Part of me agrees with the design takeaways here, and part of me admittedly prefers when my devices are as slim and unobtrusive as possible (no amount of lost desk space is worth the aesthetics of a zany computer monitor for me), but either way I'm always a little wary of these "remember the good old days of tech?" comparisons. Sometimes it feels like they're creating a false dichotomy where yesterday's devices were more pleasant to look at because they weren't tainted by corporate greed, and that today's devices are somehow uglier because all companies care about now is profit.
But these have always been mass-produced consumer devices. Even if you prefer the aesthetics of the original iMac to today's iMac, and even to the extent that corporate greed has arguably gotten worse, your relationship to Apple is the same either way--when you buy their products, you make them a lot of money.
This seems like a very strange comment. I don't think the materials and design of today's macs are any more profitable than the old ones. They used to make macs out of plastic, now they use much more premium materials. They look less fun, more high quality, and more professional. That has nothing to do with greed or profit margins, it's just what people actually want now.
I think you and I are probably in agreement there :) I would also wager, although obviously it's hard to say without hard data, that today's Macs are roughly as profitable as yesterday's Macs, and that today's design choices are at least partly a reflection of evolving materials, changing tastes, etc.
The thing I'm referring to is an attitude I've seen in TFA and elsewhere, although in the TFA it seems somewhat implied, where people conflate their preference or nostalgia for old products with a belief that the market behind those older products was any less cold and detached than the market for today's products. I don't know if I'm articulating it well, and there's additional context that's hard to surface here, but it's like this idea of "culture and design today suck because they're dictated by a handful of corporations; things were better <x> years ago when we had a different flavor of culture and design dictated by the same handful of corporations!"
IDK. It just gives me a yucky feeling when a presumably anti-conformist, maybe even anti-capitalist rejection of modern design goes on to, in the same breath, prop up the Sony Walkman(TM) as a rich cultural artifact from a better era. The antidote to our corporate overlords shouldn't be a time machine to revive an earlier version of those same corporate overlords.
I suspect it’s less a nostalgia for a less corporate time, and more of a nostalgia for an earlier stage of the product lifecycle. Pretty much every technology follows a similar path - after an initial version proves the market there’s an explosion of manufacturers and designs all trying something new before eventually the product becomes mature and settles on a single design.
The nostalgia is for a time when a new product could genuinely surprise you.
> your relationship to Apple is the same either way--when you buy their products, you make them a lot of money.
I don’t object to making companies a lot of money, so long as what I get is worthwhile.