Word: ibooks
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...iBooks are beautiful. Sitting at my roommate's new Macintosh laptop, I almost wish that I never switched away from Apple. The iBook's translucent polycarbon plastic casing is soothingly, subtly textured, and its rubberized blueberry trim is smooth and soft. It's flared, curved outline and rounded edges remind me of a clam, and the white springs visible beneath its cloudy-clear keys look almost like veins. As I hold it in my lap, the iBook feels vaguely alive...
...perhaps, Apple says with the iBook, this is the wrong approach to the question of how people and computers should reconcile their disparate personalities. Instead of worrying that in the presence of computers we will become too isolated from each other, too unemotional, we should be finding ways to reduce these qualities in computers themselves...
...Carried by its long fold-out handle, the iBook could be a sleek, flat fourth-grader's lunch-box. It is a laptop with a sense of humor--almost ridiculous in its rejection of more serious stereotypes of computer. Designed to live in someone's backpack, it can be handled with relative impunity. Colored like a pre-school toy, it can be considered with a modicum of flippancy and easy camaraderie...
...housed within Ive's "emotional human forms" packaging they could lose some of that alien aloofness. We could be more natural around computers. Perhaps instead of worrying that we will become too much like computers--too unemotional and uninvolved--we should work on making computers more like us. The iBook, at least, is a small step in the right direction...
STEVE JOBS iBook's a hit, G4 looks super, and Toy Story 2 has light-years of buzz. Too late to get stock...