The Apple Car Is Finally Here

Ferrari has never been primarily about transportation; it functions as a spectacle and a status symbol. It represents power, control, precision, and wealth, while also expressing longing for those qualities and the belief that they are virtues. For many people, a Ferrari becomes an unachievable object of desire, similar to a bedroom-poster image. Apple devices are framed as objects of function rather than spectacle. They are designed to dissolve into their surroundings and ordinary routines, reducing friction and feeling transparent so they facilitate activities. Their minimalism expresses style by vanishing into the background and serving intended purposes. This design ethos softens and domesticate industrial modernism into something demure. The collision of these worlds appears with Ferrari’s electric supercar, the Luce, which combines familiar interior Ferrari styling with an anonymous exterior.

"For normal people, a Ferrari is a symbol: of power, control, precision, and wealth-but also of the longing for those virtues, and of the idea that they are virtues in the first place. The Ferrari is the quintessential bedroom-poster car, captured in a glossy photo pinned on a wall in a teenage boy's bedroom like a photo of a scantily clad woman: an unachievable object of desire."

"If a Ferrari is an object of spectacle, an Apple device is an object of function. The Apple product, whether it's a laptop, music player, smartphone, tablet, speaker, or watch, is designed to dissolve into its context and melt into ordinary life. Frictionless, intuitive, and transparent-in its ideal form, an Apple product ceases to feel like an object at all, and instead facilitates an activity."

"An iPhone or MacBook expresses style, but through minimalism, an aesthetic concerned with vanishing into the background and becoming obedient to intended purpose. This approach to design transformed the traditions of industrial modernism that it had inherited-from Dieter Rams, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and others-into an ethos that was demure instead of forward. The best technology would become softened, domesticated, and emotionally deodorized."

"The old world of automotive desire and the new one of glass rectangles collided this week, when Ferrari unveiled the Luce, its first electric supercar. The vehicle looks like a Ferrari on the inside but an anonymous lozenge on the outside, a design that some Ferrari fans hate. Does it mean the end of the house of the prancing horse? No. Rather, Ferrari's first EV is a delightful if wistful marriage that"

Read at The Atlantic