云飞和女儿的视频:苹果魅力无可档

毫无疑问Steve Jobs是位商业天才，但他事业上的成功该说是来源于对于苹果产品细化到细胞水平上的设计理念。其实Jobs应该说是本世纪最伟大的生物学家？

作者：Jeffery Kluger 发表日期：2011.10.7

Steve Jobs was one of the greatest biologists of our time. The late Apple chief will be rightly remembered for his design and marketing genius, but it was his understanding of the look and behavior of organisms — not to mention the psychology of the most sophisticated organism of all — that is the reason he’s being so deeply mourned.

Steve Jobs 当之无愧本世纪最伟大的生物学家。 毫无疑问，这位已故的苹果总裁会因为他在设计和营销方面的天才而被铭记，可成就他如此被深刻悼念的，应该是他对有机生命体外观及行为的深入研究和理解，更不用提他对所有生命体中最复杂最精密的那部分在心理层面的了若指掌了。

Human beings have always loved to biologize their machines. Favorite old cars don’t just break down, they die. Computers don’t power down, they sleep. Manual typewriters and obsolete turntables are spoken of with a teary fondness usually reserved for late relatives.

人类对于他们中意的机器有种赋予其生命的执念。最爱的那部老爷车不是“报废了”，而是“驾鹤西去了”。电脑不是“玩完了”，而是“长眠了”。手动打字机和过了时的唱片机被提起时，主人们往往带着那种提到已故亲友时才会有的那种潸然欲泣的浓浓爱意。

Smart designers have long understood the power of blurring the line between the organic and inorganic. It’s not for nothing that the muscle cars of the 1950s were actually less muscle than they were curve — an almost voluptuous assemblage of sheet-metal hips and flanks and tail-lit rump. It’s not for nothing that dragsters who nicknamed their cars always went for something like Lulu or Betsy or Norma Rae — despite the fact that what they were feminizing was a multiton hunk of roaring, smoking, screeching machine. Still, nobody ever called a sports car Bob.

聪明的设计师们早已深谙此道——他们懂得利用这种介于有机&无机之间的强大力量。否则就不会有20世纪50年代的健美车系了，那些与其说是“肌肉曲线”不过是车的“曲线型”罢了——却被形容成一种充满健美感的金属质感翘臀和汽车后驱的完美结合。否则也不会有赛车手们给他们的爱车起名“露露”，“贝特希”或是“诺玛芮”了——他们完全不会去想自己女性化了的爱车实际上是个重达数吨，哼哧哼哧冒着烟的大块铁皮机器。即便这样也不会有人把自己的赛车取名叫“鲍勃”。

Machines don’t have to smolder to be loved. The same industry that gave us the GTO and the ’57 Chevy also gave us the Volkswagen Beetle and the Mini Cooper — cars that beg to be hugged as much as driven. It’s not beauty that’s at work here; indeed, it’s a sort of antibeauty — the same thing that made the homely, spindly yet oddly beautiful lunar module so adored in the days of the lunar program. In one of the perfect visual convergences of that era, the Volkswagen folks took out full-page magazine ads that featured nothing but a photo of the lunar module, accompanied by the legend “Ugly, but it gets you there.” The VW logo was stamped proudly below it.

机器们不是非要争锋求宠的。同样的行业里，我们有GTO有'57雪弗兰，可我们还有甲壳虫和Mini Cooper——这些车子们不仅需要被驾驭而且需要被宠爱。在这里不是靓丽养眼的外形抢占了先机，相反的，恰恰是凭了他们那种“反靓丽”外形的理念胜出。就是这种理念，让外形平平，看起来不堪一击，实难和外形“靓丽”挂钩的登月舱成为了各色登月工程中的宠儿。在那个对完美视觉效果相当挑剔的时代，大众人另辟蹊径：他们将登月舱的照片登满整版杂志广告页，写上“没错是难看，可它让你上九天揽月。”大众标志就这么无不骄傲得赫然印在页面下方。

Part of what’s at work here is the compassion impulse. A cute puppy will trump a less cute one in the eyes of shoppers looking in a pet-store window. But a needy stray can blow them both away. Another powerful variable, at least in the case of some machines, is what’s known as neoteny — or baby-like traits. Across the animal kingdom, adults of uncounted species will go gooey at the sight of big eyes, high foreheads, small noses and, in the case of mammals, undersized chins — the better to nuzzle up snugly for nursing. Throw in baby fat — dimpled elbows, creased thighs, a general absence of sharp corners or right angles — and we’re helpless.

这儿起到作用的还有“同情心”的冲动效应。宠物店客人的眼中，一只狗狗会比另一只狗狗可爱些。可以当一只需要帮助的流浪狗出现时，那两只就被立刻忘到九霄云外去了。另一个强大的变量，至少针对部分团体而言，就是我们所知道的“幼态持续”或者说是“类婴儿特质”。纵观整个动物界，不管什么类型的成年人一看到那些大眼睛，高前额，小鼻头的动物就立刻会被萌得晕头转向了。小小下巴的哺乳动物，方便熊抱和照看，要是它还肥嘟嘟的——肉肉的小前腿，绒绒的胖后腿儿，一动一动憨态可掬的小样儿——哎呀呀 谁还hold住呀。

Even from the earliest days of Apple, Jobs seemed to know all of this and to design his machines accordingly. The very name Apple — with its rounded, organic logo that someone already seemed to have been unable to resist taking a bite of — contrasted nicely with the chilly IBM initials and their machine-tooled look. The earliest Apples were simple tan boxes, but by the time the Apple IIc came along, Jobs had traded in tan for white, shrunk the keyboard down to a less intimidating size and suspended an angled monitor over it that seemed to crane toward the user with an eager-to-please winsomeness.

即便是在苹果开创的早期，Jobs貌似已早就了解到这一点方才有了他的产品设计概念。恰如它的品牌名称“苹果”——只看他们这个圆圆的Logo就有一种让人扑上去咬一口的冲到，这就和干巴巴的IBM首字母缩写以及中规中矩的电脑样式形成了鲜明的对比。最早的苹果机师简单的棕褐色大盒，到后来苹果IIc系列出炉，Jobs将棕褐色改成了纯白色，改小键盘尺寸，让它看起来不那么大的吓人，将显示屏吊装于键盘之上，呈鹅颈状倾向使用者，看上去让人感觉这家伙迫不及待得要获得你的青睐。

The first Macintosh was a higher form of this anthropomorphic art, petite and rectangular, but also without sharp corners. In what became the machine’s signature advertising image, the little screen displayed not the Apple logo, but the cursive word hello in all lowercase letters. Even the form-fitting zippered bag the Macintosh came in seemed less a carrying case than a sort of computer Snugli. Certainly, it was the Mac’s utility and then-revolutionary icons and pull-down menus that made it a hit once people got their hands on it, but it was the cuddle factor that helped get them in the door.

第一台Mac机已然是人性化艺术品的高端诠释，小块头，长方形却又不带凌厉的边边角角。在后来成为这款机器标志性广告图像的地方，小小的屏幕上显示的不是苹果的Logo，而是小写草书“你好”字样。甚至连装Mac机的拉链电脑包也别出新意，你会觉得这是给你的宝贝电脑配上了一款安全又舒适的婴儿背带，而不仅仅是个塞电脑的包而已。诚然，是Mac机强大的性能，革命性的图标和下拉菜单让一拿到手的用户们惊喜连连的，可却是这些贴心的小因素才让用户们选择了它，不是么？

It’s certainly no coincidence that Apple’s lost decade was also the one it spent without Jobs, when the computers retained most of their ease-of-use advantages but slipped back to the brown-box design. It’s no coincidence either that when Jobs returned, the product line seemed to start over from its infancy, with the bulbous, irresistibly baby-like iMacs of the late 1990s — in candy colors, no less — maturing to the goosenecked, round-bottomed adolescent model of 2002 and later to the more traditional rectangles of today.

没有Jobs的十年间苹果亏损连连绝非偶然——那一时段的苹果机虽保留了大部分界面易于操作的优势，却还是倒退到原先棕色机体颜色的旧时期。同样，随着Jobs的回归苹果焕然新生也绝不是巧合事件——20实际90年代末，圆嘟嘟，各种糖果颜色外壳的iMac一经推出，立刻虏获了众多使用者的芳心。2002年鹅颈、圆底的青少年版和今天更为传统的矩形版，苹果日益成熟，且毫不逊色当年。

Apple can get away with the mature look it sells now because the company has harnessed the power of an even more sophisticated kind of biology: the products don’t just perform, they actually exhibit behavior. They think about your music collection and organize it as lovingly and obsessively as you would if you had the time; they’ve taken over from your mom or your big sister who faithfully kept the family photo albums, caring for your pictures and tucking them safely away where you can always find them by date, by place, by face. And with the arrival of the iPhone and iPad, the final human-machine barrier — the intimacy of touch — has been hurdled. There is no mouse, there is no keyboard. Your hands are always all over your iPad — you take it to bed with you, for goodness’ sake — as you read or write or engage in the very personal business of sending mail.

就算不是以目前成熟了的产品形式来销售，苹果也还是苹果。因为这家公司已经懂得利用更为复杂的生物学的力量：苹果的产品不知是执行操作，他们还引导操作。他们替你搜集好听的音乐并且排得仅仅有条，因为他们知道你要是有时间整理的话肯定要的就是这种效果；他们接过你老妈或是大姐执着得保存家人合照的工作，把你的照片分门别类保存得好好的，让你不管是按时间，按地点，还是按头像都能方便得找出你要的那张照片儿。随着iPhone和iPad的到来，人机沟通的最后的障碍——亲密的触碰沟通——已经被不复存在了。不用鼠标，无需键盘，iPad尽在你双手掌控。你可以让他伴你入眠——看在上帝的份儿上，我是指你可以在床上读读写写或是发一封很私人的邮件。

It’s fair to remember that Jobs, for all his other attributes, was also just a CEO and salesman, and the kind of tributes and encomiums and impromptu shrines that are appearing around the world in his memory seem a little out of place. But it’s also fair to argue that Jobs was in some ways different from other captains of industry. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Bill Gates changed the world too — Gates more than all of them, perhaps, with his second chapter as the world’s greatest philanthropist — and yet the garment rending and candle lighting that has followed Jobs’ death suggests a passion that none of the others stir up. Perhaps it’s that Gates and the rest invented what were essentially just products — remarkable things that transformed the way we lived, but merchandise all the same. Jobs’ inventions got inside not just our lives but also our heads and — improbably — our hearts. That, of course, is the way it is with living things.

有些人的认知是这样的：不管Jobs有多少种身份，他也不过是家公司的CEO，一个商人罢了，为了悼念这样一个人，全世界都行动了起来，种种的歌颂，逝者的言行被人推崇备至奉若圭臬似乎有些过了——这种认知无可厚非。可是，另一种认知也应当被认同——Jobs与其他行业的引领者是不同的。Henry Ford，Thomas Edison 还有Bill Gates 同样改变了世界——Gates或许成就更胜一层，这源于他人生的新篇章中写入了慈善家的身份。然而，随着Jobs辞世，形形色色的悼念者，根根长明的蜡烛这种情结是任谁也无法引领的。或许Gates等人创造的在本质上只是产品——改变了我们的生活方式，可仍旧是商品的一种。可Jobs的作品却深入人心，不仅仅是生活方式，还有我们的思维——夸张点说——我们的内心。当然了，这才是我们和有生命的事物，沟通的根本。

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/10/07/theyre-alive-why-apple-products-are-irresistible/#ixzz1fvTGyuDG

点击这里，察看更多。http://ideas.time.com/2011/10/07/theyre-alive-why-apple-products-are-irresistible/#ixzz1fvTGyuDG