The impact Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive have had on the personal computer is immense. At Macworld in Tokyo earlier this year half of the exhibition floor was taken up with colour accessories - no longe
The impact Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive have had on the personal computer is immense. At Macworld in Tokyo earlier this year half of the exhibition floor was taken up with colour accessories - no longer mere peripherals - for the iMac and iBook ranging from coloured desks to matching carry bags. There were even several exhibitors offering 'i' jewellery; however, companies hoping to cash in on Apple's success face a problem trying to match the translucent colours that were specially developed for the iMac.
When Jobs first came up with the concept of designing computers 'so delicious people want to lick them' he faced a problem of coming up with a manufacturing process that would ensure that the resin used in the translucent cases would be the same colour for the first machine off the line as it was for the last.
Ironically the solution was found in the candy industry.
'The translucent resin presented a problem because of the high volume of products we needed to produce,' said Ive. 'We had to make sure that the colour and level of translucency were exactly the same in the first computer and every one thereafter. This led us to finding a partner who does a lot of work in the candy industry, because a lot of candies are translucent. These guys have so much experience in how you control the compounding and a great understanding of the science of colour control.'
This association with candy has continued with Apple's soon-to-be-released Mac OS X operating system, which Jobs unashamedly describes as eye-candy. It is the first time an operating system has been designed with the same concept of style and imagery and it is designed to break the mould of a bland graphical user interface that contains the bare necessities and little else. OS X uses a lot of bright and often translucent colours, 3D imagery and movie-style transitions as part of its interaction with the user.