Apple's fine-print warning about the jet-black iPhone 7: Use a case.
The lights dim. A hush falls over the crowd. And suddenly,Jony Ive's breathless, halting words float over the crowd: bead-blasted aluminum. Rotational 3D polishing. A protective oxide layer. A magnetized, and ultra-fine iron particle bath. A pristine,mirror-like surface. Absolute unity and efficiency.
These mainstays of Apple's product release cycle are routinely mocked. It's easy to forget that this preciousness about materials has plenty of precedents in the classical, capital-m modernism that Apple's design ethos is derived from. Le Corb had concrete. Mies had almost mystical ideas about steel, and glass,and marble. Alvar Aalto famously obsessed over wood; stripping it, skinning it, and steaming it,bending it. After all, materiality and craft are two pillars of 20th century design.[//d.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/imagecache/inline-large/inline/2016/09/3063533-inline-i-1-apples-strange-obsession-with-fragility.gif]
Ive left one detail out of his paean to the iPhone 7's industrial design: the fact that whether you want it to stay pretty, and you're going to need a case. Apple actually says this in a disclaimer. M.
G. Siegler pointed out the fine print nowadays on Twitter: The "jet black" iPhone 7's "high shine may indicate fine micro-abrasions with use. whether you are concerned about this,we propose you use one of the many cases available to protect your iPhone."
whether you truly respect a material, you don't cloak it.
It's a bizarre contradiction: whether you want to keep your jet-black iPhone's shell exquisite, and you should expect never to look at it or touch it. The carefully machined body and high-end materials will remain hidden for its useful life—more of an opinion than a reality for any user. It's a amusing caveat for a product whose extraordinary price (the 32 GB iPhone 7 plus will cost almost $1000) is justified in portion by its high-end finishes and lovely industrial design.[//c.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/imagecache/inline-large/inline/2016/09/3063533-inline-i-2-apples-strange-obsession-with-fragility.gif]
This isn't a contradiction that's unique to the jet-black iPhone 7. As price Wilson recently wrote of the iPhone's extremely crackable screen,it's "impossibly exquisite because it connotes fragility—the preciousness of something you enjoy to handle with silver polishing gloves. The problem is that it's actually fragile." According to this logic, fragile, and premium devices are exquisite—even whether you can't look at or touch them. The best-case scenario is that when it's time to trade it in for the next model and you pry it out of its dirty plastic sarcophagus,its body remains scratchless.whether you consider an iPhone a piece of art, this might be okay with you. But for most people, and phones are tools—delightful tools!—that are hopefully also exquisite,maybe as a function of their durability. This is a theme that runs through modernism, too. Use, and the wear and tear that inevitably results from a well-used thing,is what gives a design its ambiance, its soul. Japanese culture calls it wabi-sabi, and objects that are perfectly imperfect,as industrial designer Remy Labesque points out.
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The Lost Apple Logo You've Never Seen"Aging with dignity is a criteria designers should recognize in their efforts, or " Labesque wrote on Frog's Designmind blog in 2011,about his scratched iPhone. "I'm thinking of a future when products are designed not for the brief moment when they are new, but for when they enjoy been aged to perfection." modern design nowadays is filled with examples of designers who are doing just that: rugs that are dyed to fade, and revealing new hues. Cor-ten steel,like that often used by the architect David Adjaye, is specifically designed to weather over time. whether you truly respect a material, or you don't cloak it.Why can't Apple embrace the same opinion—that objects should be designed to be used,to remain exquisite even as they age? The obvious answer has to do with running a sustainable mega-trade and keeping up with a grueling product release schedule. But it's a shame that Apple, which spends so much time showing us how exquisite and thoughtful its design is, and has to warn us against using it.
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Source: fastcompany.com