On Dear Startup Boys: Tuck in Your Shirts for the Media
Not that I don't agree in spirit, but tucking those shirts into those jeans isn't going to make them look presentable.
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On What We'd Do With $15.5 Million in Funding
You guys couldn't handle a pancake machine.
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On David Denby Does Something Relevant
The best part of the whole episode was learning that David Denby is Nikki Finke's favorite critic. Just, you know, of course.
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On Less Human Than Human: The Design Philosophy of Apple
@Alex Pareene @barnhouse I don't know! I think I really disagree with you about their marketing image: The message of the advertising (to me!) has never been "you have to be smart"; in fact, it's been the exact opposite. "Even morons can use an iPhone, and look cool doing it!" Compare the iPhone ads, which are all goofy music and people using their phones ("look how easy it is for me to look up a sushi restaurant!" [LOL]), to the Android ads (sorry Niko!), which are these horrible, intimidating three minute third-Wachowski-brother things that never make a case for the product's relationship to human beings. Apple stuff "just works"; it's intuitive (isn't it?); it's pleasing to the eye. (This is what I mean by "human," not the smiley face!) This, to me, is deeply democratic. (I mean, prices aside. Heh.)
I get that if you're a certain kind of person this seems "infantilizing" or "condescending." I suppose it is. I'm trying to think how to respond to this, because it doesn't really bother me? A lot of people are still intimidated by computers and smart phones. The Genius Bar is a place for them to go when they need help! You can think of its prohibition on DIY as a manifestation of "superiority" or you can see it as a (necessary?) trade-off for an ease-of-use-and-repair that allows it ("the computing experience) to be pleasing for a wider audience. (So part of the issue here is the question of how "necessary" Apple's "bad" stuff, i.e., its closed loop-ness, its "condescension," is for its "good" stuff, i.e. its works-right-out-of-the-box-ness. I don't really have an answer.) (The "real computer for real people" stuff, I should note, was a feeling that seemed a lot more "real" in the 90s, when Windows was way worse, and also I was in middle school and got in fights about this all the time. :-/)
Anyway! W/R/T the iPhone vs. the radio/shelving/LP player, Maria: I think you're selling the iPhone short! Off, it's a black slab; on, it's about the most inviting phone I can think of--rows of buttons to press! Everything responds to your touch! Maybe the fact that, qua object, it isn't inviting is enough to mark it a failure for you? (I'm curious: what modern technological objects do you think exist in the spirit of Rams or Morris? Do any?)
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On Less Human Than Human: The Design Philosophy of Apple
@max bread Ha, okay. So leave out that part if it bugs you! I am still interested to know more about what Maria finds "inhuman" about Apple design, and what things being made (in 2011) are... "Morrissian" in spirit. Why is Apple imperial and Braun democratic? What makes Rahm original and Ive not? Three photographs of (gorgeous) products do not convince me! For an essay about design, there's rather little about its specific manifestations.
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On Less Human Than Human: The Design Philosophy of Apple
@Niko Bellic Don't leave it at that! You're such a tease!
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On Less Human Than Human: The Design Philosophy of Apple
I'm kind of stuck on the characterization of Apple design as "cool and impersonal," "imperial," "lacking a human dimension"—I suppose I can see the argument that these are accurate descriptors of Apple's aesthetic. But then I'm not really sure what a "warm and personal" or "human" computer, MP3 player, laptop or tablet might look like. If Apple, with its rounded corners and anti-aliased fonts—with its famous smiling face, admittedly since abandoned—"lacks a human dimension," how do you characterize Dell and H-P and Apple's other cheap-plastic, jagged-edged competitors? (Or does this speak to yr point that Jobs and his team lacked the "absolute originality" of Dieter Rams? And if that's the case, can't we at least give him points for trying to make his products seem like something other than a circuit board in a case?)
& I think that the "impersonal" or "imperial" description of Apple loses all of its force if you only go back, say, a decade, and look at Jobs and Ive's first design coup, the iMac, which not only debuted in a bizarre color ("Bondi" blue, after the Australian beach) and odd shape, but also represented a return to the thing that Apple had made its name on: making a computer for "real" people; people who couldn't, or didn't want to, do anything besides buy the damn thing and take it out of the box. To me—to a lot of people, I think?—this is Apple's "design legacy": not the glass and unibody platinum (which surely would have passed out of Jobs and Ive's favor in a few years, just as the plasticky iMacs did), but the user experience: in the 1990s, Apple's were the only computers that felt as though they were made for people.
(I'm not going to take that claim a step further and say he was operating in the same mode as design democrats like Morris or Gregor Paulsen—Apple's price points would preclude that—but it seems worth remembering that the specific aesthetics of the stores or the hardware is only one part of Job's design philosophy, and that his products' intuitiveness, their ability to act as though they were to be used by humans, is as, if not more, important.)
But given that this is an article about taste, maybe it's better to chalk up the question of "human" vs. "impersonal" to the most true, and boring, thing anyone's ever said about taste: de gustibus non disputandum est.
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On How Bad Are New York's Airports?
@Bittersweet I've never had a problem with the EWR>NYP trip! I mean I'm sure it happens (as it does on MTA!) but hand-to-god in the dozen or so times I've done it I've never once been delayed.
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On How Bad Are New York's Airports?
You guys kill Newark, and then complain that NYC airports don't have easy (commuter-rail) rides to the city center? Newark is a half-hour New Jersey Transit ride to Penn Station! (It's annoying for people who live in Brooklyn, sure, but so is going to the other two airports.) I mean! Really!
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On Free To Be... Straight White Males
@stuffisthings I don't think even Max Read knows what he was doing, to be honest.