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Examples of apple.com website design versions over the years?

Discussion in 'HTML & Website Design' started by Dave Q, Jul 24, 2017.

  1. #1
    I'm having a hard time finding them... I was discussing with someone how design has gone from depth to minimalism, but I don't remember exactly how the old sites were.

    Note: Please don't debate depth vs minimalism in this thread, that's not what it's about.
     
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    Dave Q, Jul 24, 2017 IP
  2. #2
    Blank ™, Jul 24, 2017 IP
  3. MrKing01

    MrKing01 Active Member

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    MrKing01, Aug 4, 2017 IP
  4. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #4
    Whilst not actually about the Apple site, the following article does show 2007 vs. 2011 as an example of the evolution of flat design.
    https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/

    I consider it a must-read on the subject of usability and how design is evolving. As in ACTUAL design (aka engineering), not just spanking out a pretty picture and calling it design (aka "art").
     
    deathshadow, Aug 8, 2017 IP
  5. MrKing01

    MrKing01 Active Member

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    It might be off-topic but I'm curious to know what you think about the development of Apple's website over the years.. Have they improved or done the opposite?
     
    MrKing01, Aug 9, 2017 IP
  6. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #6
    It fluctuates like anything else. I'm not a big fan of Apple's products (that's being polite) or their revising history and their importance in it -- but one thing Apple has always been good at is marketing. That's why they are in terms of form over function they are the Ikea of computer hardware (no, that's not a compliment), and in terms of marketing they're Pepsi. They do really good campaigns and have really good ideas, and still they're in second place or worse.

    When they first went flat it was brilliant. Their old skeuomorphic website (and OSX UI) were increasingly resource heavy, increasingly ineffective due to what's now starting to be called "flash blindness" (where fancy flashy art actually alienates users for "ooh look at this scam"). It was still a giant middle finger on the accessibility and usability front in terms of not using elastic fonts and derping crap onto the page with pixels, but so was their OS. You don't find a lot of users with accessibility needs praising OSX or iOS for much of anything!

    In many ways it, along with the product line transformation away from "rainbow of colours" to "all the style of a recently sanitized hospital ward" was part of a brand-wide revamp to a cleaner simpler aesthetic. It was a modern version of VW's "Think small".
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Small

    ... and it was as if not more influential as it started the entire flat design craze.

    They held onto this simplicity for a long time, but ever since Jobbo the Clown passed away they've been slowly sliding back into fancy crap that gets in the way of the user. You can see this in the current iterations of the site with the massive screen wasting animations and static images that leave you asking "where the **** is the actual product description" -- they're trying to appeal to the right brain, and alienating the left as a result -- something that they never really did under Jobbo's leadership and direction.

    You go to their current site (as of 10 Aug 2017) it's painful to watch load unless you're in the urban fantasy-land of fiber connections. The images are too large and anything resembling actual information is so spread out, no real user is going to waste time scrolling around to find it. You click on the 'mac' section and it only gets worse in that regard. You're pretty much STUCK using the menu given that each categories' on-page description sucks down a whole PAGE worth of epic /fail/ at design even at 2560x1440. IF you're wasting a screen size image and scroll to deliver 12 words, you're not designing; you're spanking it on the graphics tablet whilst stroking your.... ego. I mean something else, but let's say ego.

    You go to open up macbook, you have this agonizing 20+ second delay before a goofy fade-in animation eventually shows a picture. With four words. /FAIL/.

    Now, people will say -- but you compared it to "think small" -- how is this different? Simple, think small had four paragraphs on page too. You have to scroll to get to that impressing nobody. If you have to scroll to get to actual content on a 3k or 4k display, you have utterly and totally FAILED in your job as a designer.

    In general all these sub-pages /fail/ spectacularly in this regard making them basically useless in terms of actually selling the product. Why they need four pages mostly filled with art-faygelah BS do do the job of ONE, I'll never grasp. Literally I'd throw away the default page for a product line, move the macOS page off to it's own master-link in the category sub-menu, and then combine tech specs and buy into a SINGLE PAGE!

    Aka give the user what they came to the damned site for in the first damned place as the first damned thing, instead of making them click-through endless pointless bandiwdth wasting marketspeak BULLSHIT that NOBODY is going to actually sit there and read! PARTICULARLY when it doesn't actually say a whole lot of anything.

    The over-use of whitespace (or backgrounds behaving as whitespace) spreading out what little actual content is there, if anything seems designed to make it impossible to get hard information about the products. Nowhere is this more prominent than on their "tech specs" pages where they've taken a 1024x768 page's worth of information and spread it out so much you can't even scan it all at once at 2560x1440. Again, EPIC /fail/ at design -- THOUGH

    I often suspect this is intentional as they don't want people to be able to easily compare hardware specs to competitors, or even previous years models given that the "new" 2017 lineup is not only inferior performing to many of 2012's offerings, they are price gouging again charging $1300 for laptops that are outperformed by $500 offerings from other companies -- meaning only status symbol obsessed fools who fall for the form over function artsy-fartsy BS would be dumb enough to throw money away on their products.

    Particularly when if you ask someone who actually knows about engineering what they think of crApple's quality, they'll answer "What quality?" -- no matter how many marketing dweebs will constantly praise their products on that front.

    In any case, in that way I suspect that the design failure is in fact INTENTIONAL so as to make it so that you buy with your heart, not your brain.... which to be frank has ALWAYS been the core of their buyer base even back to the beginning. There's a reason the C64 in its first year outsold what every model of Apple ][ combined did in the decade and a half that product line was offerred... or that in the Apple ]['s first year the TRS-80 Model 1 outsold it four to one. For all of Woz's alleged "cost saving shortcuts" it was still more expensive and less reliable.

    No matter how much their buying their way into educational institutions has let them rewrite their place in computer history to sound way more impressive than it ever was. People OWNED TRS-80's, Commodores, Atari's, TI's, even Coleco's... (or for our UK friends Amstrads, Sinclairs, and BBC Micro's)... Apples were what you saw articles about in magazines, never knew a single person who owned one privately, and if you did happen upon them in person it was a room full of them at your junior high locked away from the students as "They cost us too much money to risk the students damaging them"

    Apple's place in computer history isn't even worth a footnote, but their marketing is just that damned good. That marketing is now faltering again without Steve-o's guidance.
     
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2017
    deathshadow, Aug 9, 2017 IP