Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
‘Never the Same Game Twice’
John McCoy:
From around 1970 to 1980, the Salem, Massachusetts-based Parker Brothers (now a brand of Hasbro) published games whose innovative and fanciful designs drew inspiration from Pop Art, Op Art, and Madison Avenue advertising. They had boxes, boards, and components that reflected the most current techniques of printing and plastics molding. They were witty, silly, and weird. The other main players in American games at the time were Milton-Bradley, whose art tended towards cartoony, corny, and flat designs, and Ideal, whose games (like Mousetrap) were mostly showcases for their novel plastic components.
Parker Brothers design stood out for its style and sophistication, and even as a young nerd I could see that it was special. In fact, I believe they were my introduction, at the age of seven, to the whole concept of graphic design. This isn’t to say that the games were good in the sense of being fun or engaging to play; a lot of them were re-skinned versions of the basic race-around-the-board type that had been popular since the Uncle Wiggly Game. But they looked amazing and they were different.
These games mostly sucked but they looked cool as shit. Lot of memories for me in this post.
Another Steve Jobs Quote on Lower-Priced Macs
Steve Jobs, on Apple’s quarterly results call back in October 2008:
There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.
Harry McCracken, writing at the time:
With that out of the way, the question that folks have been asking lately about whether Apple will or should release a netbook-like Mac is fascinating. Regardless of whether the company ever does unveil a small, cheap, simple Mac notebook, it’s fun to think about the prospect of one. And I’ve come to the conclusion that such a machine could be in the works, in a manner that’s consistent with the Apple way and the company’s product line as it stands today. I’m not calling this a prediction. But it is a scenario.
Apple made many $500 “computers” in the years between then and now. But they were iPads, not Macs. I think part of the impetus behind the MacBook Neo is an acknowledgement that as popular as iPads are, and for as many people who use them as their primary larger-than-a-phone computing device, there are a lot of other people, and a lot of use cases, that demand a PC. And from Apple, that means a Mac.
Steve Jobs in 2007, on Apple’s Pursuit of PC Market Share: ‘We Just Can’t Ship Junk’
In August 2007, Apple held a Mac event in the Infinite Loop Town Hall auditorium. New iMacs, iLife ’08 (major updates to iPhoto and iMovie), and iWork ’08 (including the debut of Numbers 1.0). Back then, believe it or not, at the end of these Town Hall events, Apple executives would sit on stools and take questions from the media. For this one, Steve Jobs was flanked by Tim Cook and Phil Schiller. Molly Wood, then at CNet, asked, “And so, I guess once and for all, is it your goal to overtake the PC in market share?”
The audience — along with Cook, Jobs, and Schiller — chuckled. And then Jobs answered. You should watch the video — it’s just two minutes — but here’s what he said:
I can tell you what our goal is. Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And we want to do that at the lowest prices we can. But I have to tell you, there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship, that we wouldn’t be proud to recommend to our family and friends. And we can’t do it. We just can’t ship junk.
So there are thresholds that we can’t cross because of who we are. But we want to make the best personal computers in the industry. And we think there’s a very significant slice of the industry that wants that too. And what you’ll find is our products are usually not premium priced. You go and price out our competitors’ products, and you add the features that you have to add to make them useful, and you’ll find in some cases they are more expensive than our products. The difference is we don’t offer stripped-down lousy products. We just don’t offer categories of products like that. But if you move those aside and compare us with our competitors, I think we compare pretty favorably. And a lot of people have been doing that, and saying that now, for the last 18 months.
Steve Jobs would have loved the MacBook Neo. Everything about it, right down to the fact that Apple is responsible for the silicon.