> Now almost every digital device I own is made by Apple, not because its perfect or the best on the market, but because it represents the virtues of craftsmanship in a world of mediocre, mass-produced products.
Err... their products are mostly mass-produced (not crafted) in the same places most of the other products are mass-produced.
Well, of course they are mass-produced. You, him, and everybode else here knows that.
But there's craftmanship in design: Read something about how Jobs/Apple goes about designing a product. There's an intense passion to get the look, feel and functionality about a product just right. Down to having several iterations of design on the packaging alone.
There's also craftmanship in production. There was an article about how Apple was buying up high powered lasers to puncture microscopic holes in the macbook casings, so you have lights that are invisible when they're not on.
I wish more companies would care as much about the whole experience of a product, rather than just getting more dots on the feature list.
Excellent points. I think if the original poster had written something more like this we would all agree, but writing "mass produced" in the pejorative sense when Apple is exactly that called for a bit of a rebuttal.
"Production" refers to design as well as the assembly of atoms. In that context, a company that produces a few models of thngs is craftsmanlike when contrasted with companies that put out dozens of slight variations on the same thing, almost as if shipping twelve handsets is a/b testing...
I agree that Apple's stuff looks classy, has a nice aesthetic, and has a lot of design work that goes into it, but it's also important to see some of the marketing hype for what it is. It's not hand-crafted by gnomes steeped in the crafts of wafer etching, working from little cabins high in the Tirolean Alps.
Yes, Apple products are not hand-crafted by gnomes, but they do represent a set of priorities that are rare in the world of manufacturing. I think it is more than a marketing gimmick; there is truly a desire to produce a quality product rather than only maximizing profit. I'm sure there were many times where Jobs vetoed a design decision where a little money could be saved at the expense of quality. I hope that the future leadership of Apple continues to have that courage.
How is that not just a made up caricature? What single example of Apple's marketing can you show that suggests anything of the sort?
The only marketing materials I've seen from Apple that say anything about how the products are made show Jony Ive in a workshop talking about industrial machine processes.
Err... their products are mostly mass-produced (not crafted) in the same places most of the other products are mass-produced.