Plastics News Europe - July/August 2019 - 5

design landmark

The original "Bondi Blue" iMac
was featured in this column in
November 2013 but, given the
imminent departure of Apple's Chief
Design Officer Jonathan "Jony" Ive,
it's a good time to revisit his most important design.
Most important? Surely that's the
original iPhone? In transforming Apple into the company it is today the
iPhone is a pivotal product, sure. But if
the iMac had failed, there would
have been no iPod, no iPhone, no
$1 trillion valuation.
Jony Ive, viewed as a secular saint
by Apple acolytes, doesn't have a
faultless record (his G4 Cube of 2000
was a flop, his "butterfly keyboards"
have proven unreliable) but there's a
good reason why he should be celebrated here: he was an unrepentant
cheerleader for plastics. On the
launch of the iPhone 5c in 2013, Ive
described the product as: "Beautifully, unapologetically plastic."
In the early 1990s, Ive worked for
the design consultancy Tangerine,
which counted Apple as a client. One
of his early designs at Tangerine, the
Novamedix A-V Impulse System
(which featured in this column in

2012) used the sculptural potential of
injection moulded plastic to soften
what would otherwise have been an
imposing machine for treating deep
vein thrombosis. Produced to this day,
it looks like the blueprint for the
beige PCs and peripherals of the midto-late 1990s. Apple invited Ive to
join its team in California.
Consequently, for his first few
years at Apple, Ive was straitjacketed
by the expectations of the PC market:
functional boxes in unchallenging
beige. But when founder Steve Jobs
returned to the company in 1997, after a 12 year hiatus, he understood
that bold design was Apple's only
hope.
You can't overstate what a terrible
mess Apple Computer was in, back in
1997. Its joint ventures with IBM and
Motorola, intended to break Microsoft and Intel's dominance, had collapsed. It tried to licence MacOS to
third parties but, with no growth in
OS-market share, it cannibalised its
own hardware sales. And MacOS itself, once pioneering, was starting to
lag behind Microsoft's Windows.
This is when plastic (and brave
management) came to the rescue.

How Apple advertised its iMac as fashion, not
technology

Jobs axed all the products that
weren't core (bye bye printers,
farewell Newton digital assistant,
see you, third parties) and asked
Ive to concentrate on an all-in-one,
plug and play, internet-ready computer: the iMac. Apple purists were
distraught that their old peripherals were incompatible. But Jobs-andIve's candy-coloured creation brought
Apple to new market sectors and
brought in the revenue needed to
overhaul MacOS and lay the framework for iPhones to come.

Design Landmark
is researched and
written by James
Snodgrass

SAVE THE DATE!

www.prseventeurope.com
july/august 2019

Photo: ©Apple Inc

apple imac (revisited) (1998)

http://www.prseventeurope.com

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