I think he wants them to sell weed. Maybe someday...
If only ascii WOULD smoke some weed. He might find a way to lighten up. Too many these days go through a wasted youth without smoking pot, and they end up as trollish curmudgeons. brlawyer is another that could use some right-brain medicine.
Apple aren't exactly pirates nowadays are they? You go in to an Apple Store and it's about as sterile and corporate as you can get.
Er, what? No, the wood-rich Apple Store design is warm and inviting, a direct opposite of corporate stores like best buy or comp usa. That's what made them the most successful retail spaces per sf and copied by others.
Apple aren't exactly pirates nowadays are they? You go in to an Apple Store and it's about as sterile and corporate as you can get.
Clearly, you have not been in any bricks-and-mortar consumer electronics stores in the past thirty years.
For a consumer electronics retailer, Apple is the polar opposite.
Best Buy, Good Guys, Circuit City, Comp USA, Frys, Gateway Computer, the defunct Sony store at the Metreon in SF, Radio Shack, any cellular carrier store, etc. Those are/were far more sterile and corporate than an Apple Store. Warehouse-sized buildings, strip malls, industrial tile floors/carpet, standard metal shelving in aisles, fluorescent lighting, banks of cash registers, anti-theft scanners, advertisements, etc.
Let's say you and a pal want to check out a new computer. You park your car in Best Buy's huge parking lot and walk past the aisles of CD blanks, cellphone cases, A/V cables to the computer aisle. But wait, there's someone demoing the computer you are interested in. So you wait until he/she is gone. Meanwhile, you demo other computers a few inches away, hoping that the person will get uncomfortable and quickly walk away. When you decide you are happy with the computer, you grab a box from a shelf full of boxes, then walk over the ugly ass blue-and-yellow corporate colored carpet to the check-out line to the sales associate wearing the ugly-ass blue-and-yellow corporate polo shirt. If the item is faulty, you return to the store and go to a moribund ugly ass blue-and-yellow service counter, the cheap formica counters heaped with dead monitors, broken PCs, and random items in opened blister packs.
Apple Stores are light and airy. Bright, but not illuminated with banks of industrial lighting full of 4-foot cool white fluorescent tubes, no crummy tile floors. There are no stacks of boxes, Apple has taken the products out of the boxes, put many of them on wood tables (not metal shelving) where people can see and try them. You and your pal can try the same device at the same time, even talk about it since you can face each other or be side by side. Today, there isn't even a check-out line. If you need help with a purchased device, you sit at a wood table while the person helps you out. They don't even have chairs at Best Buy or Radio Shack, it's basically a cattle call.
Apple retail employees carry around handheld POS terminals, can e-mail your receipt. At Best Buy, you get a three-foot long ugly-ass receipt plastered with logos and full of promotion codes, rebate offers, etc.
And from a business standpoint, how does this all play out? Apple Stores are number one in the most important retail metric: revenue per square foot. In fact, they are way ahead of the number two retailer, jewelry store Tiffanys. That's right, they blow doors on everyone despite the fact they don't cram their stores with aisles of crap.
Apple made their retail experience something totally different from the ugly ass consumer electronics retail model. They made it more like shopping for something personal, like clothes at The Gap. You are welcome to try the Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc.
When Apple finds a suitable retail location that happens to be in a historic or architecturally significant property, it strives very hard to retain much of the original building's good qualities. No other consumer electronics retailer bothers to do that. The corporate and sterile approach would be to find a strip mall, tear down what's there and build a big box store full of aisles of metal shelving, cheap carpet and fluorescent lighting.
It's not like Apple is going to buy a bunch of horse-drawn carriages and arrive in town like some carpetbagger, nor is it going to set up operations in some fusty old general store with cobwebs in the corners, dust covering everything, the shopkeeper is an old guy wearing a leather apron. The Apple Store reflects Steve Jobs's aesthetic, a clean and simple California style. That sense of California is so important to the company that they choose to use California places as names for OS X.
Heck, Apple clothed their retail staff in t-shirts. How many other consumer electronics retailers do that? Maybe Microsoft? (who ripped off everything from Apple for their Microsoft Stores). And the Apple Store managers don't wear a suit and tie. They dress like the other employees. That's about as un-corporate you can get in retail.
Your comment shows you know nothing about consumer electronics retail and very little about Apple's philosophy on aesthetics.
Stealing her font name was about as classy as stealing the Swift name from the academics who created the real Swift language: http://swift-lang.org/main/
Apple need to stop doing this.
She was employed by Apple when she made the font, last I checked; unless she had some kind of clause in her contract or there was an agreement, they own her work.
You're comparing the price of a mass produced tool to the price of collector art. How strange.
Of course. Except the value of that flag is not likely to increase much. Only the rarest Apple prototypes approach that level. Sure, it's nice, but you could probably make something up yourself (or pay someone to do it) for far less money.
Stealing her font name was about as classy as stealing the Swift name from the academics who created the real Swift language: http://swift-lang.org/main/
Apple need to stop doing this.
I have no idea if you have a point about Swift (the site gives no hint at how long it's been around), but saying that Apple shouldn't use the name San Francisco for its new font is like saying that Apple stole it's own name when it introduced the iMac.
Of course. Except the value of that flag is not likely to increase much. Only the rarest Apple prototypes approach that level. Sure, it's nice, but you could probably make something up yourself (or pay someone to do it) for far less money.
I bet you could copy almost anyone's signature with a little practice, so therefore it's a waste of time collecting autographs. People value having a "piece of history" or other physical connections to things/people they admire/desire. Nothing wrong with that, even if your own (or my own) values differs.
Just curious, what would your reaction be if someone started selling exact copies of that flag for $30 on eBay?
Er, what? No, the wood-rich Apple Store design is warm and inviting, a direct opposite of corporate stores like best buy or comp usa. That's what made them the most successful retail spaces per sf and copied by others.
This is correct, but ascii doesn't register such real-world elements as wood or soft finish aluminum, or the occasional juicy bits of color at the 5C table.
I love the way people with PC-deadened senses use the word "corporate" to describe Apple's character because it's successful and ubiquitous. As if they didn't get that way by putting users first and fighting bad corporate taste their entire history.
Clearly, you have not been in any bricks-and-mortar consumer electronics stores in the past thirty years.
For a consumer electronics retailer, Apple is the polar opposite.
Best Buy, Good Guys, Circuit City, Comp USA, Frys, Gateway Computer, the defunct Sony store at the Metreon in SF, Radio Shack, any cellular carrier store, etc. Those are/were far more sterile and corporate than an Apple Store. Warehouse-sized buildings, strip malls, industrial tile floors/carpet, standard metal shelving in aisles, fluorescent lighting, banks of cash registers, anti-theft scanners, advertisements, etc.
Let's say you and a pal want to check out a new computer. You park your car in Best Buy's huge parking lot and walk past the aisles of CD blanks, cellphone cases, A/V cables to the computer aisle. But wait, there's someone demoing the computer you are interested in. So you wait until he/she is gone. Meanwhile, you demo other computers a few inches away, hoping that the person will get uncomfortable and quickly walk away. When you decide you are happy with the computer, you grab a box from a shelf full of boxes, then walk to the check-out line. If the item is faulty, you return to the store and go to a moribund service counter, the cheap formica counters heaped with dead monitors, broken PCs, and random items in opened blister packs.
Apple Stores are light and airy. Bright, but not illuminated with banks of industrial lighting full of 4-foot cool white fluorescent tubes, no crummy tile floors. There are no stacks of boxes, Apple has taken the products out of the boxes, put many of them on wood tables (not metal shelving) where people can see and try them. You and your pal can try the same device at the same time, even talk about it since you can face each other or be side by side. Today, there isn't even a check-out line. If you need help with a purchased device, you sit at a wood table while the person helps you out. They don't even have chairs at Best Buy or Radio Shack, it's basically a cattle call.
Apple retail employees carry around handheld POS terminals, can e-mail your receipt. At Best Buy, you get a three-foot long ugly-ass receipt plastered with logos and full of promotion codes, rebate offers, etc.
And from a business standpoint, how does this all play out? Apple Stores are number one in the most important retail metric: revenue per square foot. In fact, they are way ahead of the number two retailer, jewelry store Tiffanys. That's right, they blow doors on everyone despite the fact they don't cram their stores with aisles of crap.
Apple made their retail experience something totally different from the ugly ass consumer electronics retail model. They made it more like shopping for something personal, like clothes at The Gap. You are welcome to try the Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc.
When Apple finds a suitable retail location that happens to be in a historic or architecturally significant property, it strives very hard to retain much of the original building's good qualities. No other consumer electronics retailer bothers to do that. The corporate and sterile approach would be to find a strip mall, tear down what's there and build a big box store full of aisles of metal shelving, cheap carpet and fluorescent lighting.
It's not like Apple is going to buy a bunch of horse-drawn carriages and arrive in town like some carpetbagger, nor is it going to set up operations in some fusty old general store with cobwebs in the corners and dust covering everything. The Apple Store reflects Steve Jobs's aesthetic, a clean and simple California style. That sense of California is so important to the company that they choose to use California places as names for OS X.
Heck, Apple clothed their retail staff in t-shirts. How many other consumer electronics retailers do that? Maybe Microsoft? (who ripped off everything from Apple for their Microsoft Stores). And the Apple Store managers don't wear a suit and tie. They dress like the other employees. That's about as un-corporate you can get in retail.
<span style="line-height:1.4em;">Your comment shows you know nothing about consumer electronics retail and very little about Apple's philosophy on aesthetics.</span>
I have no idea if you have a point about Swift (the site gives no hint at how long it's been around), but saying that Apple shouldn't use the name San Francisco for its new font is like saying that Apple stole it's own name when it introduced the iMac.
For sure, San Francisco (the city) has changed in the past thirty years.
In that sense, it seems natural that Apple would envision a new San Francisco font, the old one swept away into the annals of typography history.
I have no idea if you have a point about Swift (the site gives no hint at how long it's been around), but saying that Apple shouldn't use the name San Francisco for its new font is like saying that Apple stole it's own name when it introduced the iMac.
A lot of Apple's designers (at least the ones that work with Jony) live in San Francisco. My guess is that's why they picked the name for the font, not to piss off Susan Kare.
There are no stacks of boxes, Apple has taken the products out of the boxes, put many of them on wood tables (not metal shelving) where people can see and try them. You and your pal can try the same device at the same time, even talk about it since you can face each other or be side by side. Today, there isn't even a check-out line. If you need help with a purchased device, you sit at a wood table while the person helps you out. They don't even have chairs at Best Buy or Radio Shack, it's basically a cattle call.
I think there are two points in this paragraph that need additional attention.
1) The lack of boxes being stored under and around each product. As you note, perhaps MS has followed Apple's lead, but all the other stores did and do that. It's ugly, uses the sales floor as a warehouse, and it's ugly. It's only when you get to the back with the self-checkout items do you get any items on the wall, and this is an area that has been shrinking over the years. Remember when most of the shelf space was dedicated to boxed software? I'm so happy that is over with.
PS: The Gateway store near me had no boxes on the sales floor but that's because you could only order from the store with no in-house pickup. I also use in-house loosely as it was a strip mall in the cheapest place possible, which was just one of many reasons why Gateway stores failed.
PPS: Around the holidays Apple may put a protected, and manned table in the store to help facilitate faster sales of more popular items.
2) Rarely do I ever go into an Apple Store to find the demo units not functioning, with broken or worn components, or even noticeably dirty. With the number of people they have coming through I assume there are a far amount of replacements but without having plastic pieces designed to pop off it's surely much less of an issue than with other stores with CE demos.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever been to a carrier store that didn't have at least several of their devices non-functioning and many others that look like they were left with a 6 month old puppy for an afternoon.
PS: I wonder if they record and use their demo device replacement results to better engineer their future devices.
Stealing her font name was about as classy as stealing the Swift name from the academics who created the real Swift language: http://swift-lang.org/main/
How do you know they stole it? Maybe they asked permission to use the name or offered them some money. I don't hear them complaining. It got them some publicity at least anyway.
We're either trademarked? If not, then I would expect Apple to pay out for these.
The Swift scripting language is fairly recent 2007, but who the hell has used the old San Franscisco font in the last 30 years. It's ugly as ****; I'm hard pressed to find a less attractive font. Even Dingbats is more readable¡ if I made that font the only reason if be upset with Apple is for calling attention to a font I wish remained forgotten.
Comments
If only ascii WOULD smoke some weed. He might find a way to lighten up. Too many these days go through a wasted youth without smoking pot, and they end up as trollish curmudgeons. brlawyer is another that could use some right-brain medicine.
Er, what? No, the wood-rich Apple Store design is warm and inviting, a direct opposite of corporate stores like best buy or comp usa. That's what made them the most successful retail spaces per sf and copied by others.
You're comparing the price of a mass produced tool to the price of collector art. How strange.
And have you seen all the oily canvas at art galleries! I can get canvas so much cheaper at Lowes!
Try reading the piece next time. "More of an homage than a direct copy". (first sentence, second paragraph...demanding, I know)
That being said, it looks pretty darn similar to the grainy, compressed image in the video still.
Apple aren't exactly pirates nowadays are they? You go in to an Apple Store and it's about as sterile and corporate as you can get.
Clearly, you have not been in any bricks-and-mortar consumer electronics stores in the past thirty years.
For a consumer electronics retailer, Apple is the polar opposite.
Best Buy, Good Guys, Circuit City, Comp USA, Frys, Gateway Computer, the defunct Sony store at the Metreon in SF, Radio Shack, any cellular carrier store, etc. Those are/were far more sterile and corporate than an Apple Store. Warehouse-sized buildings, strip malls, industrial tile floors/carpet, standard metal shelving in aisles, fluorescent lighting, banks of cash registers, anti-theft scanners, advertisements, etc.
Let's say you and a pal want to check out a new computer. You park your car in Best Buy's huge parking lot and walk past the aisles of CD blanks, cellphone cases, A/V cables to the computer aisle. But wait, there's someone demoing the computer you are interested in. So you wait until he/she is gone. Meanwhile, you demo other computers a few inches away, hoping that the person will get uncomfortable and quickly walk away. When you decide you are happy with the computer, you grab a box from a shelf full of boxes, then walk over the ugly ass blue-and-yellow corporate colored carpet to the check-out line to the sales associate wearing the ugly-ass blue-and-yellow corporate polo shirt. If the item is faulty, you return to the store and go to a moribund ugly ass blue-and-yellow service counter, the cheap formica counters heaped with dead monitors, broken PCs, and random items in opened blister packs.
Apple Stores are light and airy. Bright, but not illuminated with banks of industrial lighting full of 4-foot cool white fluorescent tubes, no crummy tile floors. There are no stacks of boxes, Apple has taken the products out of the boxes, put many of them on wood tables (not metal shelving) where people can see and try them. You and your pal can try the same device at the same time, even talk about it since you can face each other or be side by side. Today, there isn't even a check-out line. If you need help with a purchased device, you sit at a wood table while the person helps you out. They don't even have chairs at Best Buy or Radio Shack, it's basically a cattle call.
Apple retail employees carry around handheld POS terminals, can e-mail your receipt. At Best Buy, you get a three-foot long ugly-ass receipt plastered with logos and full of promotion codes, rebate offers, etc.
And from a business standpoint, how does this all play out? Apple Stores are number one in the most important retail metric: revenue per square foot. In fact, they are way ahead of the number two retailer, jewelry store Tiffanys. That's right, they blow doors on everyone despite the fact they don't cram their stores with aisles of crap.
Apple made their retail experience something totally different from the ugly ass consumer electronics retail model. They made it more like shopping for something personal, like clothes at The Gap. You are welcome to try the Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc.
When Apple finds a suitable retail location that happens to be in a historic or architecturally significant property, it strives very hard to retain much of the original building's good qualities. No other consumer electronics retailer bothers to do that. The corporate and sterile approach would be to find a strip mall, tear down what's there and build a big box store full of aisles of metal shelving, cheap carpet and fluorescent lighting.
It's not like Apple is going to buy a bunch of horse-drawn carriages and arrive in town like some carpetbagger, nor is it going to set up operations in some fusty old general store with cobwebs in the corners, dust covering everything, the shopkeeper is an old guy wearing a leather apron. The Apple Store reflects Steve Jobs's aesthetic, a clean and simple California style. That sense of California is so important to the company that they choose to use California places as names for OS X.
Heck, Apple clothed their retail staff in t-shirts. How many other consumer electronics retailers do that? Maybe Microsoft? (who ripped off everything from Apple for their Microsoft Stores). And the Apple Store managers don't wear a suit and tie. They dress like the other employees. That's about as un-corporate you can get in retail.
Your comment shows you know nothing about consumer electronics retail and very little about Apple's philosophy on aesthetics.
She was employed by Apple when she made the font, last I checked; unless she had some kind of clause in her contract or there was an agreement, they own her work.
Of course. Except the value of that flag is not likely to increase much. Only the rarest Apple prototypes approach that level. Sure, it's nice, but you could probably make something up yourself (or pay someone to do it) for far less money.
Stealing her font name was about as classy as stealing the Swift name from the academics who created the real Swift language: http://swift-lang.org/main/
Apple need to stop doing this.
I have no idea if you have a point about Swift (the site gives no hint at how long it's been around), but saying that Apple shouldn't use the name San Francisco for its new font is like saying that Apple stole it's own name when it introduced the iMac.
Of course. Except the value of that flag is not likely to increase much. Only the rarest Apple prototypes approach that level. Sure, it's nice, but you could probably make something up yourself (or pay someone to do it) for far less money.
I bet you could copy almost anyone's signature with a little practice, so therefore it's a waste of time collecting autographs. People value having a "piece of history" or other physical connections to things/people they admire/desire. Nothing wrong with that, even if your own (or my own) values differs.
Just curious, what would your reaction be if someone started selling exact copies of that flag for $30 on eBay?
This is correct, but ascii doesn't register such real-world elements as wood or soft finish aluminum, or the occasional juicy bits of color at the 5C table.
I love the way people with PC-deadened senses use the word "corporate" to describe Apple's character because it's successful and ubiquitous. As if they didn't get that way by putting users first and fighting bad corporate taste their entire history.
Very good post, with epic level of detail.
I have no idea if you have a point about Swift (the site gives no hint at how long it's been around), but saying that Apple shouldn't use the name San Francisco for its new font is like saying that Apple stole it's own name when it introduced the iMac.
For sure, San Francisco (the city) has changed in the past thirty years.
In that sense, it seems natural that Apple would envision a new San Francisco font, the old one swept away into the annals of typography history.
A lot of Apple's designers (at least the ones that work with Jony) live in San Francisco. My guess is that's why they picked the name for the font, not to piss off Susan Kare.
I think there are two points in this paragraph that need additional attention.
1) The lack of boxes being stored under and around each product. As you note, perhaps MS has followed Apple's lead, but all the other stores did and do that. It's ugly, uses the sales floor as a warehouse, and it's ugly. It's only when you get to the back with the self-checkout items do you get any items on the wall, and this is an area that has been shrinking over the years. Remember when most of the shelf space was dedicated to boxed software? I'm so happy that is over with.
PS: The Gateway store near me had no boxes on the sales floor but that's because you could only order from the store with no in-house pickup. I also use in-house loosely as it was a strip mall in the cheapest place possible, which was just one of many reasons why Gateway stores failed.
PPS: Around the holidays Apple may put a protected, and manned table in the store to help facilitate faster sales of more popular items.
2) Rarely do I ever go into an Apple Store to find the demo units not functioning, with broken or worn components, or even noticeably dirty. With the number of people they have coming through I assume there are a far amount of replacements but without having plastic pieces designed to pop off it's surely much less of an issue than with other stores with CE demos.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever been to a carrier store that didn't have at least several of their devices non-functioning and many others that look like they were left with a 6 month old puppy for an afternoon.
PS: I wonder if they record and use their demo device replacement results to better engineer their future devices.
Maybe Apple is paying homage.
We're either trademarked? If not, then I would expect Apple to pay out for these.
The Swift scripting language is fairly recent 2007, but who the hell has used the old San Franscisco font in the last 30 years. It's ugly as ****; I'm hard pressed to find a less attractive font. Even Dingbats is more readable¡ if I made that font the only reason if be upset with Apple is for calling attention to a font I wish remained forgotten.
Apple aren't exactly pirates nowadays are they? You go in to an Apple Store and it's about as sterile and corporate as you can get.
Not really, obviously you haven't been in a REAL corporate store, like IBM's dull stores which are now gone.
Or the more recent MS stores, which don't know how to present products to the general public.
When I go in an Apple store, on the way in I have to say to myself 10 times before the very friendly Apple sales people approach me; "only looking"!
But the let me look and try forever, so I have to resist buying and leave my wallet buried deep in my pocket.
However after I leave the Apple store I may dream for a few days about the lovely new iDevices I saw !
The weird thing is that pic was only taken in 2004¡
What would make an Apple Store not sterile or corporate?
Nothing. Consider the age and size of the company. It is what is necessary today.
The things that always amaze me in an Apple store, are that,
regardless of how many people are in it, it rarely seems "crowded"...
That, and the fact that everyone is usually glued to something, not just
cattling their way through...
Imagine yourself in a Sears or Macy's with the same concentration of people per square foot
as you often see in an Apple store - unbearable.
Given that this is a company dedicated to immersing you in a digital lifestyle,
that so many people are attracted actually to "show up" is almost miraculous.