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Apple's quest for perfection and enduring beauty
Product introductions are usually predictable, orchestrated events. Company executives in jeans stalk a football stadium-sized stage and let their products do the talking: "This is our great new product, here are the specs, and now we'll demo some of the features. It's better than anything else on the market, and it's available soon for this price in these configurations. It's really amazing."Apple execs did their fair share of stalking the stage Monday with well-rehearsed, Steve Jobsian product intro panache, demoing alternately what they described as "incredible" and "stunning" products at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference.It was an impressive performance, with some elegant refining of OS X and iOS, as well as MacBook Airs with longer battery life and a reimagined Mac Pro. (You can read all the Apple WWDC 2013 news here.) The upcoming iOS 7 now has the Jony Ive touch with a new palette of colors, redesigned icons, translucency and distinct functional layers.AppleHowever, the beginning and end of the two-hour keynote, attended by more than 6,000 developers, employees, special guests and media, broke with tradition. Bookending the lovefest were two videos that seemed to bare Apple's tortured, transcendent soul, and perhaps covertly sent a message to the competitors and critics who claim that the company is losing its way and market share. Just prior to Apple CEO Tim Cook taking the stage, a minimalist, black-and-white video with animating geometric patterns, music of the spheres and Zen koan-like phrases appeared on the immense screens at San Francisco's Moscone Center West auditorium with the following message: If everyone is busy making everything...how can anyone perfect anything? We start to confuse convenience with joy, abundance with choice. Design requires something: focus. The first thing we ask is what do we want people to feel. Delight...surprise...love...connection. Then we begin to craft around that intention. It takes time. There are a thousand no's for every yes. We perfect. We start over, until everything we touch enhances every life it touches. Only then do we sign our work: Designed by Apple in California. The first part of the video takes a shot at Samsung and other mobile device competitors, who Apple contends don't have design at their core, which is another way of saying their products are inferior. Nor do they have complete control of the hardware, software and ecosystem, as Apple does. During the keynote Cook pointed out several times how the iPhone didn't outsell the competition but cited research that it garnered far more Web usage and customer satisfaction awards, not to mention profit.Tim Cook touted Apple's leading the J.D. Powers customer satisfaction survey for the last nine years.James Martin/CNET More from WWDCMeet iTunes Radio, Apple's long-awaited streaming music serviceApple gives the iPhone a user interface face-lift with iOS 7Apple unveils new MacBook Air, gives Mac Pro sneak peek Mac Pro sneak peek (pictures) Getting to know Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks (pictures) WWDC 2013: Full coverageIt's also a blatant defense of Apple's lack of any significant new hardware in recent months. In fact, it's been more than eight months since Apple gave the world a new mobile phone, and more than seven months since the iPad Mini debuted. While Apple's engineers have been quietly toiling to achieve perfection in their secret workshops scattered around their Cupertino, Calif. campus, Samsung, HTC and others have been launching bunches of mobile devices that are getting good reviews. Apple did roll out a pair of updated MacBook Airs and teased the sexy, cylindrical Mac Pro, which inspired marketing chief Phil Schiller to tell the crowd, "Can't innovate any more, my ass!" However, mass market, game-changing new phones, tablets, TVs, watches or glasses were not seen or teased. Apple unveiled the all new, radically designed Mac Pro computer today at the World Wide Developer's Conference Monday in San Francisco.James Martin/CNETThe second part of the video goes more to Apple's drive for perfection, and to the point that being perfect can be tortuous to the soul and typically requires more time between iterations. "We have to focus on products, making the best products," Cook has said. "If we do that right and make great products that enrich peoples' live, then the other things will happen." In other words, be patient with us, the tortoise. Our mission is difficult and requires gargantuan effort and focus, but you will be rewarded. For decades Apple has been a design-driven company -- it's part of the company DNA. Apple doesn't ask people what they want, but apparently asks themselves what they want people to feel. Is Apple attempting to intuit intent and determine what feeling users should experience when they encounter a calendar entry, notification, control panel or icon, or a hardware enclosure? Less obtusely, Apple is attempting to design products that generate feelings of delight, surprise, love and connection to predispose or even addict people to the brand. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Jobs famously said: "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want." His way of articulating Apple's values is a bit more straightforward than "the first thing we ask is what do we want people to feel." The second video (see below), a TV ad set to air this week, was prefaced by Cook at the close of the keynote. "Words are more than just words to us," he said. "They are the values we live by...they drive us. You have seen them reflected in our products. We have created an ad to help us express just how deeply we feel about this." It reiterates much of the first video -- Apple spends a lot of time on a few things and strives to make peoples' lives better through the product design...and talking about values and whether features should exist, like a larger screen on an iPhone:This is it. This is what matters. The experience of a product. How will it make someone feel? Will it make life better? Does it deserve to exist? We spend a lot of time on a few great things...until every idea we touch...enhances each life it touches. You may rarely look at it...but you'll alwaysfeel it. This is our signature...and it means everything. But the second video also alludes to an element of magic, or sleight of hand, what Apple design chief Jony Ive refers to as "profound and enduring beauty." Each element of the design is part of a whole, a devine symmetry that brings order to complexity, which Apple believes users may not be consciously aware of but can innately "feel," creating an emotional bond with brand.The quest for perfection and the devotion to creating objects of profound and enduring beauty seems to be working. Apple has sold 600 million iOS devices to date, and it tallies 1 million Apple Store visitors per day, 900 million apps in its store and 575 million online store accounts, most with credit card numbers attached. Mac sales have risen 100 percent over the past five years, versus just 18 percent for Windows PCs. Who knows if it's divine symmetry at work, but as long as Apple can persist increating an emotional connection with its customers, the tortoise wins enough to move on to the next race.

New York Times prominent among media iPad apps
As their print editions lose readers and business, many newspaper and magazine publishers are hoping the iPad will prove fertile ground for new customers.iPad owners who need their daily New York Times fix can grab it courtesy of the paper's new iPad app or even just the site itself, which made Apple's list of iPad-ready sites that have been optimized for compatibility with the iPad's features. The Times' iPad features got a prominent preview during Apple CEO Steve Jobs' unveiling of the tablet device in January.The free New York Times Editor Choice app will download to the iPad a daily selection of the newspaper's top business and technology stories, opinions, and features picked by Times editors. Readers will find 8 to 10 articles all captured from the paper's regular news pages and columns.Using the tablet's touch screen, iPad owners can tap to view the videos and slideshows that will join many of the Times stories. Articles and images can also be downloaded and synced to the iPad, so readers can view them without a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. The new app is free and supported by advertisers, but the Times said it's planning a paid app that would offer more content.The Times is joined by a growing list of other publishers eager to tap into the new iPad market.Wall Street JournalUSA Today is launching its own iPad app Saturday with a hook to lure readers. The app will be free until July 4 and then available through a fee-based subscription. In addition to providing the latest news stories, the USA Today app will offer photos and graphics to take advantage of the iPad's high-resolution screen.The Wall Street Journal is unveiling a free iPad app on Saturday with selected news stories, videos, and slideshows for non-subscribers, but a richer array of content for people willing to pay $3.99 a week to subscribe. Current subscribers of the Journal's print edition can get full access free for a limited time.Magazine publishers are also hopping onto the iPad with new apps on Saturday. Popular Science is launching a $4.99 app, while GQ will hit the tablet with its own $2.99 app. Though newspapers and magazines are offering full content for free, most are adopting a strategy similar to that of the Times and the Journal--dangle a limited number of stories for free, but then charge for a fuller plate of content. iPad users, for example, will be able to download for free 12 pages of content from the April issue of Men's Health magazine as a preview. The Men's Health app for the iPad: Click for a larger image.Men's Health The full April issue will then be available for download in the iTunes store for $4.99 and will be followed by the May issue, available by April 20. The Men's Health iPad app will also offer interactive features including real-time polls and increased social-networking capabilities with Twitter and Facebook, and will incorporate full-screen, high-definition video footage from behind the scenes of Men's Health cover shoots. However, the strategy of offering a bit of content for free before charging for it may not do much to stem the tide of shrinking sales. Surveys, such as a recent Harris poll, found a significant number of people unwilling to pay for content online.