Comment by woadwarrior01
11 hours ago
> For one, Apple was unwilling to have visible barcodes printed on the envelopes — but it wanted every step of the shipping and delivery of your card tracked. That wasn’t something the US Postal Service did. Apple and the printing company created an invisible barcode that was sprayed on the envelope, visible only under certain UV light, so that the envelope itself would remain unadulterated. And the USPS agreed to scan cards when sent, when processed at mail facilities, up to and including when they went out on a mail truck for delivery.
This is classic Steve Jobs. Sheer force of will.
It's not as complicated as it seems from a technical perspective. Stamps have been UV-tagged since the 1960s as an anti-counterfeiting/automated detection measure. In the analog era, you shine UV light on a letter and if it it glows enough, it's got a stamp.
Modern processing machines (AFCS) capture both a visible and UV image of the mailpiece, so it's fundamentally changing the image processing software to have it look for the barcode on the UV side if it can't find one on visible. The downstream DBCS sorters already read secondary barcodes that are applied by the AFCS which happen to be in UV ink.
Further, USPS benefits from the same idea to hide a barcode for marketing (junk) mail. When combined with a handwriting-like typeface, it makes letters look personal and gets people to open them more. Same psychology where mailers apply a bulk-rate stamp instead of using a permit imprint.
It's a very Steve Jobs/Apple case where it sounds like a minor detail that requires crazy advances, but under the covers, it's very technically feasible, and importantly, can exploit economies of scale.
What’s the latest on the roomful of people who read nearly-impossible-to-read addresses? Was dwindling last I heard—mad respect to them. You see some of those envelopes, complete chickenscratch or water damage, and somehow they get them to their destination.
In the 50s, when they started to use machines to sort mail, there were keyers at every facility that sorted mail. I believe there are still are still some local keyers on parcel sorters, where it's harder to "lift" the image of the address on a large box.
For letter encoding, they used to have 55 centers, in 2014 it became one, in Utah. A large part of it is OCR getting better and deciphering most handwritten addresses.
Another part of it is simple consolidation: it's trivial to send images over networks, and due to how mail has to be sorted together for dispatch, the demand tended to be peaky. Consolidation lets you exploit different timezones. (Slowing down the mail also gives a big benefit because you can spread the load over the whole day)
During my time at Apple one of the coolest talk I attended was about the process Apple went through to send a camera to the International Space Station and train astronauts how to use to use it to capture footage to be used as a screensaver in one of the earlier Apple TV versions.
The amount of work that went into getting regulators IN EVERY JURISDICTION IN THE WORLD to let Apple put the regulatory markings behind an info button in the OS (instead of printed on the device) just so that the back of the phone can be clean of all text and iconography except the Apple is absolutely mindblowing.
I appreciate it SO MUCH. I remember on the 7 or 8 when it happened how totally blown away I was.
Now there’s less visual/symbol spam in my daily view of an object I (and billions of others) use constantly. This stuff is way more important than people think.
I would maybe appreciate things like this, if manufactures made phones with solid grip and not by visuals or metrics like thickness measured at thinnest point. But as they are all of them go into bumper cases that hide whatever they have on the back.
Speak for yourself, I don’t use a case.
And removing the indicator lights from most of their chargers! unlike the twinkling stars of other companies that blind you while you're trying to sleep.
Honestly only dumbasses wouldn't appreciate these small things that accumulate to a big difference, just instinctively downvoting from bumache just because it's Apple
I remember the moronic Samesung ads that made fun of the iPhone 4 or 5 for moving the headphone jack to the bottom of the phone.. not realizing that it made it easier for people it put in their pockets while letting a headphone or charging cable go straight up.
MagSafe chargers have lights though?
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Can't believe they got USPS to do a custom stamp in 2011.
Sheer force of stupid, no one cares if a bar code is on the envelope.
Not only an untrue statement, but also a sadly incurious way to approach someone else's design choice. Yes, it was an enormous amount of work and invention to achieve a desired effect, but the effect is striking in an environment that is otherwise plastered with everyday visual clutter.
Minimalism is difficult and expensive to achieve. Some people consider that effort worthwhile.
I dunno. Premium products are a difficult thing. I can't weigh in because I don't care about cards at all, I'd much rather receive a wedding invitation via e-mail yet people spend hundreds on custom cards on thick card, custom printing etc etc. In fact, some couples are insistent on getting their wedding invitation envelopes "hand cancelled" so they look crisp and clean when they arrive at their destination:
https://www.theknot.com/content/hand-cancel-wedding-invitati...
If you're one of those people I could absolutely imagine you'd care about a visible barcode on an envelope. They kind of have to be premium products because if they’re blah then people will just use evites, which are better in a bunch of functional ways. The product relies on its differentiators.
Someone who cares about the barcode tends to care about other details. In some ways it's like the band riders that have silly things like no brown m&m's.
There's a related Steve Jobs quote:
"When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
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I literally thought of brown m&ms when I read your first sentence and have to say this way of thinking has to be some kind of mega baloney, no offense. I would be more concerned if someone actually spent time sorting brown m&ms because it means I'm dealing with people pleasers that waste time on nonsense, thus not having time for more important things.
As for the design details, the proof is in the pudding. If they sold well then the person with this idea understood the vapidness of his customers to the point of contempt. But I am reminded of how things like design evolve from being there to solve a problem to over time becoming the problem itself that needs solving and the actual focus. But I don't think this is a good way to deal with things.
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JUMP!
When you’re sending someone a personal card barcodes makes it look very impersonal, maybe even makes it look like junk mail.
But this is not a personal card. It is a credit card. Who in the world would even notice this detail?
This whole exercise sounds like a minimalist circlejerk that was only possible in a ZIRP environment.
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I think many failed/aborted projects only seem stupid in retrospect because we assume it proof they could never have succeeded .. but many ridiculous things can and do succeed and find their place. It fizzled after his death without anyone championing it with persistent care and constructive iterations. It may well have ultimately failed, regardless, but it certainly lost its motive power.
Clearly one person did.
Less "sheer force of will" and annoying arrogance and stubbornness.
Reminder that Jobs is not a good role model. A lot of his decisions were erratic and based on what might as well have been undiagnosed BPD.
What part of this is annoying? They made the barcode invisible so the envelope looks better. That’s wildly unnecessary, but cool.
That’s what makes Apple different than other tech companies. They have an extreme attention to detail that extends even to their packaging.
Arrogance and stubborness would be insisting on doing things that are literally impossible. This is pushing people to go beyond "computer says no" attitude.
The problem with Steve Jobs and his insistence on doing things his way is that other people were like ants to him. He made other people's lives hell when they had to follow his borderline insane orders. He'd yell at people, belittle them, insult them, and he got away with it every time because he was a billionaire and those other people depended on their paychecks.
And it was often for details that didn't matter. Like the exact shape of the curve of the plastic housing of some long-forgotten iMac. People just want computers that work and that don't look like total crap, they don't even notice the corner radius or whether the motherboard (excuse me, "logic board") is aesthetically pleasing according to the genius that took one class on calligraphy at Reed College.
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You mean maniacally focused on customer experience?