"There are objects that are timeless in design. You can’t improve much upon simple tools like a spoon or a compass. Brands can do this too—Dieter Rams designs for Braun fit in almost any decade and it is hard to imagine much by Muji looking dated. But a digital device is not an alarm clock or a shelving unit. It will grow obsolete very quickly. Which makes the atemporal look of electronics by Apple more uncanny, more rarefied. The personal computer as Holly Golightly's little black dress... The iPhone in particular seems born out of years of science fiction fantasies of handheld gadgets with boundless capabilities. It appears to have arrived not from China, but from just a few years ahead of time. A little piece of the future we were lucky enough to receive early... There are two prevailing science fictional design aesthetics. One is a worn, rusty, lived-in-looking future. It is the junkyards in Philip K Dick novels and the dust collecting on Star Wars flight control interfaces. Then, there’s the world of tomorrow imagined as a sterile place of white and translucent surfaces... A willingness to try Apple products at all suggests appreciation for, if not commitment to its value of simplicity over ornamentation. Design asceticism was a way of life for the company’s founder... To return the favor, some Apple consumers practice a kind of Western interpretation of Shintoism, valuing and caring for the products as if they were living creatures. They respect the objects — their painstaking craftsmanship, and the promise of a better, less dirty, less vapid world —by keeping them in just-unboxed condition."