I had to buy a mac OS/X DVD a week ago and I was actually surprised by how clean the (old) site feels compared to almost every other e-commerce site that I use.
The only thing that was slightly cumbersome was the checkout process but otherwise it was pretty smooth.
What bugged me is that I had to take 'snail mail' delivery instead of being offered the option to download an ISO image. There absolutely is no added value in having to wait for a week for delivery of something that could have been done instantly, no fun when you're computer is broken and sitting there doing nothing for longer than necessary.
Here's a small tip if you really want a download instead. If you sign up as a mac developer you can download it from developer.apple.com , though I'm not sure what the license on that is.
That's the 100/yr agreement, right? I'm sure it's coming fairly soon, they're shipping install-on-chip now, and it would be fairly pointless to sell an OS upgrade on a medium they're phasing out.
I'd bet that Lion's shipped on a DVD with a chip option. Whatever's after Lion will most likely have digital distribution as an option, though.
The added value is that my mom and grandma don't have to worry about what that option is and if they should have picked it. I think the Mac App store is a much more likely place and method of getting instant updates.
... and it doesn't work quite right on the iPad. There is a hovering menu bar which is fully blank. I'm surprised they didn't test the site on the iPad before pushing it live.
That's what asset versioning is for. I can't believe they don't concatenate their assets. Even their versioned PNG files use Etags... With proper caching and other optimizations they could probably get their site load times down to maybe 300ms (almost instantly) instead of 1.8s and at the same time fix such caching problems.
Apple's website has a long history of being superficially pretty, but seriously lacking when it comes to any form of professional usability.
To wit, it is typical of over-designed sites in that it is fragile when people use it at different resolutions, on different browsers or in different countries (e.g. when the iPhone came out, or rather didn't come out different international versions of the page had rendering issues because the big chunk of space for the iPhone wasn't there, and all of a sudden all the pretty little lines didn't line up.
Then there's the way they were so fond of grey-on-grey text - who's idea of usability is that? Put your hands up so you can be slapped. Repeat after me: "contrast is good, m'kay?".
Agreed, the translucent dark black looks somewhat Windows Vista/7-ish. The metallic theme was more distinctive, more Apple. Wonder what their reasoning behind the redesign is...
Though that's the only page so far I've found with a dark black background. I'm not sure why it's black, all the other Macbook Air pages have a light background.
This is the old and unchanged MacBook Air page. Apple heavily customizes product pages – no two look alike. That has always been the case and is definitely nothing new. I think that the Final Cut Studio page was entirely black in the past, maybe even the Mac Pro page.
Obviously. Site wide elements obviously changed (I think the site map at the bottom also slightly changed), but that’s not really relevant to the comment. The page content itself – everything minus the site wide elements – is completely unchanged. It being black is not new and also not surprising.
It's amazing how fast they converged; the first two (from 1997) look nostalgically mid-90s Web 1.0, but the 1998 homepage is recognisably a forerunner of the current one.
That change is pretty clearly pre- and post-Jobs' return/launch of the iMac. It's kind of crazy that they've maintained such a singular focus and style for so long, especially after the painful decade of constant reinvention and flux that preceded it.
In general I do like it. The search bar (top right) with the gradient background isn't good usability though. It looks as if it is deactivated. It turns white when one clicks it, but how many people don't click it because they think it is disabled?
Someone have a before and after? Maybe I just don't spend enough time on apple.com, but this looks the same to me, except maybe a different color on the menu bar.
There are some page transition effects that are new as well. Not sure what browser you need to be using to see them, but I'm using Safari.
When I load the "Mac" section, the icons for the various models of Mac sort of spring outwards to fill the scroll area.
Clicking on any of the other categories on that page (like Applications, Accessories, etc. result in a offloading of old icons + reloading of the new category icons that includes the same spring/jiggle.
Also, when I go back to a previous page, like the main page, the navigation bar animatedly drops down from nowhere on page load.
Different color menu bar, far more animations (which have a tightly sprung attitude instead of the previous more smooth transitions), the background color went more neutral grey, the background was augmented by a gradiential noise pattern, there's more of an emphasis on rounded corners...
It's a lot of minor details leading to a pretty tangible cosmetic effect. Also the scripts seem a lot more responsive on my iPad.
I think it was lightly grey before. I definitely remember there being a lightly grey and noisy background at the top like there is now, don’t know about the bottom of the page.
I agree with that. I have seen apple.com a few times when I want to drool and this seems strikingly similar. But one thing is, when you have such a minimalistic design, the change in menu bar is a major change.
I'm seeing a weird bug with the search feature. Typing a search request and then quickly hitting enter gets you taken to a results page that is missing most of or all of your query (depending on how fast you type). It must be something with the search as you type JS, but is very annoying. I tested in both Chrome and Safari.
They're certainly getting full use out of the CSS animation support in Safari. Check out the Mac and iPod sections, and the animations when you move between the different groups of products. They've replaced the old horizontal scrolling display with some bouncy back and forth.
Looks like they simply stripped all the navigation off the existing design. (at least that's what I see in the latest Chrome).
As such, unless I want to read about whatever that big picture is talking about, or one of those 4 irrelevant things on the bottom (such as learning about iPhone4 on Verizon), there's nothing I can do there. They've essentially removed the rest of their site from the internet.
If, for instance, I wanted to buy a new Macbook Pro, I currently have no way to do so.
Must be. After enough SHIFT+F5'ing, I can see the nav on the homepage. And if I do a hard refresh on every page I go to, I eventually get the nav there too.
Apple really should know how to version their .js and .css to avoid this. It's Website 101 to increment the version number on your style sheet when you launch a new version of your site.
We all do it for our sites. Why do you suppose Apple don't do it for their own?
My opinion on the redesign: The difference in design between the old and new site is very analogous to the design changes between the 3gs and 4. The boxes are much squarer.
I seem to remember a previous iteration having the auto suggest as well, then it went away. I think it was when they first put the search field at the top of the page.
Perhaps it's what you're going for, but accenting the "t" in the wordmark the way you do, is little too "jesus-y" for my tastes. This is especially true of the favicon.
Then again, I know for a lot of folks this isn't necessarily a turn-off.
I really don't like the app store design. Light gray text on a white background is nearly impossible to read. And why oh why do they have horizontal scrolling for the app screenshots?
OK, I clicked on Site Map. I get this zero-pixel border/gutter on the left side (on Safari), which I find incredibly annoying. Does anyone else see this ?
Well, it... is kind of button-y in that something happens when you click on it. (Or tab into it - glad to see that at least keyboard usability did not suffer.)
I wouldn't mind it, but - for me at least - on a just-before-unibody-gen MBP w Chrome, it is really choppy. I basically see the first 2 and last 2 frames of the animation.
It's better on Safari, but still, it would be better the disable the animation on browsers where it performs poorly.
I'm not sure I'm a fan of this new layout. The old one tended to have plenty of whitespace to give it a clean, open feel. This more boxy one looks pretty cramped in my browser (Firefox).
I think they have a few issues with content/navigation as well. Certainly they could do with someone more internationally aware checking the wording, because to those of us who don't use the bizarre US date order, "Coming Februrary 10" sounds like your web site is nearly a year out of date...
"February 10" isn't that U.S.-specific. When writing out dates numerically, the mm/dd/yy is very American, but when writing out the month in words, there's not a lot of international consistency between whether people from various countries write "February 10" versus "10th February" or "10 February" or even "10. February" when writing in English. Here in Denmark it seems to be pretty evenly split (when writing English). This University of Copenhagen page uses both on the same page!: http://www.math.ku.dk/english/
"February 10" to mean February 2010 is pretty uncommon in most countries though, isn't it? Maybe February '10, but not February 10.
As far as I can see the general layout is unchanged.
What has changed is the navigation bar and the product selection boxes on the Mac and iPod pages. (You previously had to scroll horizontally, now there are tabs.) It could be that they also de-cluttered those two Mac and iPod pages and removed a few elements. I’m not sure about that. What I am sure about is that all the product pages are unchanged. (Apple’s product pages tend to be heavily customized. They don’t follow one layout, they can be very different.)
So, no less whitespace than before.
(Apple.com is the US website, not Apple’s international website.)
The only thing that was slightly cumbersome was the checkout process but otherwise it was pretty smooth.
What bugged me is that I had to take 'snail mail' delivery instead of being offered the option to download an ISO image. There absolutely is no added value in having to wait for a week for delivery of something that could have been done instantly, no fun when you're computer is broken and sitting there doing nothing for longer than necessary.