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Apple.com gets a redesign
- cookiecaper 16y agoSomeone 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.
- rick_2047 16y agoI 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.
- pudquick 16y agoThere 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.
- maguay 16y agoThe page background color is different as well. It was white before, now its #F2F2F2. The new top-level menu looks nice, too, but somehow it just doesn't look "Apple" to me. Maybe I'm just too used to the old site...
- ugh 16y agoI 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.
- tel 16y agoDifferent 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. (edit: s/w/a/ ugh)
- mikeleeorg 16y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20091027023413/www.apple.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20091027023413/www.apple.com/
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Kudos 16y agoI don't like the look of the menu, but I do like its css animated entry to the page.
- jasonkester 16y agoLooks 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 http://i.imgur.com/mujh6.jpg
- spicyj 16y agoMust be a caching problem. This is what I see: http://cl.ly/0W2X1v0L1Y020F1A3U21 http://cl.ly/0W2X1v0L1Y020F1A3U21
- jasonkester 16y agoMust 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?
- mryall 16y agoThey'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 16y agoI 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.)
- zaatar 16y ago... 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 http://i.imgur.com/DxTKY.png
- dmcg 16y agoSame here - that is quite a fail.
- arn 16y agoit's just a caching issue - just reload the page, and it works.
- wkornewald 16y agoThat'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.
- smackfu 16y agoHow elegant.
- Stormbringer 16y agoApple'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?".
- epistasis 16y agoAnd the store is down. New products coming out? Cook making his mark already?
- spitfire 16y agoI 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 16y agoCould be a sign of a shift to a darker tone in OSX Lion as as been rumoured in the past.
- spitfire 16y agoDarker tone? OSX is going to go all futuristic-holocaust on us? "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...."
- Stormbringer 16y agoWell, they are back from the dead and much more powerful this time, so it must be a sequel.
- maguay 16y agoOr a more dark plastic look based on the top menubar. Out with the metal, in with the plastic?
- hugh3 16y agoI'm not seeing any dark black -- am I not getting the same thing everyone else is getting? Honestly if there's a difference from the old version I don't see it myself.
- pieter 16y agoSee the Macbook Air page for instance: http://www.apple.com/macbookair/ http://www.apple.com/macbookair/ 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.
- Silhouette 16y agoI'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...
- spicyj 16y agoThere are actually localized versions of the entire site based on country: http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ Apple chose to make http://www.apple.com/ http://www.apple.com/ the U.S. site (and why wouldn't they?) so it makes perfect sense to write February 10.
- ugh 16y agoAs 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 16y agoThe 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/ http://www.apple.com/ipod/ with the AT page http://www.apple.com/at/ipod/ 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 http://i55.tinypic.com/2wpnv61.png (Please refer to the picture if the AT site changes to the new design before you read this.)
- elai 16y agoI 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.
- dirtyhand 16y agoSteve Jobs is gone for a week and this happens...
- Devilboy 16y agoWell to be fair I don't see much of a difference.
- biot 16y agoAt least they didn't feel the urge to put laminate flooring as their site background.
- mortenjorck 16y agoAnd a big 72-point "Hi! We're Apple. We make technology enjoyable and magical." set in Museo Slab with a one-pixel chisel-effect.
- jcapote 16y agoon 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
- cskau 16y agoAnyone 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 16y agoLooks like a known bug in Chromium at least: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=29427 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=29427
- joedavis512 16y agoI can confirm this same bug on Fedora. I'm not sure how this wasn't caught in testing. In my opinion the previous site design was better.
- terhechte 16y agoIn 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?
- saint-loup 16y agoThe 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 16y agoWell, 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.)
- pg1 16y agoI like it. Menu bar is thinner and fonts are smaller. Also auto suggest on search is really cool.
- tesseract 16y agoI 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.
- revorad 16y agoI 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?
- jacquesm 16y agoI 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.
- mryall 16y ago> There absolutely is no added value in having to wait for a week for delivery of something that could have been done instantly … Agreed. I wonder how long it will be before they release Mac OS X upgrades through the App Store.
- steveklabnik 16y agoThe 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.
- pieter 16y agoHere'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 16y agoThat'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.
- tophtucker 16y agoFly-out fly-in animation under Mac and iPod has gotten totally out-of-hand.
- epo 16y agoSomewhat Pixar-ish, like a crowd of cartoon characters dashing off stage to be replaced by a new bunch. Will get irritating very quickly.
- kaylarose 16y agoI 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.
- Jayasimhan 16y agoMy 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.
- frou_dh 16y agoThe dark glossy nav-bar gives me a Flash site template vibe.
- cosmicray 16y agoOK, 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 ?
- Tycho 16y agoLove 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
- emehrkay 16y agoMy ten minute attempt at recreating the animation found on the product page http://jsfiddle.net/5rmLv/ http://jsfiddle.net/5rmLv/
- cantlogintohn 16y agoWhat page is this for? I couldn't find it in the store or individual products. Perhaps its my laggy internet connectioPr
- emehrkay 16y agoCheck http://www.apple.com/mac/ http://www.apple.com/mac/ in a webkit-based browser (safari, chrome, etc) and click applications or server
- cantlogintohn 16y agoWhat page is this for? I couldn't find it in the store or individual products. Perhaps its my laggy internet connectioPr
- cantlogintohn 16y agoWhat page is this for? I couldn't find it in the store or individual products. Perhaps its my laggy internet connectioPr
- jonknee 16y agoI'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.
- gry 16y agoApple 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/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/kernelpanic/sets/283374/
- blahedo 16y agoIt'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 16y agoThat 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.
- yesno 16y agoSomehow the menu style reminds me of Widgets/UI-component from the Windows ecosystem.
- runjake 16y agoThis 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.
- btucker 16y agoPerhaps 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 16y agoWrong article.. You meant to comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2143977 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2143977
- btucker 16y agoD'oh! Thanks :)
- finemann 16y agoThe search field looks ugly (Chrome+Ubuntu)
- blago 16y agoDesigners, turn your copy machines on :-)