Skip to main content

Behind the scenes: How Apple designed its most exclusive product ever

Apple

Apple fans, hold onto your hats. The trillion-dollar company behind the iPhone has something brand new: a hunk of precisely engineered and polished aluminum, handcrafted by the company’s world-famous design team. It’s carefully packaged like a Christmas present, it’s special-delivered to some lucky people’s front doors … and you can’t get one.

In fact, you’ll never even see it in person.

Limited to a run of exactly 15 (plus a spare or two to have around Apple Park), this is Apple’s most exclusive product of all time. I was lucky enough to see one, and I swore an oath not to share pictures, although I can describe it for you. It’s pretty amazing – but not as amazing as the people it honors.

I’m talking about the new trophy Apple’s designers put together, a special physical award to honor the Best Apps of 2020. Handmade from the same aluminum alloy that the company’s iconic phones and computers are hewn from, the solid metal ingot is instantly iconic: A real-world App Store icon, a physical version of a digital item handed out for a digital version of a physical event.

“It’s a beautiful object that recognizes their incredible work and our deepest appreciation” — Phil Schiller

“We are excited to present the first-ever physical App Store Best of 2020 Award to these winning developers — it’s a beautiful object that recognizes their incredible work and our deepest appreciation,” Phil Schiller, Apple Fellow and the man behind the App Store, exclusively told Digital Trends.

Attention to detail

Apple is rightly respected for its attention to detail, and everything about the award speaks to that. It was conceived and crafted by the same design team that makes the company’s products, dreamed up during one of their regular Tuesday afternoon sessions. It is handmade of the same metal that goes into the company’s products: 6R01, Apple’s own custom grade of aluminum that is made up of a 100% recycled mix of excess aluminum from Mac products’ manufacturing process.

The byproducts of products built into a product to honor product design – could anything be more unique?

Handmade things usually get their charm from their little imperfections (that’s what makes Aunt Shirley’s sweaters so unique!), yet somehow, Apple’s craftspeople built something as precise as the gadgets that roll off the assembly lines, bead blasted to precision.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

And of course, like any Apple product, it came in a custom box, surrounded by a separate sleeve, with handmade paper wrapping (all recyclable, of course). Half the joy of buying a new Apple product is the unboxing experience; the design team wanted to ensure that Apple’s award winners had that same experience, of unwrapping a present, getting closer to the thing as layers are removed.

Attention to detail is the Apple way. That’s why the company delivered trophies to the winners at the same time Monday morning, right before a special meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook himself. Coordinating deliveries from Guatemala City to Poland to Shanghai isn’t easy; doing it all at the same time is near impossible.

The byproducts of products built into a product to honor product design.

The trophy itself speaks to the same attention yo detail, an almost fanatical obsession over something only a handful of people will ever see. One side carries the A of the App Store, which the design team felt would be iconic and instantly recognizable. The other side of the trophy (something unseen by any outside of the design team and the trophy winners themselves) carries a laurel wreath of the sort a marathon runner might win. It was created from the outline of the App Store icon, rotated and replicated three times.

Exactly one year ago, Apple invited a few hundred folks to its Duane Street townhouse, an ordinary address in Tribeca secretly owned by the wealthiest corporation in the world. Within its plain exterior is a swanky, sprawling loft, each of its five floors filled with libraries and roof desks and an internal elevator. There’s also the sort of brushed stainless-steel kitchen you’d see on Pimp My Crib.

Attending that event felt like being part of a pretty exclusive crowd. This year? Physical events are clearly out of the question, so Apple held a quiet, virtual event to honor the best apps of the year that was somehow even more exclusive.

“We are thrilled with the Best of 2020 winners — these 15 outstanding apps and games from visionary innovators represent so much great work by developers on the App Store,” Schiller told us. “It is particularly meaningful to honor these winners this year as apps have become even more integral to our daily lives and helped so many of us.”

The most exclusive Apple product of all time is a heck of a way to say thank you.

Editors' Recommendations

Jeremy Kaplan
As Editor in Chief, Jeremy Kaplan transformed Digital Trends from a niche publisher into one of the fastest growing…
Why AI will never rule the world
image depicting AI, with neurons branching out from humanoid head

Call it the Skynet hypothesis, Artificial General Intelligence, or the advent of the Singularity -- for years, AI experts and non-experts alike have fretted (and, for a small group, celebrated) the idea that artificial intelligence may one day become smarter than humans.

According to the theory, advances in AI -- specifically of the machine learning type that's able to take on new information and rewrite its code accordingly -- will eventually catch up with the wetware of the biological brain. In this interpretation of events, every AI advance from Jeopardy-winning IBM machines to the massive AI language model GPT-3 is taking humanity one step closer to an existential threat. We're literally building our soon-to-be-sentient successors.

Read more
The best hurricane trackers for Android and iOS in 2022
Truck caught in gale force winds.

Hurricane season strikes fear into the hearts of those who live in its direct path, as well as distanced loved ones who worry for their safety. If you've ever sat up all night in a state of panic for a family member caught home alone in the middle of a destructive storm, dependent only on intermittent live TV reports for updates, a hurricane tracker app is a must-have tool. There are plenty of hurricane trackers that can help you prepare for these perilous events, monitor their progress while underway, and assist in recovery. We've gathered the best apps for following storms, predicting storm paths, and delivering on-the-ground advice for shelter and emergency services. Most are free to download and are ad-supported. Premium versions remove ads and add additional features.

You may lose power during a storm, so consider purchasing a portable power source,  just in case. We have a few handy suggestions for some of the best portable generators and power stations available. 

Read more
Don’t buy the Meta Quest Pro for gaming. It’s a metaverse headset first
Meta Quest Pro enables 3D modeling in mixed reality.

Last week’s Meta Connect started off promising on the gaming front. Viewers got release dates for Iron Man VR, an upcoming Quest game that was previously a PS VR exclusive, as well as Among Us VR. Meta, which owns Facebook, also announced that it was acquiring three major VR game studios -- Armature Studio, Camouflaj Team, and Twisted Pixel -- although we don’t know what they’re working on just yet.

Unfortunately, that’s where the Meta Connect's gaming section mostly ended. Besides tiny glimpses and a look into fitness, video games were not the show's focus. Instead, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted to focus on what seemed to be his company’s real vision of VR's future, which involves a lot of legs and a lot of work with the Quest Pro, a mixed reality headset that'll cost a whopping $1,500.

Read more