Linked List: July 19, 2019

Friday, 19 July 2019

Jony Ive Describes the 20th Anniversary Macintosh in 1997 ★

This was so early in Ive’s career that he still had hair, and went by “Jon Ive”. The 20th Anniversary Mac was a weird beast, starting with the fact it commemorated the 20th anniversary of the company, not the Mac (which was 11 years old at the time). The main thing is it was never meant to sell at scale — it started at $7,500 and according to Wikipedia Apple only ever made 12,000 of them. It was a shipping prototype, effectively.

But the design clearly presaged what we now know as the modern iMac, which effectively is the modern desktop: all-in-one design, LCD display (this was truly radical in 1997), good built-in speakers, and an attempt to minimize the tangle of cables most PCs and Macs had in the back. All the hallmarks of Ive’s design sense are there.

Mark One: Apollo Edition ★

I’m a big fan of Studio Neat, the two-man design studio of Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost. Their Glif is an amazing iPhone tripod mount (works with any size iPhone, or any other phone for that matter), and their Canopy turns Apple’s Magic Keyboard into my favorite portable iPad keyboard.

One of their most recent products is a pen: the Mark One. I’m using one as my daily carry right now (with a custom 3D-printed converter that lets me use my beloved Zebra Sarasa 0.5mm ink cartridges^*). It’s a very nice pen and a beautiful, functional object. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, they’ve created a limited edition version, on sale in an 8-day Kickstarter campaign that coincides with the dates of the Apollo 11 mission. The project is already funded three times over — most likely, I suppose, from fans of the standard Mark One — and this is the only opportunity to buy this edition. I’m in.

* For years, I swore by 0.4mm Sarasas. But now that I’m older and my eyesight is deteriorating, I can’t print as small as I used to, so I switched to 0.5mm a while back and now I can’t believe I ever used the 0.4mm pens for so long. A tenth of a millimeter sounds like a negligible difference, but in practice, it’s the difference between “very fine” and “fine”.

Ken Rosenthal on Jayson Stark ★

Ken Rosenthal, writing for The Athletic:

Sometimes, I wish I could think like Jayson — and sometimes, with all the stuff ping-ponging around his brain, I’m grateful I cannot. But always, I wish I could write like him. Jayson’s writing is conversational, entertaining and often laugh-out-loud funny. He doesn’t take himself seriously. But he takes his audience extremely seriously, and considers no detail too small in his service of the reader.

Among his many attributes, Jayson has a knack for engaging relatively obscure veterans who are keen observers of the game, and then elevating them to oracles in his columns. After a long night of October baseball, 99 percent of us will gather in the clubhouse around the star of the game. Jayson will be off in the corner, talking to whoever he has identified as this year’s Corky Miller or Casey Candaele or Skip Schumaker or Mark DeRosa — and naturally, getting the best stuff.

Stark was a longtime baseball columnist for The Inquirer here in Philly. Back in the ’90s, he got an entire two-page spread in the Sunday Inquirer all to himself. My roommates and I used to fight over who got to read it first. I like The Athletic a lot, but I’d subscribe just to read Jayson Stark.