That change in philosophy is exemplified by the product that choked the life out of the white MacBook.
Apple came to believe its customers would still buy a new MacBook every couple years, even if they couldn’t upgrade it on their own. Over time, though, expandability vanished from Apple’s laptops - that’s part of the reason it’s so hard to find a laptop today that has so much as a user-replaceable battery. Pairing robust Apple-exclusive build quality with the ability to upgrade the hardware as you went led some of these MacBooks to live surprisingly long lives. That support for expansion over time meant the white MacBook had a much longer shelf-life than an average laptop. A student might buy the laptop they could afford, with an eye toward upgrading it over time, rather than buying a new system in the next year or two. In that way, it was an investment in Apple’s ecosystem. It held your hand and gave you the confidence to tinker with it. Apple even provided a set of do-it-yourself guides offering step-by-step instructions on how you could open it up to replace or upgrade components on your own. The white MacBook, on the other hand, designed with students and budget-minded customers in mind, was built from the ground up to be user serviceable. It wasn’t exactly an inviting hardware experience. So, if you picked up the cheapest iBook to get you through your first semester away from home, you’d need some serious technical skills once you scratched together enough work study cash to upgrade it. Just to replace the hard drive, you needed to almost completely disassemble the chassis. The iBook, for instance, was a pain to open. An entirely new internal design philosophy was on display, too. It wasn’t just a coat of paint that made the MacBook stand apart from its predecessors. The white MacBook was built to be user serviceable and Apple even provided do-it-yourself guides offering step-by-step instructions. But there were some significant differences in the MacBook that established its own identity. Its predecessor, the iBook, first introduced the all-white look to Apple laptops. The MacBook didn’t appear out of thin air. It was built for a different set of demands than more premium machines and, most importantly, it was designed with entry-level or budget-conscious users in mind. The size of the device and the durability of the plastic chassis made it ideal for packing from class to class, and surviving dorm life. As a laptop that started at $1,100, it wasn’t just a cheaper version of the MacBook Pro. That kind of marketing caught on with a specific generation of new laptop buyers. Apple called it a “superfast, blogging, podcasting, do-everything-out-of-the-box” laptop. Somehow, the MacBook became the must-have tool for wannabe creatives and students - the “crazy ones” who were set out to think differently and change the world. “Macs are used for creative output, so we felt very strongly that the tools to help users do that should be as elegant as their machines.”Īpple launched the “Get a Mac” campaign to coincide with its shift in marketing strategy (toward young adults and college students) following the released of it’s white Macbook.
“We started Twelve South with the notion that the Mac platform should have accessories worthy and exclusive to the Mac,” Green said. The white MacBook was a blank canvas for its users, and it was rare to see one in the wild that wasn’t adorned with stickers, wrist pads, or other aftermarket accessories. The MacBook’s elegant design made users want to buy accessories to personalize it, but not just any accessories. The release of the white Macbook, with it’s focus on design and aesthetics, jumpstarted an accessory movement that emphasized style as much as functionality. Laptop accessories at existed for years, but no one cared much what they looked like, just so long as they did the job. These were products that were designed to speak the same aesthetic language as the MacBook. It’s important to point out, this cottage industry was sprung up not to produce products that simply protected the MacBook - like a case for your iPhone.
“People bought a $200 iPod as their first Apple product, and it had all these amazing accessories, and then they went and bought a MacBook and there weren’t any accessories for it, or they were just PC accessories painted white,” Green recalls. Twelve South was one of a few companies founded to fill that gap. Back then, accessories for laptops were few and far between, and almost none of them were designed with Macs or MacBooks in mind. The white MacBook was a blank canvas, inviting us to make it our own.Ī magnetic latch wasn’t a world-changing innovation, but it was the kind of thoughtful design that informed that period in Apple’s history.