Inside Apple's industrial design lab

A rare visit with the man who designed the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone

Jonathan Ive. From Gary Hustwit's "Objectified."

"I guess it's one of the curses of what you do," says Jonathan Ive, Apple's senior vice president for industrial design, "is that you are constantly looking at something and thinking 'Why why why is it like that? Why is it like that and not like this?'"

Ive's five-minute appearance inObjectified is one of the centerpieces of Gary Hustwit's 2009 documentary about contemporary industrial design. It's a follow-up to Hustwit's amazing Helvetica (2007), the only full-length film about a typeface.Objectified may not be as surprising or groundbreaking, but it does feature this rare inside look at Apple's (AAPL) secretive design lab, an inner sanctum on the Cupertino campus only slightly less guarded than Fort Knox.

"I remember the first time I saw an Apple product," says Ive as the camera pans across a busy Apple Store. "I remember it so clearly because it was the first time I realized when I saw this product I got a very clear sense of the people who designed it and made it."

Below fold, unless Hustwit has pulled it, a YouTube clip of that video.

It's Almost 2010 and CDs Are Not Dead Yet?

I've started to buy vinyl records again. It's not because of the sound. It's the touch and the pretty pictures. Obviously, vinyl is not why CDs are dying. Zoom-zoom in, digital boys and girls.

What surprises me about these facts and figures—apart from iTunes skyrocketing again after the introduction of variable pricing—is the fact that CDs are not completely dead yet. They are clearly going down, but I had this mental image in which all of those round mirrors were destroyed, melting like Dali clocks in a desert of indifference. [Mint]