A facelift for the Macintosh
curved.de
curved.de
One might argue that good designers and designs move on as they co-evolve. This "new" design is a nice piece of borderline-functional retro chique, but apart from being thin it hardly qualifies as futuristic or practical from our perspective today.
As components shrink, people expect the display to become the only visible component of the computer - and Apple is clearly on that path. I would consider it the right path from a usability as well as a design perspective.
I'm not sure putting the ports on the rear of the e.g. iMac improves usability. It certainly looks nicer, but I wouldn't consider the required neck acrobatics to plug in a thumb drive a usability improvement. (But I guess it makes sense in the long-term with everything going wireless.)
1. interaction peripherals where Bluetooth+batteries is workable (keyboards, mice)
2. interaction peripherals where Bluetooth+an external power cable is workable (speakers)
3. low-power data peripherals (CF cards, flash drives) where low-speed USB is acceptable
4. high-speed data peripherals and controllers (RAID storage, discrete GPUs, etc.) that effectively need a PCIe channel
1 and 2 are wireless, obviously. 4 doesn't get reconfigured much, so it makes sense that Thunderbolt and related "extension" ports are on the back of the device. (They were previously inside the device, after all.)
3 is the main problem, then, that currently suggests accessibility of ports: the small, transportable, label-able data-containing devices that descend from floppy disks.
But why not think of alternative solutions, if "lightweight" data storage devices are the only constraint?
One design I always thought fondly of was having small magnetic-backed data-storage "pucks" with no plugs as such, and making the non-screen part of the computer (e.g. the front-bottom panel area of an iMac) a magnetic attach-point for them. You would literally "mount" the your drives onto the computer. (Presumably it would inductively power them while they're there, too.)
This wouldn't be a very fast storage device class compared to something using actual wires, but it wouldn't need to be; fast storage is what Thunderbolt et al are for.
It'd likely also have other uses: for example, magnetically attaching your ID card (which is also a smart card) to a corporate computer to cause it to log in—and also to indicate to anyone else walking by that the computer is in use.
That Apple logo on the front is nothing Apple would do. Lower left? nah. Apple would put one Apple logo on it. On the back. Maybe even none at all (look at the Mac Pro).
The headphone jack seems perfect to pull the thing down right on it's screen. The blue glow on the back? really?
Apple designs are about removing the bezel and letting the computer disappear and let the screen come out. This thing is like 60%-70% computer and 35% screen. This isn't a "facelift", it's a mock up of a design regression.
This would never be something out of Cupertino.
If you look at the actual apple computer standing next to the mock-up, you'll see the nothing-Apple-would-do-lower-left logo.
According to his biography, Steve Jobs added a handle to the original iMacs, not because he wanted people to carry them around, but because it made it less threatening to people who aren't used to computers.
So adding things is part of Apple's design history.
Anyway, the rest of the slit is a speaker, so while it is obviously there as a throw-back (the whole design is a throwback) it does serve some purpose.