That's an interesting thing about an object. One object speaks volumes about the company that produced it and its values and priorities.
So much of what we try to do is get to a point where the solution seems inevitable: you know, you think "of course it's that way, why would it be any other way?" It looks so obvious, but that sense of inevitability in the solution is really hard to achieve.
Apple was very close to bankruptcy and to irrelevance [but] you learn a lot about life through death, and I learnt a lot about vital corporations by experiencing a non-vital corporation. You would have thought that, when what stands between you and bankruptcy is some money, your focus would be on making some money, but that was not [Steve Jobs’] preoccupation. His observation was that the products weren’t good enough and his resolve was, we need to make better products. That stood in stark contrast to the previous attempts to turn the company around.
If something is not good enough, stop doing it.
Its difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company.
We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer. It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.
One of the hallmarks of the team is this sense of looking to be wrong. It's the inquisitiveness, and sense of exploration. It's about being excited to be wrong, because then you've discovered something new.
Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see... rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make something better.
I discovered at an early age that all I've ever wanted to do is design.
The goal of Apple is not to make money but to make really nice products, really great products.
The more I learnt about this cheeky - almost rebellious - company, the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had reason for being that wasn't just about making money.
When you're trying to solve a problem on a new product type, you become completely focused on problems that seem a number of steps removed from the main product. That problem solving can appear a little abstract, and it is easy to lose sight of the product.
We make and sell a very, very large number of (hopefully) beautiful, well-made things. Our success is a victory for purity, integrity - for giving a damn.
There's no other product that changes function like the computer.
There's an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there's real simplicity. This looks simple, because it really is.
As consumers we are incredibly discerning, we sense where has been great care in the design, and when there is cynicism and greed.
Really great design is hard. Good is the enemy of great. Competent design is not too much of a stretch. But if you are trying to do something new, you have challenges on so many axes.
We say no to a lot of things so we can invest an incredible amount of care on what we do.
That's just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one.
At the start of the process the idea is just a thought - very fragile and exclusive. When the first physical manifestation is created everything changes. It is no longer exclusive, now it involves a lot of people.
In our quest to quickly make three-dimensional objects, we can miss out on the experience of making something that helps give us our first understandings of form and material, of the way a material behaves--'I press too hard here, and it breaks here' and so on. Some of the digital rendering tools are impressive, but it's important that people still really try and figure out a way of gaining direct experience with the materials.
Perhaps I'd like to design cars, but I don't think I'd be much good at it.
If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it's new you are confronting problems and challenges you don't have references for.
The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That's not simple.
It's just easier to talk about product attributes that you can measure with a number. Focus on price, screen size, that's easy. But there's a more difficult path, and that's to make better products, ones where maybe you can't measure their value empirically.
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