

Apple.com gets a redesign - ssclafani
http://www.apple.com/

======
jacquesm
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.

~~~
pieter
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.

~~~
sudont
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.

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zaatar
... 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.

[Edit] Screenshot: <http://i.imgur.com/DxTKY.png>

~~~
dmcg
Same here - that is quite a fail.

~~~
arn
it's just a caching issue - just reload the page, and it works.

~~~
wkornewald
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.

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spitfire
I don't like it. The light grey worked and seemed very Apple. This dark black
seems a little too serious and the menubar seems somehow incomplete.

I'm sure they'll still sell millions of whatever they're selling though. and
I'll still buy their stuff.

~~~
nfg
Could be a sign of a shift to a darker tone in OSX Lion as as been rumoured in
the past.

~~~
spitfire
Darker tone? OSX is going to go all futuristic-holocaust on us? "I've seen
things you people wouldn't believe...."

~~~
Stormbringer
Well, they are back from the dead and much more powerful this time, so it must
be a sequel.

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dirtyhand
Steve Jobs is gone for a week and this happens...

~~~
biot
At least they didn't feel the urge to put laminate flooring as their site
background.

~~~
mortenjorck
And a big 72-point

 _"Hi! We're Apple. We make technology enjoyable and magical."_

set in Museo Slab with a one-pixel chisel-effect.

------
gry
Apple often updates their site to reflect treatments in their desktop OS. A
lot of the elements here, I expect in Lion.

For fun, here's a Flickr set since before time, including now.

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/kernelpanic/sets/283374/>

~~~
blahedo
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.

~~~
ja2ke
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.

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terhechte
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?

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epistasis
And the store is down. New products coming out? Cook making his mark already?

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cookiecaper
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.

~~~
pudquick
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.

~~~
mickeyben
There's also a nice transition when using the search

<http://littlebigdetails.com/post/2939190835>

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emehrkay
My ten minute attempt at recreating the animation found on the product page

<http://jsfiddle.net/5rmLv/>

~~~
cantlogintohn
What page is this for? I couldn't find it in the store or individual products.
Perhaps its my laggy internet connectioPr

~~~
emehrkay
Check <http://www.apple.com/mac/> in a webkit-based browser (safari, chrome,
etc) and click applications or server

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elai
I like the product bar redesign, I don't like the color scheme of the top bar
although. It seems mismatched with the rest of the website.

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jonknee
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.

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mryall
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.

~~~
Yaggo
I noticed the same. The animation is so smooth that it must be done in CSS.
Nice to see Apple eating its own dog food. (And delicious food it is.)

------
jasonkester
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.

I'm going to call this a step back:

<http://i.imgur.com/mujh6.jpg>

~~~
spicyj
Must be a caching problem. This is what I see:

<http://cl.ly/0W2X1v0L1Y020F1A3U21>

~~~
jasonkester
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?

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cskau
Anyone else seeing the graphical glitch with the search field upper left ?

I'm running Chrome on Ubuntu. But still - they could at least have tested it a
little before launch.

~~~
sabatier
Looks like a known bug in Chromium at least:
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=29427>

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Jayasimhan
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.

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Tycho
Love the way the content seems to 'bounce' onto the page like it just got
there in the nick of time all at once.

Does anyone know about the gallery/slideshow widget they use on the Mac pages
(and elsewhere probably). the div id = 'herogallery'

Wondering if this is a proprietary Apple thing or can other people use it

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pg1
I like it. Menu bar is thinner and fonts are smaller. Also auto suggest on
search is really cool.

~~~
tesseract
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.

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runjake
This article might be flag-worthy otherwise, but it's important to note that
it appears they're transitioning to HTML5 with this latest redesign.

In this case, the changes under the hood are probably more important than
what's going on visually.

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btucker
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.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Wrong article.. You meant to comment here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2143977>

~~~
btucker
D'oh! Thanks :)

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revorad
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?

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saint-loup
The gradient over the search field is kind of weird, more button-y than
field-y.

Something I like : no more horizontal scrolling on the Mac page. It also loads
faster.

~~~
tesseract
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.)

------
cosmicray
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
?

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yesno
Somehow the menu style reminds me of Widgets/UI-component from the Windows
ecosystem.

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Kudos
I don't like the look of the menu, but I do like its css animated entry to the
page.

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tophtucker
Fly-out fly-in animation under Mac and iPod has gotten totally out-of-hand.

~~~
kaylarose
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.

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frou_dh
The dark glossy nav-bar gives me a Flash site template vibe.

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jcapote
on the latest chrome I see all possible ui states for a split second, then the
regular interface appears normally. this happens every page i visit

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finemann
The search field looks ugly (Chrome+Ubuntu)

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blago
Designers, turn your copy machines on :-)

------
Silhouette
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...

~~~
ugh
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.)

~~~
acqq
The parent is right: the boxes are more prominent, the old design looked much
"cleaner" and lighter.

Compare the US page

<http://www.apple.com/ipod/>

with the AT page

<http://www.apple.com/at/ipod/>

This picture shows the US page details (above) vs the AT page details (under):

<http://i55.tinypic.com/2wpnv61.png>

(Please refer to the picture if the AT site changes to the new design before
you read this.)

~~~
ugh
I don’t think that’s really the old design you are looking at. Maybe a caching
issue on your side.

Archive.org has sporadic and broken coverage of apple.com but here is how the
iPod page looked in September 2010:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080613084354/www.apple.com/itun...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080613084354/www.apple.com/itunes/)

It has a different general layout and is much more cluttered. Product pages
are, as I said, unchanged:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080503193605/www.apple.com/ipod...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080503193605/www.apple.com/ipodtouch/)
I don’t know about shadows since images on archive.org are broken.

Edit: Those boxes already had shadows in 2008:
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/zurb/3045535592/> Must be a caching issue on
your side that you are not seeing them. Here is also an old screenshot showing
nicely how they de-cluttered the category (Mac, iPod) pages:
[http://www.mac4ever.com/images/images_full/new_imac_design.p...](http://www.mac4ever.com/images/images_full/new_imac_design.png)

