Always been an Apple fan boy myself. Got my start with Macintosh back in the day with a Power PC 6100/66 (a blazing 66 MHz PowerPC 601 processor, whopping 2 MB of RAM, and a 350 MB hard drive) and my love for all things Apple continues today. This Christmas, the Mrs. gave me a iPhone 3G and it is one of the best toys a techno-nerd like myself could ask for. Also helps that the touch screen features lovely big keys, a sight better (pun intended) than the itsy-bitsy keyboard on my now-discarded Blackberry Pearl which were always a challenge thanks to my dwindling eyesight and sausage sized thumbs.
Some of the apps available verge on Unicorn Magical Pink Unicorn territory. Shazam, kick-ass music recognition software that ‘listens’ to music through your iPhone, identifies the track, the artist and serves up a bunch of links including You Tube videos, artist discographies and a helpful ‘buy now’ link to Apple’s iTune store is one such app. And it’s free. Being heavily into the music scene in my earlier days, a Christmas dinner turned into a ’stump Shazam’ challenge, and the free app performed with freakish accuracy. Had to dip into my obscure 12″ remixes of 80’s Brit Pop before Shazam gave up the ghost and admitted ‘I got nuttin’. So yes, the iPhone rawks. But as this is a logo design blog, we’re going to bring everything full circle with a discussion of the Apple MobileMe logo.
In order to get take full advantage of the iPhone’s connectivity with my Mac, apparently I need some software called MobileMe. No problem – a quick trip to Best Buy on Boxing Day would take care of that. Once I arrived at the software aisle, I saw a box that claimed to be MobileMe staring up at me. The logo looked a little, how do I say this, ahm, ‘tacky’ so I had to pick up the box and give the back a quick once over. Was this really an Apple product? Certainly didn’t look like it. Cause here’s the point. The Apple MobileMe logo is so odd, especially for such a tightly branded company like Apple, the logo makes the package look like it’s developed by some two-bit knock-off outfit, not the Cupertino giant. The logo just didn’t look, well, Apple.
Not that the logo is so bad, per se (well, actually, it is), it’s just that it’s a world away from the Apple icon and logo family that it simply doesn’t fit. While everything else is so sleek, clean and visually sophisticated, this MobileMe logo is a clunker. And such a depature from Apple’s visual styling, I’m wondering if this is a aberration, or a new trend. I’m hoping the former. Not on my lonesome either. Gawker wonders what’s wrong with this logo with this logo while Manhattan Offender chimes in, opining that the MobileMe logo worst logo in history of Mac (before being excoriated for conflating Apple and Mac, but that’s another issue entirely).
To make matters worse, the font work for the MobileMe logo bears more than a passing resemblance to the old Microsoft Windows ME design making some Apple fans to wonder if the two logos were separated at birth. I did like one of the comments -
I agree it’s not a great logo but at least MobileMe won’t end going down in history as possibly the worst version of an operating system ever.
Rule #24 for Apple Fanboys – even when reluctantly dissing Apple, never pass up an opportunity to slam Microsoft.
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