Phantasm
Does it fly and have two spikes and a drill bit ?
You can see yourself reflected in the bright shiny, mirror-smooth surface of La Cie's Sphère - a storage ball - and you'll pay a lot of cash for the privilege. LaCie Sphère LaCie's mirrored storage ball - see the keyboard reflected in it. In this case mirroring doesn't mean data protection but the device's surface …
Looks more like the Orgasmatron from Woody Allen's The Sleeper, to me: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4sZPaKqYvos/TgRE2OM1K-I/AAAAAAAADB0/jG53z6aLf6s/s640/Sleeper_560x330_MSDSLEE_EC030_H-thumb-560xauto-28566.jpg
The above image is Safe For Work, though not all the pictures I saw whilst searching for it were.
That's the first time I've heard of Iomega being held up as a posterchild for design... and we used a lot of ZIP disks in our c2000 design campus.
LaCie's history has been tied to that of Apple's... but Apple's emphasis on design pre-dates that. It was Apple that led Hartmut Esslinger's design agency (clients including Wega and Sony Trinitron) to become Frog Design in 1982. Since then they've designed products for NeXT and SPARCstation. Even the grooves on the original Playstation were an acknowledged and deliberate homage by Sony's internal design studio to Esslinger's Mac design.
Lacie started out as two companies, one started in 1987 and the other in 1989. They tend to bring in 'star' product designers, such as Neil Poulson, Philipe Starck or Porsche Design to make an oblong box less boxy.
Dave, the Zip and Jaz drives were beautifully designed. They could've looked like every other crap external drive (i.e. oblong beige box), but they didn't. They might not have been Starcked or Poulsoned, but they did look sexier than the norm. And their external housings still look pretty dishy…
Fair dooes, I vaguely remember the external ZIP drives, though mine was an internal unit, all stamped mild steel with a beige plastic face!
T'was a strange time: CDRW drives were still rare, and flash memory was still very expensive even if you wanted to shunt data over slow USB 1.1 (which I couldn't cos NT 4.0 wouldn't play ball). Home internet was still dial-up, so files couldn't be shunted around very easily by that method. And some fruity company released a desktop PC without a floppy drive... Strange thing is, I had a portable MD recorder at the time, a format that could have been a suitable alternative to ZIP disks had Sony not been asleep at the wheel.
The lack of storage space and the portability was my first reason to buy a PP version of the external Zip drive. Then Iomega brought out the 2GB Jaz drive, and I was smitten. It worked over PCMCIA and SCSI, which at the time worked for me on my laptop and desktop.
Yes, the internal versions didn't have the cute green and purple fascias (in keeping with the external housings)… but nonetheless they were good. :-)
The MD would've been fabulous, and yes, if Sony hadn't been so boneheaded, it could've gone the other way. :-)
My take: In the centre of the image is a distant wall that has a strange colouring. That would have been a good place to have set up a tripod with a long lens camera to take the picture. Whoever 'shopped the tripod out didn't do a very good job of it in that case.
Looking at the left edge of the ball, I'm sure that's someone holding their arms up high with a flash unit in their hands. If so, that would have been easy to obfuscate, so why didn't they do it? I dunno ......
Looks like Marketing, Sales, and Exec types everywhere will want one and probably buy it with their own dosh. IT will then get banged about for not supporting it. Mid-Level Execs upon seeing them with this status symbol will then bang IT for not providing them one also. The geeks down in the basement will get their own, remove the ball and hang it from the ceiling. The guts will then decorate their desk and soon become the envy of the semi-geek group.
The author's just having us on, right? Anyone who can see or feel a computer knows the difference between industrial design and just design for art's sake. La Cie's design buys me nothing in terms of storage performance or ease of use (except perhaps for throwing if the thing goes south because sit has a typical La Cie power supply embedded in it), whereas Apple's, like them or hate them, are at least nominally aimed at improving user performance (as well as cash-flow-inducing sexiness). Aluminum (as we spell it here) makes for a more rigid and less frangible laptop than plastic, even the first-yen iPad was thin enough to hold (vs. the first gen version of almost all other tablets) while using, and since the c. 1996 Power Macs, Apple's larger desktop boxes were always easier to work on than basic PC XT kit, particularly as measured by hand lacerations. Cost, of course, is an entirely different issue.