Apple has quietly announced that it will be adding a new product to its online store tomorrow, and before you ask: No, it’s not a new model of the iPad Pro. It is, instead, the least technical thing you could possibly imagine — a hardback book.
As you’d expect, Apple’s book — simply entitled Designed by Apple in California — doesn’t come cheap. There are two sizes available — small and large — with pricing starting at $199 for the former and topping out at $299 for the latter.
This isn’t your standard book, though. As opposed to being filled with hundreds, if not thousands of words, on Apple’s design history, it’s merely packed with gorgeous pictures. 450 of them, to be precise.
The photographs, which were all shot by Andrew Zuckerman, show off 20 years of Apple design in a “deliberately spare style.” Jony Ive described the book as a “gentle gathering of many of the products the team has designed over the years.”
In the foreword, Ive writes:
While this is a design book, it is not about the design team, the creative process, or product development. It is an objective representation of our work that, ironically, describes who we are. It describes how we work, our values, our preoccupations, and our goals. We have always hoped to be defined by what we do rather than by what we say.
We strive, with varying degrees of success, to define objects that appear effortless. Objects that appear so simple, coherent, and inevitable that there could be no rational alternative.
Obviously, the book isn’t going to appeal to everyone, but it’s certainly going to stand out to the diehard Apple fans amongst us. Dedicated to late CEO Steve Jobs, it’ll be available in the UK, US and a number of other regions starting tomorrow.
It will also be on display in select flagship Apple Stores, where you’ll be able to see the book up close before purchasing a copy.
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