Famous designer says Apple will reveal 'revolutionary' product within 8 months - Page 4

Yeah the speaker thing is not his best work. And his furniture is hit and miss for me. A few pieces are great, many of them are just not targeted at me I think. Everyone should remember though that a designer like Stack (and other freelance types) don't work in a vacuum. The client has input and very often sets the starting point. Plus, he in particular is not trying to please everyone. That just isn't what he does with design. That's why his work elicits such a wide range of commentary. For sure, he thinks different. I would bet that is the real reason he was consulting with Apple (or maybe only Jobs directly). Simply to pick his brain.

Considering its open knowledge that Jobs placed an order with him to do work on his mega yacht in 2009, and that Starck's major focus for the past couple of years has been interior work and green energy, including the mega yacht called "A", it pretty obvious that is what he is referring to. Why else would he be meeting with Jobs wife?

As others have noted, Ives is certainly Starck's peer in design and his better in the kind of work that makes up Apple's DNA. No way is Starck designing some key innovation in Apple's product line. And given his industry rep and publicity savvy, its very likely that his coy statements are just a great way to promote himself through the buzz any Apple-related news generates.

I understand the logic of your argument... Except that (in the US) the cablecos have their boot on the larynx of content delivery. With the music companies, and, to a lesser extent, the phone carrier(s) -- Apple introduced a compelling solution that they had to implement... "if you grab them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow!"

I don't see Apple gaining a position of strength in home TV unless they offer an alternate delivery system -- or one that so greatly expands the capacity/capability of the current cablecos offering -- that the cablecos will be forced to go along with Apple.

There is only one "L" in Philippe.

What is the difference? The reason fruit juice is considered a health risk is that people often drink it quickly on an empty stomach and the natural sugars enter the blood stream rapidly causing an imbalance in insulin which can lead to increased risk of diabetes over time. If you want to drink fruit juices for the benefits of the natural vitamins and other nutrients, you should consume food at the same time which will slow down the absorption of the sugars to normal acceptable levels. Or simply eat the fruit instead of making juice with it. Then you get the added benefit of fiber.

I don't buy it for a second. If he did do anything for Apple he'd be working with the ID team and I just don't see that happening. Too much of an ego. Not sure what he thinks of Ive or the Apple ID team, but he did tell Dieter Rams that he thought Apple was ripping Rams off. Not sure Ive would agree to work with someone who thinks his talent is ripping off Dieter Rams.

Doesn't QNX have CarOS heritage -- especially in regard to monitoring and controlling the entire operation of the car...

Seems like a natural evolution would be to include AV entertainment and navigation.

So you don't think Ive ripped off Rams? Looking at photo comparisons of their work I would say he did. Or to be more polite, he used Rams' work as very deep inspiration.

I think Ive is amazing, but the similarity between his and Rams' work is startling.

I agree with this, in combination with the unibody earbuds: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...c_bonding.html

They will have a single wire connecting L & R plus bluetooth connectivity to the Nano.

Wear an iPod Nano watch on your wrist and play through newly designed earbuds.


Or it could be for a product that is out of Jony Ive's scope of design ability. Why would Apple need an outside designer to help with designing a CE product if they have Sir Jony, the King of modern day CE design, at the helm already?

Maybe it's a TV that makes coffee? That would be revolutionary!

I don't know this Stark guy but I think it's plausible Apple uses outside talent for developing designs.

Here is an interesting article about Steve Jobs on first seeing the Segway. I recommend reading the whole thing as it gives a lot of insight into how Steve thinks but I'll point out this one part...

1. Yeah, all you needed to add was a kb, TV-Typewriter circuitry, Dazzler boards for graphics and color, Assembler and BASIC languages... the Apple ][ Had all those things and game paddles -- you plugged an RF modulator into the Apple and the TV -- any person could do it!

2. Doing it so people could actulally use them, and wanted to buy them was new!

3. And they sucked. Apple sold more iPads in the first year than tablets sold in the prior 10 years.

Woohoo!!! I've got it.

Apple's going to be producing a Starck-designed yacht.

Or maybe a sexbot using Mrs. Jobs as the model.

Or maybe a sexbot driving a yacht.

Or maybe something else.

The iSaver, it will save all of humanity.

CultOfMac erroneously claims that this is the yacht Steve designed. It's absolutely hideous.

Just can't trust any "cheese eating surrender monkeys". No matter what they say.

No way. Lacks simplicity, minimal aesthetic. Less is the new more.

yes, but they were never the same after iPad.

According to LinkedIn Doug Field is currently a VP of product design at Apple. Not sure who he works for or if he's part of Ive's ID team. I did a patent search and his name didn't come up at all with Apple. A while back Apple hired Richard DeVaul to work on wearable electronics. I believe he's since left the company but when he was there he was working under Jony Ive. I could maybe see Stark collaborating with the ID team on something but more likely if he's involved with Apple it's designing a new store or finishing Steve's yacht.

Well since we have covered almost every other topic might as well take it a little further.

Simplicity is a nice thing as long as you don't lose important functionality to achieve simplicity. A trimaran is a very important configuration for stability and safety but it does tend to complicate the hull design. Perhaps there is a bit too much complexity with the windscreens here, but most of that design is an essential part of the functionality.

They don't. We have no idea what Stark is referring to and something could have been lost in translation. If he really is working with Apple on a new product design (TV or something else) no way would he be talking about it publicly. As far as we know since Ive took it over the Apple ID team hasn't worked with other high profile industrial designers. If it didn't happen when Ive and team were just getting started I can't see it happening now when they've really hit their stride and are considered the best in their industry.

Boy did they suck. And tablets running Windows have existed since the days of 16-bit Windows. Oh yes, I have used them. They were heavier than a 17" MacBook Pro and had 3 hour batteries. Little had changed from those days to the UMPC days, other than Moore's Law. But tablets were still crippled Windows laptops without keyboards.

I like the design but I think this is better.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK5ofoKbv1o

Really? That doesn't look very comfortable or safe.

After looking a little more closely at the original trimaran design, it is not apparent how you would conveniently get to the bow or the poop deck. So it still needs some work I guess.

I agree

The WallyPower 118 has been a fav of mine for years - truly beautiful and kind of scary. 16,800 horsepower total from three gas turbines. 70 mph top speed. They should use in a bond movie for the villain's boat.

Giorgio Armani's yacht is also pretty amazing.

For a multi-hull vessel, I like this one.

I'm sure Apple (just like Microsoft) hires freelancers and senior designers from everywhere for special projects so they don't develop tunnel vision and miss obvious design solutions.

I'm not a yacht man. I'm not even a car man.

But that's my favorite yacht. It's just so clean.

The litre per second nonsense would have Steve balking, though. He wouldn't ever be that wasteful. And he'd want something more livable. I imagine the 118 has to be mostly fuel tank…

Not fair. I'm not the one to work it out, seeing as for years I have had no cable, haven't watched TV except for the occasional DVD, been on full exile from the commercial mediasphere.

All I know is that McLuhan got media right because, as an Irish-Catholic-Canadian English professor mostly on the works of James Joyce, he saw the contours of the shift from print to electronics and the resulting global village clearly, as a total outsider, better than anyone else at the time.

As an outsider myself, I predict that more people will find the living-room internet screen more interesting than the old force-feed model from the ad-crippled Providers. There will be a shift of enough magnitude that lack of content deals will be seen as minor annoyances. YouTube is only the beginning. Global-village FaceTime (in 3D?) is more like what's the future of television. The past 15 years have shown that many people prefer communication with each other over passive content consumption. Maybe I'm just being optimistic. And as thataveragejoe points out, sports and news are exceptions. Or is there a crowd-sourced way around that?


Thank you for an eyewitness report from the past.


Great story. Good find.

I'm with you. If it doesn't have a gun turret and a helicopter pad I move right along to the next offering at the boat show. Torpedoes would be good also.

The way that tech works the answer could be not in your lifetime. Perhaps not even in your kids or grandkids. Not if you are looking for something that wasn't at least a kernel of an idea before Jobs died.

Actually I would prefer a unibody aluminum iMac-like TV design, tough it was already copied by LG

I agree. Content not the actual set is what will make something like this sink or swim. Which is part of why I question if they are making a tv set at all. The Apple TV may always stay this set top box and what they could be working on is a major overhaul of the Cinema Display series to make it more advanced, more size options and more inputs so you can use it with your computer, your blu-ray etc. Might it have the Apple TV hardware inside, perhaps. But it won't be just about the Apple TV. And they won't discontinue the box for those that would rather keep using their Samsung etc TV

Who the heck knows? Perhaps they'll have something like a sensor that sits on or near the TV that would compliment their face recognition, iCloud, content deals and video streaming technology. Whatever is released, it will have to be idiot-simple and irresistible.

A friend who does design work for large corperations (not the electronics industry) often laments the concept of NIH. Not invented here. In other words I agree with you.

Apple is no more in the TV/Film production business than it is an ISP or a cell phone company. And they don't want to be.

That said, if someone came to them and wanted to sell a show that was an 'iTunes original' I think they wouldn't care so long as the sellers have the legal rights to put it up for sale and Apple gets their 30%. Or it could be a way to keep shows with a rabid fan base going without dealing with a network or the ratings. The whole Fox Studio shopping Terra Nova after Fox Net called it a successful gamble and then killed it comes to mind. That horde of fans seems rabid enough they would be willing to pay as much as $4.99 an ep (if it is in 1080p) to keep it going. And if that gamble was a success it could be the beginning of the end for the Nielsen ratings system deciding what is and isn't produced

Which is why J Mays at Ford commissioned Marc Newson to design the 021c car. The design team at Ford didn't even know the project was happening until it was presented to them for inspiration. Truly not invented there.

Wonder no more:

Stock Dividends, corporate charitable contributions and seeking settlements over annihilation in some inter-corporate disputes.

(PS: Just an observation not an evaluation.)


They played well off each other in a creative tension, true. So the new homeostasis and synergy (or lack of same) among the top-decision makers will be of great importance



The thing pictured looks like a Martian tripod in a bad moodm but the article - from 2008 - is very revealing (slightly excerpted, emphasis supplied):

Quote:

Renowned French designer Philippe Starck says he is fed up with his job and plans to retire in two years...

"I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact'"

"Everything I designed was unnecessary. I want to do something else, but I don't know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself... design is a dreadful form of expression."

Starck, who is known for his interior design of hotels and Eurostar trains and mass consumption objects ranging from chairs to tooth brushes and lemon juice squeezers, went on to say that he believed that design on the whole was dead.

Sound like the guy you want designing your next "magical and revolutionary" Apple product? Unless he had a spiritual revival by spending time with Steve, of course.

You also notice how a) he's addicted to hyperbole and delusions of grandeur and b) hardly followed through on his "retirement."



Well said!


Ford and MS seem to have forged a good working partnership with Sync. I've only seen demos, but if you could add some special Apple sauce....

Also well said. Form follows function. Which has always been true and was articulated about the emerging architecture of skyscrapers over 100 years ago:

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law

Louis Sullivan, American Architect, 1896 He and Steve seem cut from the same cloth. As was Frank Lloyd Wright. Stay hungry!

PS: the phrase was also used by a sculptor, Horatio Greenough, in 1852 (also in relation to architecture).

Not quite as well said. I'm not going to re-refresh my memory by searching, but I'll basically stand by this: There were other devices which were arguably "personal computers" (for true geeks) emerging at Homebrew and elsewhere - Steve and Steve's was just better, more accessible and marketable. It's kind of like asking "who invented the automobile?" as the technology was ready for it to emerge, people had a vision of it, and, and although Karl Benz had the first patent (aided immeasurably by his wife, Bertha Ringer Benz, it appeared independently in about 12 places within a period of a few years. And Henry Ford's "invention" of the assembly line was, not too arguably, what made the car business take off like a rocket.

In other words, the PC was GOING to emerge. It was however forever shaped and enormously influenced by Apple.

Apple WAS the first (I think) to merge a pocketable "phone/music/podcast personal computer" into one device, but all those things existed separately or in partial combination before that, so more of an engineering and design tour de force merged with a brilliantly conceived and executed software and content infrastructure. And the 3rd device you described was an elaboration on the aforesaid iPhone (sans the phone), and not the first tablet, though those were previously stylus-driven in the main.

This is not to belittle Apple (nor to suggest they're not inventors - as they hold many thousands of in-house developed patents), rather it's a misapprehension of what they've always been fundamentally about: always using a whole panoply of emerging technologies in designing and making what other people were grasping for elegant, intuitive, useful and accessible to "the rest of us." (And at a very healthy markup!)

Considering that they fought for this country at one key point in its history, and most recently, cleanly and efficiently took care of Gaddhafi (unlike our pathetic, long-drawn out mess in Iraq and Afghanistan), that's a bit of a silly claim. And highly ethnocentric too.