Steve Jobs wanted Macintosh design to be like the early Beatles
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wanted the Macintosh to be "like The Beatles," an award-winning designer from the team behind the device has claimed.
Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs
The National Design Awards took place on Thursday, recognizing excellence and innovation in the field. As part of the 2023 ceremony, held at the Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan, award winner Clement Mok offered an anecdote about his work with Steve Jobs at Apple.
When asked what his favorite design was, Mok offered to WWD that he was "most proud of the first child, which is the Macintosh, and then my most recent child [Sugarfish Sushi]."
Talking about the core Mac team, which he assisted via an affiliated design team, Mok and the other designers saw the design direction for the device as "Whatever Steve Jobs liked," with hundreds of design iterations performed on that belief.
"In a strange way, it was such an indoctrination about design for me as a practitioner," Mok added. "It was not about what it looks like." The "best way" to describe the concept was using a quote from Steve Jobs himself.
Jobs said "What I want is like The Beatles. It's the early Beatle, not the later Beatle," according to Mok. "We were like, Steve, we can't figure out what that means.' It was about having verve, energy, and soul."
Decades down the road, the ethos continues to persist, according to Mok. "When I talk to people from Apple and how they think about design, that core is still there. And you can't quite express it but their care about details and creating that experience and wow factor is making that emotional tug."
Mok also says Apple is "very much a fashion brand."
Mok received the award for Digital Design, and wasn't the only Apple-affiliated person to win. Arem Duplessis, a group creative director at Apple, picked up an award for Communication Design.
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Comments
Think of a single PC or Android device that has an iconic design where it stands out from the crowd in a good way or sets the standard for other products. The PC and Android industry is a pile of unidentifiable, uninspired, insipid garbage.
It baffles me how actually. Apple has been doing this for decades and they don't employ the only industrial designers in the world. I can only imagine that the other designers are working within tighter budget and time constraints and have different priorities.
This is Apple's 'secret sauce' that is right out there in the open.
Accessing the inside WAS a problem...
?????? What ?
The problem I’ve seen with the better companies that I’ve been associated with is that they try to emulate what everyone is saying is the right way to approach design, be it software or product design. However, when things that they’re trying to emulate do not produce the intended effect, perhaps because they really don’t “get it” or don’t have the required skills, they flip flop back to doing what they’ve always been doing or move on something else, usually with equally mediocre results. Chasing trends and what’s considered the next cool thing is very prevalent in product design. But putting on a doctors smock does not make you a doctor.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying all non-Apple products that compete against Apple are garbage. A lot of them are uninspired but still provide just enough value to be sellable and even desirable to large segments of the market. Such products may require sacrifices by their users to deal with the compromises their makers have designed into the products to make them attractive to the targeted segment of buyers. As long as the functionality, utility, and quality are deemed to be acceptable at their selling price people will buy them and live with the compromises.
Describing Apple as a “fashion brand” is in no way a knock on Apple and their designers. Apple very much cares about aesthetics and recognizes that Apple users feelings about their products is influenced by how the products look and feel in their hands and fit into their personal space. Delivering high levels of form and function in a personal product that becomes an extension of you and your environment is an incredible achievement. It always comes down to minimizing compromises and not settling, even when you could probably get away with less because you don’t think many people will notice, i.e., the back of the fence.
Apple is totally a fashion brand. Its designs speak for themselves as a fashion statement. Even a Mac sitting on a table is I'd say the most elegant looking computer on the market today. Every Mac looks high end now matter how expensive it is.