Conclusion - Renewed consumer focus: 1990-91
4-frogdesign || 5-Corporate focus || Conclusion || Bibliography & links
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Fortunately for Apple, several ideas for inexpensive Macs were already being explored by engineers. In October 1990, three of these emerged as realized products, replacing the Plus, SE, and IIx in an unprecedented sudden shift. Apple's 1990 Annual Report emphasized that a "exciting new chapter in the history of Apple Computer" was signalled by these new products:
With these three computers, we put much of the power of our most advanced computers into our least expensive ones. Together, they will help us to reach our goals for the 1990's: To offer the best possible personal computing technology, and to put that technology in the hands of as many people as possible (Apple, 1).
In each of the three new products, the Snow White language was quieted and partly supplanted by a new style that would emerge over the early 1990s.
The Macintosh IIsi, the LC and the Classic, marketed and priced for the consumer market, each suggest a movement away from the boxy design that the previous Macintosh II had used to meet corporate expectations. These expectations were for the standard created by IBM with its PC in 1981, a standard not simply in technology, but in the physical design which expressed it. The variety of forms which computers took after the "homebrew" hobbyist market began to grow into a consumer industry nearly disappeared after IBM sanctioned this raw, industrial look of its machines. As the most recognized and successful company to arise out of the hobbyist era of personal computing before the entry of IBM, Apple resisted this emerging standard, both through its very different values and through their expression in physical design.
The replacement of Steve Jobs with Jean-Louis Gassée as the principle figure to guide product design signaled a new corporate direction for Apple. The desire of the Macintosh team to create a consumer product "for the rest of us" became a drive for profitable sales to the business sector; democracy became less significant than economics. The Snow White design language, developed to give a formal elegance to consumer appliances, was adapted instead to Apple's corporate market.
The design of Apple products continued to express the goal of the company to make technology accessible without intimidation. However, the vision of a democratic revolution through computing which drove the Macintosh design was diluted in order to fit within the expectations of a corporate audience. Apple products were still differentiated in a way expressive of its underlying technological philosophy, but as Apple's business philosophy adapted to find common ground with its corporate customers, its products also adapted to the more expected corporate form. However, its adaptation to this PC standard, along with the inevitable use of Snow White details by other manufacturers and the improvements to Microsoft's imitation of the Macintosh interface, Windows, gradually reduced Apple's distinct identity.
Realizing the need to attract the consumer audience originally intended for the Macintosh and to depart from its increasingly stale and inappropriate design language, Apple introduced three relatively inexpensive computers at the end of 1990. These machines began a new era in Apple's physical design towards an expressiveness rarely even suggested by a PC. In its uniquely vital need to differentiate itself from other computer companies, Apple continues to generate products that communicate its beliefs, both about the relationship of people to technology and about the expectations of its audience. The articulation of Apple's beliefs through the physical design of its products, as much as its business strategy or reports of its corporate culture, has maintained a cult-like following that has already endured a contradictory neglect for the consumer in the pursuit of profit; the message of the objects seems to prevail.
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