Apple’s Colour Strategy ⇥ macworld.com

The Macalope in Macworld skewers Mike Murphy’s ridiculous piece — “Apple Killed Fun” — that was published in Quartz last week:

Even still, the MacBook, all of the iPhones other than the iPhone X, the iPad Pro, and the Watch (counting the Edition) all come in four different colors. The MacBook Pro comes in two and the iPad in three. Other than the Product(RED), they’re all muted tones but that’s good. The bright colors of the original run of iMacs worked for Apple and were a brilliant strategic move but, frankly, created a trend in design that did not age well.

One thing that the Macalope, astute as it is, did not mention is the way that Murphy blames Apple for the entire industry’s lack of colourful products:

By refining its products to near-impenetrable pieces of glass and metal, and bringing the aesthetic of the entire consumer electronics market along with them, Apple has stamped out much of the fun within its own company, and the greater industry. […]

Murphy’s passive tone here is his way of shifting the blame towards Apple and away from all of the companies that thoughtlessly copy them. There’s every opportunity for Samsung or Xaomi or Oppo or Google to come along and ship a brightly-coloured lineup of devices with unique shapes and clear differentiation through design, but they don’t. That’s not on Apple; that’s on them — but their lack of doing so also assuredly reflects what most consumers want to buy.