Fanboys

Let’s just say yes up front. If you’re a Mac user, now or at any point, you probably remember the models you used with great, perhaps alarming, clarity. Perhaps the first one was at school, or a friend’s house. Most likely not the office, but there are exceptions. You may have vivid memories of some aspects of the then-current OS: some version of 7 or 8, or, if you’re on that side of thirty, maybe Jaguar or Panther. Maybe even iOS. Maybe you remember beige Macs; maybe bondi. Maybe all you know is aluminum and white polycarbonate.

Many “fanboys” have been with Apple through good times and bad, have seen the stock price go up and down. We've seen good decisions and some, well, less good. But more than a string of business successes or dump trucks full of cash, we've seen one company out of many that shares something of our values. I don't mean “liberal values” necessarily, I mean design. I don’t mean “style”. Many Apple users have been stereotyped as “Apple Fanboys” for years, ostensibly because we’re swanky hipsters who live off of lattes and biscotti, and buy every Apple product without question, hence the “cult” of Apple. Apple has similarly been regarded as “style” over substance, “form” over function, and having the notorious “Apple tax” for being more expensive than the “competition”. Although not so much at the moment…

One thing about that, though, is we may have seen something in ourselves there: when Apple, through Steve Jobs, says “We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk”, we heard the same argument we make in our own work: we want to make good work that’s worth something. When the rest of the industry raced to the bottom, making cheaper and cheaper copies of one another's beige boxes, we wanted to be bondi blue. (Although we didn't want to be the puck mouse so much.) And this isn't just for the technology world: I know bakers and book editors and programmers and designers and accountants and managers and parents and cartographers who think their work has value, and recognize that in others. We can see a company that treats their customers the way we want to treat ours, and a company that values its own work the way we value ours.

If we seem loyal to Apple, maybe it's really ourselves we're loyal to, and our own ideals expressed. Where's the PC maker willing to argue “Don't make junk”? Really: where is it? We all want to learn, and get better, and have a long term vision of ourselves, and at the moment, Apple has that. Maybe it's design we're loyal to, not just visual decoration, but the “goal-oriented problem solving” that guides visual, industrial, strategic design, but so many other aspects of our lives.

We're all designers, in some ways, at some points in our life. That’s what I’m a fan of.

People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Steve Jobs

(Written on an iPad, albeit awkwardly, which is more Drupal than anything else.)