#HTE

Rain’s Weekly Design Minutiae: Apple’s Unusual Shopping Bag

A crew in my photo studio left behind a bunch of paper shopping bags. I was folding them up to recycle them when I noticed something odd. Take a look at this Apple shopping bag vs. the others:

Front

Rear

See it? All of the non-Apple shopping bags have their fold-flat crease on one of the faces. 

The bottoms of the non-Apple bags, though they are comprised of different pieces laminated together, are designed to remain flat whether the bag is folded or open. They are also a visual hodgepodge of different pieces meeting.

In contrast, the bottom of Apple’s bag is neat and orderly, no angles. It’s also designed with the fold-flat crease on the bottom, leaving the face unmarred.

In other words both faces of the Apple bag are completely seamless.

I found that Apple has patented this bag’s design. And the Washington Post even wrote about it. But neither the patent nor the article mention the seamless faces; both are instead focused on the nature of the handles.

The non-Apple shopping bags have twine-like handles glued between strips of paper. In the Abercrombie & Fitch bag the handles disappear into slots.

The mid-range bags have shoelace handles that are knotted on the inside.

The Apple bag has knit handles that are made from paper. They don’t feel softer in the hand than the shoelace handles but they do feel more substantial.

They disappear into the bag through these half-moon cutouts and are reinforced on the inside. The top of the bag feels quite strong and I’m certain that if this were to fail, it wouldn’t be at the handles.

(This drawing is a cross-section of 9-9 shown in Fig. 1)

I’m a longtime Apple user, but the company no longer holds the magic for me that it once did. I find their products aren’t any easier to use compared to competitors and their software is non-intuitive, clunky and buggy. I don’t care if they do or don’t come out with something shiny and new every year, I just wish they’d focus on making their current stuff work well.

So, seeing the design attention lavished on this bag actually made me a little sad. Because it shows that someone inside the company still gives a damn, but it is not trickling down to end-user-me in a way that improves my life.

Steve Jobs used to cite the old craftsman’s saw about making the unseen back of the cabinet as nice as the front, and someone has done that here with the bottom of the bag. Which is admirable, though no one is likely to notice. I do notice daily, however, that the search functionality in Mail is completely fugazi, it’s impossible to find things in the Finder and using iCal is horrific. My phone is constantly nagging me to use iCloud and when I activate Siri there’s no more audible prompt, so by the time I start speaking it cuts me off with “Sorry, I didn’t get that.” And on and on.

So while I appreciate the design of the bag, these days I find myself less inclined to buy anything to put into it.