)
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.
What was wrong with it? It seems like they cared a lot about the physical experience of the cards and envelopes, for example. But maybe customers didn’t understand that or had different priorities.
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.
My thoughts as well. The main complaints I remember hearing about CDs were people claiming that they were “too clean” and didn’t have the same personality as analog formats
"Any format that is less clean than my favorite analog format is crap. Any format that is more clean than my favorite analog format is soulless."
That quote is from Brian Eno’s 1996 book, so he knows his stuff.
I’m guessing he’s referring to early CDs when both mastering and player DACs had digital roughness. Or maybe he’s talking about digital clipping which was deliberately being introduced in the 1990s to create loudness.
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...
I would use Cards while on vacation to send a spontaneous photo to elderly family members who weren’t online, and the experience was perfectly frictionless and very Apple. I don’t know if I ever saw the finished product.
I emailed Eddy Cue when the shutdown was announced and he agreed it was a great app but confirmed it wasn’t popular enough.
I don’t think I’ve sent a card since.
It is correct.