Apple unveiled the first-ever touchscreen MacBook Pro laptop and what does new CEO John Ternus choose to highlight in his one and only post on his X feed after the event? The return of the glowing Apple logo on the display casing. That was his message to the world.
Strange really, don’t you think? Amid all of that new-to-Apple technology the company was unleashing – OLED, reference quality monitor, way lighter, better speakers and mics, the Dynamic Island – Ternus chose something that could have been accomplished on any of the current MacBooks.
It’s not a breakthrough, it’s a throwback.
Hell, it was first accomplished in the last century, and last appeared on a MacBook laptop more than a decade ago. It is far from new, but its return is being celebrated like a retro NBA jersey.
The iconic glowing logo was ditched during the peak Jony Ive minimalist design era, when Steve Jobs was no longer around to rein in his design chief’s worst instincts. In search of thinner and lighter, Ive removed so much je ne sais quoi, as well as functionality. Out with the ports, in with the dongles.
The glowing logo’s initial demise came with the razor-thin and ultimately ill-fated 12-inch MacBook with that horrendous ‘butterfly’ keyboard that sparked a class action lawsuit resulting in a $50 million settlement. That thin lid couldn’t accommodate a cutout because it made it structurally more vulnerable. So the character was sacrificed for a couple of millimetres. Thankfully, Ive is long gone and is now cozying up with apocalypse accelerator Sam Altman of OpenAI.
The reflective logo did have its advantages. It brought some design homogeny with the iPhone and solved the problem of display hotspots, but Apple could have gone back to it at any time. Why now?
It’s not a coincidence that Apple is bringing back the glowing logo now, with a new era underway and a new man at the helm. Ternus is a man who spent 25 years on Apple’s design teams. He arrived at the company not long after Steve Jobs’ return to the fold as Apple CEO. He was at the company during the launch of some of Apple’s most iconic products, when design carried so much instantly identifiable character, before Ive turned to minimalism over character and functionality.
Apple’s succession planning will have been such that Ternus could have had direct impact on the decision to include this design element and I believe the new boss is making a statement: the glory days of Apple industrial design are on the way back. We can expect the company to be bolder.
That was the reporting from in-the-know Mark Gurman this summer. He quoted Ternus saying at internal meetings that “the most beautifully designed thing that most customers own is an Apple product. We’re going to make sure that stays the case.”
The report also spoke of the diminished role of the Apple design team since Ive’s departure. Well not anymore. I think Ternus probably missed it. Those days when you picked up a product and said “this is uniquely Apple.” Did you see his enthusiasm when flashing the iPhone Duo around the red carpets? He was beaming.
That glowing Apple logo might as well be a bat signal. Bold, instantly-identifiable Apple design is making a comeback.
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