I’m a trifle (not excessively; but a trifle) surprised that Ive would go for something like that.
In his work at Apple, it has always been the case that ‘design’ isn’t a sticker you slap on the surface. It’s something that pervades the product, in both structural and aesthetic aspects.
By doing a Leika rebadge, Ive is basically doing exactly the same thing that, say, an HP ‘Envy’ (of guess who?) does: take an off-the-shelf design and tart up the outer panels, maybe swap the plastics kit for some metal parts.
Totally different game. If ‘design’ was something you could wrap around a beige box full of commodity FRUs, nobody would have ever heard of Ive and Apple would be a footnote from the era where Mac OS classic was at least friendlier than DOS. It isn’t. That’s sort of the whole point.
And here he goes and ‘designs’ something by slapping an outer shell of ‘materials and textures associated with Ive’ around somebody else’s assembly. No integration. It’s an autoparodic product that critiques itself.
