This is a book with very few words.
It is about our products, their physical nature, and how they were made.
While this is a design book, it is not about the design team, the creative process, or product development. It is an objective representation of our work that, ironically, describes who we are. It describes how we work, our values, our preoccupations, and our goals. We have always hoped to be defined by what we do rather than by what we say.
The actual products are, of course, incontrovertible. We have attempted to develop an approach to representing them that is equally impartial. The photography is analytical and spare, free from personal voice and its consequent subjectivity.
We begin this archive with the translucent iMac of 1998, and we conclude with the Apple Pencil of 2015. We have not included all our work in the interim, only those products that seem significant, that demonstrate learning, or for which we simply have affection.
The decision to stop somewhere, to not include our current work, and to not reveal the design of future products was fantastically hard. Many of us have worked with one another for more than 20 years, and we have learned a lot together. The products in this book are the result of a profoundly close collaboration between many different groups. We behave as one team with a singular goal; how we work enables what we make.
Designing and making are inseparable. Seeing something made, you appreciate its nature. Understanding the remarkable transformation of anonymous materials into recognizable products, you begin to understand that we don't arbitrarily create form. Fundamental ideas and shapes are derived directly from our knowledge of materials and manufacturing processes: bending a single piece of aluminum to make a stand or cutting a holo to create a handle rather than adding multiple parts.
We attempt to develop forms that achieve an integrity between external surfaces and internal components. Look at the first iMac, on page 19. So much of the form was developed to be coherent and harmonious with the primary internal component, the cathode ray tube. You can see how forms and materials have evolved, driven by display technologies and components, as we transitioned from spherical cathode ray tubes to flat-panel liquid crystal displays.
We strive, with varying degrees of success, to define objects that appear effortless. Objects that appear so simple, coherent, and inevitable that there could be no rational alternative.
Although we have been doing this for many years, creating something simple never seems to get any easier. Simplicity is not the absence of complexity. Just removing clutter would result in an uncomplicated but meaningless product. I think a product that is truly simple somehow communicates, with striking clarity, what it is and what it can do.
Above all, I have come to feel sure that human beings sense care in the same way we sense carelessness. I do think we respond, maybe not consciously, to something much bigger than the object. We sense the group of people behind the products, people who do more than make something work, people who sincerely care about the smallest unseen details, as well as the big idea and primary function.