Acronym’s new computer with Asus is bonkers, but that’s the point
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5. Good design is unobtrusive. Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user's self-expression.
6. Good design is honest. It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It doesn't attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
If you read these principles and reverse them, you get your typical "product art" — a product form of clickbait titles — an attention-grabbing product that's intended to shock and generate PR, not sell the actual thing.
Such products are usually shallow: stylized to some theme without deeply understanding it, like user interfaces from movies, or like Lcroium's* own website (https://acrnm.com), which is stylized with useless _underscores and [brackets] without understanding why they are used in computing.
*) that's how you read ACRONYM's logo if you know Cyrillic.
It should be possible to make an avantgarde font without confusing or oversimplifying letters.
As an aside, I wonder how many graphic t-shirts those guys sell at $200.
Anyway, my point was that the symbol "Λ" has a distinct meaning from the symbol "A" -- and, try as I might, I can't see them as interchangeable.
There is also 'V' as 'U' which is quite confusing and some others. Creative people will be creative, that's what they get paid for. It's low hanging fruit, obviously but it works because you are talking about it. And that was their goal: to get you to notice it. Mission accomplished.
И for N is equally terrible and meaningless.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turned_v [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BA%BA
That being said, who are you to say their interpretation of interpreting things is wrong? Etc etc.
Personally, I think it’s stupid too. Of course people recognize it as “A.” My dislike isn’t because it’s confusing, it’s because I think it’s pretentious and ugly.
I would instantly dispute pretty much any word of the first 3 sentences in your post. (except maybe the name)
If you want to live in a world without choice, where everyone and everything looks the same (the inevitable endpoint of form follows function), be my guest, but at the end of your sad life you will remember all the times you looked back over the fence at all the people enjoying life in all its diverse forms, shapes, textures, activities and regret some choices you made along the way.
Optimizing for different tradeoffs (i.e. utility) tells us that sameness is not the end-state of form follows function.
>Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user's self-expression.
But I also have nothing against highly volatile treats from time to time reminding myself that in the end one must be also able to let go and enjoy the moment.
In keeping with the golden mean (μεσότης) these two things pushed too far are of course ugly, indeed, but the beauty of it very much depends from which side you need a steering direction.
For me for example the tension between the aesthetic choice (ornament) camouflaged by caricaturing multi-functionality (usefulness) of the packaging of an ordinary product is an artistic expression of the state of affair we find ourselves: instant technical obsolescence the moment you have the product in your hands becoming an artifact in its own right. Is art ever useful? Is its value ultimately not just based on a fundamental impotency? I guess nowadays the most talented pool of artists express themselves through marketing. /s
Are you implying that the same gray macbook, paired with the same iPhone, that everyone else at your company, in your social circle and every coffee shop of your town is not the PINNACLE of social existence?
Personally speaking after growing up in the 80s and having to be a slave to multiple brands from year to year lest I be labeled a lesser child for not having whatever was chic, I'm happy if everyone wears non-descript but functional items that they then modify how they want. Most children in 1987 were walking Coca-cola billboards who wouldn't be caught dead without Guess, Girbaud, or Z Cavaricci jeans. It's one of the outlying reasons that most public schools have dress codes nowadays.
Or maybe that's just my iPhone owning friends.
Technical constraints do exist, and if you shit on them you are a pretentious bad designer of products that cannot be taken seriously.
Maybe it's not for you. That's okay. If it's been a niche for this long then I doubt it's gonna be the default anytime soon.
I ended up getting rid of it because my org’s password rules were annoying and I struggled to touch type symbols and numbers that weren’t in a word. And whenever I had “guests” it was uncomfortable to them and me so I would have to keep a guest keyboard anyway.
So the designer doing "I can just focus on art" is probably experiencing more joy than the designer doing "this has to be as cheap as possible" or "this is a keyboard for children learning to touch type", simply because the scope of work is so much more unconstrained. Art could be anything! A keyboard for people learning to use computers is going to mostly be letters.
> *) that's how you read ACRONYM's logo if you know Cyrillic.
If you know Cyrillic, then why not read it as it is written? What's the point of bastard translating it to Latin?
That said though, the translation of Cyrillic to Latin is commonly done, and a rather opinionated field. As is the reverse, Cyrillization.
It is good to know that symbol is acceptable for handwritten forms though, I've been struggling to differentiate л and п in my handwriting.
Speaking of keyboards, how the hell do they think this product would be sold in countries where there are two sets of alphabets on keyboards if it already comes prefilled with nonsense characters? :)
Being a great designer is knowing they don't matter
Also, the website proper that you linked is amazingly utilitarian, especially in contrast to your introduction. It loads fast, and shows a list of images of various products right on the front page. I have seldom seen a product company with such a practical website as this. I had to look around to find the misuse of special characters that you're criticizing them for. This hardly ruins an otherwise good website
Surely this computer is still ultimately meant for computing (in style)?
even worse - C -> S in Cyrillic :)
Excuse my French, but fuck Dieter Rams. I certainly understand this viewpoint, and I have no problem with folks that adhere to it, but my problem is with stating as some sort of axiom, with no evidence or reason, that "Products fulfilling a purpose are neither decorative objects nor works of art."
Humans have built things that are both functional and beautiful since culture first existed, and there is nothing wrong with designing products with a strong visual aesthetic viewpoint. If we all followed Dieter Rams' silly advice, all of our computers would still be boring beige boxes, maybe covered in stickers "for the user's self-expression."
Note I say this while agreeing with the latter part of your post. I'm not a fan of this particular design - it feels kitschy and shallow in the same way that Hollywood "hacker" movies show terminals that look like 3D game worlds. But that's just my personal opinion, and I don't fault people for feeling the exact opposite. I do fault people for saying that you shouldn't be allowed to try, and if you do that you are "not following principles of good design."
Can you remind me of the quote where Dieter Rams says that you shouldn't be allowed to try?
These are Dieter's principles — a product design approach that he believes leads to good design. I pointed out that if you apply the opposite of them, you get this product.
That said, I agree the aesthetic here under discussion is pretty miserable. Ostentatious CNC tool marks might impress some, but to me it just says they couldn't be bothered to finish manufacturing the thing before they shipped it, and it shares with brutalism the trait of being deliberately unwelcoming to the senses as a way of demanding attention be paid to itself.
We just kind of hand-wavy announce that anything boring, sleek, or rectangular is "functional". It's not.
I can respect the motivation behind this; I favor midcentury modern furniture not least precisely because it doesn't insist on itself with an excess of ornament, as Rams also inveighs against. But there's a seasonality in any new idea; after the first generation for whom it's revolutionary comes a second for whom it's the status quo ante, and most of those raised with any norm will defend and uphold it for its own sake just because it's what they know to be "normal", whether or not the idea itself or its application still makes sense. Hence the canonization of an aesthetic based originally around the idea that no aesthetic deserves to be canonized.
I agree with everything you've said, but would just point out that the pendulum has perhaps started swinging in the other direction: a lot of folks in the design world are starting to push back against the associated minimalist/functionalist aesthetic that has taken over much of the world: it can make our built environments feel sterile, boring, and robotic.
Design is meant to exist in conversation with culture, and after such a long time developing a society that revolves around consumption I think that meaning has been lost. "Right to repair" is a partial reaction to this also, and valuable as such, but what I really want to see is a swing back in the direction of the idea that made things can and should be made to last - not as perfect, impenetrable monoliths of capital-D Design, but as longstanding participants in the lives of the people with whom they're surrounded, and which can be and are changed by those people to better meet the needs of the day and year and decade.
That isn't something the money power has any incentive to want these days, of course; every thing that need not be replaced today is a thing for which no replacement will be bought or sold today. But this is not a novel problem, and it has been solved before.
In the 90s, it was nothing to stitch a patch on a piece of clothing that made it uniquely yours, or artfully distress your jeans.
Now, people just... don't. Because they can buy them like that.
Great for consumerism. Less great for individuality and building self-reliance.
Just the opposite. It's ostentatiously sterile, boring and robotic.
While also being retro, and trying very hard to look like something that might have appeared in the original Matrix movie - which was 24 years ago.
Visually, it's unoriginal, which is an unforgivable design sin - literally a stock laplet with pointless metal bits stuck on which will get in the way if you're trying to use it seriously.
It fails as fashion because it looks like a mess, neither cool, exotic, nor aspirational.
And it fails as design because while it's - perhaps - trying to be ironic, it takes itself too seriously to be funny. And it's just not very functional.
Interesting, is that what you take away from brutalism? To me brutalist design and art is deliberately unwelcoming to critique the blandness and safeness of our modern cushioned existence, not a puerile drawing of attention. I actually enjoy the aesthetic.
But then, disclaimer, I'm a sucker for histrionics and theatrical gimmicks.
One of my friends did a bit of photoshop to see what it would look like if the conduit was instead a dull gray and it looked so much better and so distinctive that it felt like I had been robbed.
I think there's a reason everybody seems to love the star trek engine room
Parent should have quoted the entire set, in which good design...
- is innovative
- makes a product useful
- is aesthetic
- makes a product understandable
- is unobtrusive
- is honest
- is long-lasting
- is thorough down to the last detail
- is environmentally friendly
- is minimal
To chisel functionalism in industrial design down to something I can fit in a HN comment, my takeaway was that their central tenant was 'Have a specific useful vision, that values your user above yourself, and optimize everything in service to that vision.'
With the understanding that designed objects aren't paintings and must have a utility component.
PS: I would also have a long disagreement about fanciful graphical representations of computing in visual media as a metaphor intended to convey an experience to a computer-illiterate audience, versus a kitschy misunderstanding of reality. ;-)
Technical advisors and directors aren't idiots. You think it's a coincidence that the primary method of interacting with a computer in the Star Trek universe is voice-first?
Oh, says who?
'Shallow' is indeed the word...
Wouldn't it be more like Lsroioum's ?
You have a problem with your setup.
Further you mention 2 sets of specs, and use an unmentioned spec as your measure.
I gotta find some better sites/communities
I want to see more wacky and boundary shamelessly “techno” designs like this, it’s like someone brought something from a Gibson novel to life and I dig it. I’ll take this over the current crop of bland device/tech design.
My second reaction is that I'm due for a rewatch of Hackers...
Maybe like someone who's into watches enjoys fun diversity of Swatch and G-SHOCK or artfulness and craft of more expensive brands and rejects blingy stylized pretentious watches from fashion brands.
Also, please don't judge the community by their response to this design, because this design was specifically created to be polarizing. It's intended to generate debates, just like many pieces art.
It feels like they're saying "Because this is so ugly and objectively bad, it should not exist at all. It must be stamped out and everything should look like Apple."
Demna Gvasalia, attempting to subvert the high fashion status quo, while starting his career at Maison Martin Margiela and LV, working under Marc Jacobs...
Demna Gvasalia, whose current position is ... checks notes ... creative director of Balenciaga. Ahh, yes, very ... subversive.
The fashion world, even the high end, is not immune from criticism or outright mockery.
OP might be the perfect stereotypical HN user while criticizing the same stereotype.
I happen to like it. It looks rather durable. The sling attachment points are really cool. If I found some indication it was water resistant I'd add it to the short list of acquisitions.
The aversion to high frequency detail is a fad that well go away some day.
Perhaps makerspaces are better. Traditional tech spaces are now dominated by oppressor/oppressed mindset and incessant indulgence in outrage/anger.
Still, I can't tell if this change is a change in me or a change in the world. It could well be that I just occupy different spaces against my better wishes. The other day I got some notification from ubuntuforums.org and found my posts from 2005. Haha, that was a riot! But very earnest attempts at stuff.
Perhaps the only solution to this is to start one.
Clearly the author has never set foot in the Alps (or any other mountain range). People wear technicals all day every day
you should try it :D
The stuff is really expensive, it is delicate and you have an ultra-narrow range of weather conditions where you can actually wear it. The laptop in this article is kind of the same.
Their most delicate stuff is the Goretex, and that’s delicate only in the sense that you need to wash it regularly to avoid delamination. Same as any Arcteryx or Tilak or whatever jacket, because that’s just how goretex is. All their other stuff is even tougher, the stotz, the encapsulated nylon, the dryskin, whatever CH is, except maybe like, the knit beanies?
Now if you mean delicate in a more psychological sense, I can see it. Sure, a J1A-GT may be just as tough as arceryx beta AR, but it’s hard to avoid worrying about the condition of a raincoat you spent $1500 on. :)
https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-acrnm-rmt...
It has some Matrix looking visuals going on in parts of the page.
And there is a weird video of a guy who demonstrates wearing the computer, without saying anything. The vibe reminds me of that video game from a few years ago where you play a hacker in a cyberpunk future.
I get the brutalism thing. There are a bunch of exposed bits that would normally have some trim over them. Brutalism literally meant showing the raw (brut) structural concrete rather than hiding it behind a facade. The back of the laptop does have a little much in the way of ornate greebling, but the sides of the top show just the structural bits, right?
It's too weird for me, and yet I keep considering it as it's one of the only tablet PCs currently out with 32GB ram and can run Linux without too many headaches.
The idea of fashion designers making cool/new/different laptops makes a lot of sense. I want one & I hope this sticks!
Edit: hahahh the space bar has the word “VOID” on it in a sleazy serif font. Love it
I am a bit torn by they keyboard though - the primary labels are certainly not functional, and secondary english labels look like last-minute addition with a mismatched font. I wish they went either with complete nonsense print, or with a more functional one.
I’ve worked with Matt Panzarino in the past a few times and he’s one of the most well versed tech journalists out there. And a nice guy to boot
Laptop sounds pretty amazing too if pricey
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vC9qXnc5MuA
Althought I can't imagine someone actually using it that way...
The keyboard is apparently detachable so it can be used as a tablet, which somewhat makes sense.
In this case, they simulate a haphazard laptop where the creator ran out of same color keys and used whatever they had or they simulate not having time to finish the machining of the aluminum and leaving it in the roughing stage.
Put another name, what's the name of the very intentional and studied "I don't care about looks" aesthetic, where you "don't care" in a very precise and fashionable way.
Wabi-sabipunk
See, I interpreted that as like those gaming keyboards where the WASD keys are a different colour - but moreso. With mysterious extra keys.
I've noticed this approach and attitude in various arts, but it's hard to put a single word to it. As another commenter mentioned, I think wabi-sabi is related, and punk too.
> The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" in nature. It is prevalent in many forms of Japanese art.
For example in ceramics, they value the crooked, asymmetrical, coarse, and cracked. In calligraphy, it's the splash and drip, the way the brush runs out of ink and how the line fades out near the tail end.
In singing, it's the smokey aged voice that breaks perfectly when pushed by emotion. Or other musical instruments, when the sound gets dirty because of the physical material being pushed to its limits, like an over-driven guitar amp, or a violin bowing a string too hard but actually perfectly hitting that point intentionally, to get that stank, that nasty, it makes you grimace with pleasure.
In theatre they say, "You need to throw it away." Apparently, acting can get stiff and unnatural when you try too hard, so you need to let go a bit, as if you don't care, to give it room to breathe.
I suppose it can be seen in literture too, like "stream of consciousness" style, or certain narrative voice that tastefully breaks the rules of grammar.
> where you "don't care" in a very precise and fashionable way
That's the trick it seems, that this "don't care" attitude is actually very polished, studied, carefully done, paying attention down to the details, and then letting it go. It's an artful use of "mistakes" and imperfections. Jazz is like that, they value the richness of "off" harmonies, dissonance, polyrhythms which can sound "wrong" to the unfamiliar but which is exactly what the connoiseurs appreciate and enjoy.
Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, by Leonard Koren
> It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
And a discussion around how it might relate to software:
>> A related term in literature and the arts is "clinamen", the act of deliberately breaking a stylistic rule to enhance the beauty of an otherwise perfect whole.
I LIKE IT.
What isn't getting old is having a functional keyboard and not needing an extra 50% of flat surface behind the screen to precariously balance the screen kickstand on. Why are so many "convertibles" going down this stupid path? You could easily put a real keyboard with a real hinge on it at roughly the same thickness and very little added weight. Bonus points for going with the 2013-era XPS 12 flipping design for maximum cyberpunk feel.
Any high res photos of the keys/lettering?
...is that a good or bad thing?
> You’d better know how to touch type. The Cyrillic-ish alphabet designed for Acronym by Rudnick is all part of the theme — this is a computer from another dimension slightly off axis from yours, where people stand in the rain on the roof of a parking garage typing something into a terminal prompt.
looks at qwerty letters clear, if a bit dim, on the keys
Did author sniffed glue before reviewing it or something ?
Turns out that ROG beast was a rebadged model formerly in Asus's Lamborghini co-branded line, intended to compete with Acer's Ferrari laptops.
I guess there is an intersection of fashion nerd and computer nerd. And I am not the arbiter of computer nerd, but I think the 20 or so times I talked with people who said they were computer nerds and had cool looking computers that sucked as computers they didn’t seem authentically computer nerdy (for lack of a better word).
I specifically remember someone from the late 90s and early 00s who kept going on and on about how he was into computers and always had to have the best computers, the “absolute best” he would say. Then he had these really trash Sony vaios. I asked him about what he liked most and he just said how they were cool. I asked him what he ran and he didn’t really say anything.
People like collecting stuff, and I don’t want to begrudge people their joy. But I’d like to learn about the people who buy these and what they are most interested in. I think my Sony Vaio guy just bought whatever was most expensive in the store.
i9-13900H, NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 4070 (Laptop), 1TB SSD, 32 GB RAM
It has looks and performance seemingly
Similarly, how much of people's car-buying decisions come down to looks? Sure things like "how many seats" or cargo capacity matter but I imagine looks/perceived status boost are the biggest factor for a lot of people.
Hell, I don't like admitting it but I actively dislike my cheapo phone (Nokia G22) in part because I think the colour is dumb. (Also modern Android kinda sucks, but that's a different story).
If you have the interest, take a look to the book Emotional Design by Donald Norman. There is a cognitive theory on the perception of a product that goes into three levels: visceral, functional, and reflective.
Even if you only care about functionality, an unpolished product will give you the impression that it’s unfinished and adds bias to the perception of the functionality. In this case the design is oriented towards a particular audience that likes the cyberpunk aspect, the impact for that people is more reflective: I don’t use the minimalist computers like everybody else, I use something that looks imperfect but works perfectly… well that’s the idea. Personally, I’m more inclined to the minimalism of a Mac.
I'm also perpetually confused that people buy Macs.
Easy peasy, Macbooks are maybe not perfect in one aspect, but they strike a well-rounded balance.
OS: Great ergonomics, unix based (WSL can shove it). The peak of Windows was win2000, with XP and 7 still usable. After that it's adware garbage that's getting worse with each release. Linux on desktop sadly never materialized into something that would work out-of-the-box. Plenty issues with wifi, audio, high dpi displays. And even if you overcome this the UI is still clunky.
Hardware: Usually solid. There were some issues with the butterfly keyboards and low amount of ports but besides that it's just nice bodies, good sound, great display.
Nowadays: ARM-based chips just blows out Intel out of water. Never heard a fan noise, battery lasts forever.
You might pay some extra. But as a professional in software engineering, you should be able to afford it.
I get the appeal of a solid macbook for sure. But for me, the price tag is completely unjustifiable given the alternatives. It is without a doubt almost 80% about looks, acceptance, and feeling over actual specs. People buy them because other people have them and they want to be in the club. And that's fine, no judgement, but it's a waste of money.
Also the only reason they have any form of dominance at all is the fact that they lock down their shitty OS to only run on their hardware. Sure they get to control the "expeeeriennnnce" but nobody else does that.
People with actual design sensibilities buy Apple.