Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story

Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story lexontech.org

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#origin #apple #cards #fifteen #later #apple cards #cards origin #apple cards origin

120 comments

solfox5 days ago

As the co-founder of Sincerely (at this time in 2011), I remember this keynote very specifically because it felt like we'd been Sherlocked. We were busy building out Postagram and Sincerely Ink, both from-iPhone-to-printed-card apps. afaik we were the first app to do this, and we were at that time gaining a lot of momentum. I remember seeing the announcement for Cards and feeling a mix of fear and anger that it felt like Apple was using their clout to take our idea.

I seem to recall my co-founder being somewhat more optimistic about the whole thing. And sure enough, we found that the announcement really only seemed to boost awareness.

Apple Cards was an extremely limited and flawed product, and we already had some distinct technical and feature set advantages. It was clear Apple didn't have their heart in it nor know what they were doing. When they retired it shortly thereafter it wasn't a shock, and I ironically recall feeling somewhat sad.

dan-robertson4 days ago

What was wrong with it? It seems like they cared a lot about the physical experience of the cards and envelopes, for example. But maybe customers didn’t understand that or had different priorities.

solfox4 days ago

It was harder than you'd expect in 2011 to actually accomplish mailing a trackable card reliably like this at low cost. We spent a lot of time developing and implementing tracking and reliability with our provider - it was clear from our early tests of Apple Cards that they may not have anticipated some of the challenges (cards wouldn't actually show any tracking, for example).

It sounds like despite their reach and promotion, their sales lagged for Cards - which suggests they didn't quite get the product fit right either in cost or UX. The demand certainly was there.

I'd also say that a fancy printed card-in-envelope is sort of a weird product anyway, no matter how nice the paper is. Its naturally competing against other card-in-envelope junk in your mailbox, and while it was maybe a little bit of a novelty, I don't think I've ever personally thought "wow, this person really put effort into this" when getting a printed card. I'd much prefer something handwritten. That's why we focused on the much-cheaper postcard-style cards, which also still gave that little hit of novelty (hey, something in the mail!), without trying to be something it wasn't.

wdb4 days ago

I mean it's an old idea you had apps for limited set of feature phones back in 2005 that could do the same you would sent a photo + address it would sent the card to the address and get billed by your phone bill.

woadwarrior015 days 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.

sneak4 days ago

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.

dmonitor4 days ago

Even before that, the first iPhone simply not having the brand name of the carrier plastered on the front like every other cell phone felt so nice.

flaunf2214 days ago

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.

paulddraper4 days ago

And now you can put a case on and cover it all up anyway.

Razengan4 days ago

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.

sam17144 days ago

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.

Barbing4 days ago

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.

bradly4 days ago

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.

al_borland4 days ago

Wow, I always assumed they used video released by NASA, not that they sent a camera to space specifically to have astronauts take the video they wanted.

I’d imagine most companies would laugh someone out of the room for suggesting something like that. That’s why those other companies seem like the Temu version of Apple.

ZeWaka4 days ago

Can't believe they got USPS to do a custom stamp in 2011.

gnopgnip4 days ago

Which one is that?

VCFundedGenYer4 days ago

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.

brokencode4 days ago

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.

rrjjww4 days ago

Arrogance and stubborness would be insisting on doing things that are literally impossible. This is pushing people to go beyond "computer says no" attitude.

JSR_FDED4 days ago

You mean maniacally focused on customer experience?

jasongi5 days ago

The part of "founder-led" companies nobody talks about. For every groundbreaking tech project, there's 100 other people sleeping in conference rooms working on some rich guy's latest brain-fart that everyone knows will never work.

jmbwell5 days ago

I was once in a position to relay the sleeping-in-conference rooms situation to such a leader. The tone of surprise, confusion, frustration, and more than faint contempt in his voice as he said “everyone got paid didn’t they?” stays with me

Money solves all their problems, if it doesn’t solve everyone else’s then fuggem

elzbardico3 days ago

In your situation I'd have to bit my lips to avoid retorting with:

"Indeed, they were paid, but just not as much splendedly as you, your highness!"

Cyph0n5 days ago

Hahaha precisely. The other part people seem to ignore is that there are bound to be projects with potential that are unilaterally killed early on because of the founder’s “taste” and ego.

qingcharles4 days ago

Some of those rich guy brain farts turned out to be iPod and iPhone.

mitxela4 days ago

Wasn't apple near bankruptcy when they made those? Only saved by a Google-style payment from Microsoft to ensure Microsoft wasn't legally a monopoly?

jimbokun4 days ago

And the Mac.

claw-el4 days ago

Nowadays, they call it “the founder’s office” team..

annex-winged-cr5 days ago

> Letterpress printing historically didn’t try to put much bite into printing, preferring what’s called a kiss impression—just perfectly laying the ink on top of the paper. Martha Stewart popularized debossing because, unlike real letterpress, it felt like letterpress.

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided… It’s the sound of failure.”

meindnoch5 days ago

>CD distortion

Ah yes, that notorious -96dB noise.

NobodyNada4 days ago

Surely tape saturation or the artifacts/tone coloring of vinyl records would have been a better example.

SonOfKyuss4 days ago

My thoughts as well. The main complaints I remember hearing about CDs were people claiming that they were “too clean” and didn’t have the same personality as analog formats

pavlov4 days ago

That quote is from Brian Eno’s 1996 book, so he knows his stuff.

I’m guessing he’s referring to early CDs when both mastering and player DACs had digital roughness. Or maybe he’s talking about digital clipping which was deliberately being introduced in the 1990s to create loudness.

rgovostes4 days ago

I would use Cards while on vacation to send a spontaneous photo to elderly family members who weren’t online, and the experience was perfectly frictionless and very Apple. I don’t know if I ever saw the finished product.

I emailed Eddy Cue when the shutdown was announced and he agreed it was a great app but confirmed it wasn’t popular enough.

I don’t think I’ve sent a card since.

testing223214 days ago

I still send hand written postcards all the time because I know people get a kick out of them.

Bonus points when you send them from a country people have to search a map to locate.

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