[IreneE]

You do know that this is why Jonathan Ive, Apple's head designer, who created the original iMac G3, the iPod, the Titanium Powerbook, the iBook, the Powermac G5, the iPhone and the G4 Cube (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) — was knighted?

He is a pre eminent post modern industrial designer. Up there with all the dead guys from Bel Geddes.

Ive has been known to be a big fan of the Braun industrial designs of their electrical components from the 1960’s, and the Eames era Kartell plastic designs of the mod 70’s. This is what the white iBook was all about.

The industrial design of the first modern Powerbook, Ive's Titanium Powerbook G4, is an ode to forties modern. He eschewed this on the latter model “Aluminum” Powerbooks with their aluminum colored keyboards; extended this through the first generations of Mac Book Pros.

But he brought back that forties look with the Mac Book Air and now the newest generation of MacBooks and Mac Book Pros.

I think he is a genius and I mentioned to some art people I know that he deserves a major show of his work. Function/form = modernism. He is really a great designer. He would make all the early 20th Century designers like Mies/Corbusier/Bruer — even Charles Eames — proud.

[antiRepublicrat]

Sounds like you know your design. Yes, Ive is a genius. But that is mixed with hard work, as he tends to make hundreds of design variations before arriving at the final one. It used to be clay and such, I’ll bet he had a CNC machine all to himself to play with variations on the new MacBook/Pro case.