Where is my wrist to Apple?

You cannot purchase one of the coolest gadget of Apple: an Apple Design Award. They hand them each year at the Worldwide Developers Conference, honoring "applications that demonstrate technical excellence, innovation, adoption of superior technology, high performance and outstanding design.

Is the Apple version of Oscar, the Stanley Cup, the cup of the world's largest grandmother. Like the rest of these incredible honors, the iconic trophy award requires a and boy, did the design team to nail it. ADA is a grey cube that is practically nude on each face, except for the side with a big white Apple logo on it. Has some electronics inside that only do one function: makes the Apple logo glow brightly when the cube is touched.

This item is 100% design and virtually zero percent of the engineering function, and is designed to make you think about how awesome Apple is in the eyes of most critics of society, then, is the latest Apple product.

I like it because it's probably the silliest piece of Apple hardware ever been involved with. (Assuming that the iPod Socks don't count. I don't think they do. Textile goods cannot be classified as technology until it's possible for them to fail and precipitate a disaster without warning.)

I wish that Apple did more things that they were stupid. The Macintosh Portable don't count, either. For those of you who have joined us late, the laptop was Mac before mobile Apple Was as cumbersome as a concert accordion, heavy as a concert accordion ... and the masses are the portable Mac just as unpalatable.

No, the folks at Apple--God loves 'em--I honestly thought they had a winner with that. What I want are Apple products that are pure expression of society's ability to design things and its employees take pride in producing an object causing a spike in galvanic skin response of the individual.

Every Apple product has at least one component of that concept. I don't like the new iPod nano (I think its design is only practical if you do not have almost never choose the tracks or playlists), but man alive: a computer medium color multitouch, the size of a postage stamp are almost unbearably cool.

(Image Caption: LunaTik (lunatik.com) is a iPod nano wristwatch add-on.)

A friend of mine has started to wear your Nano on a custom belt which turns it into a wrist (very chunky) that just tell the time after you wake the display. Here's how cool his design. The new Nano is so cool that Apple fans want an excuse to stare at it longingly and lovingly several times an hour during the day.

What happens if Apple decided to cut out the middleman and actually design a wristwatch?

Not an "iPod wrist." Not "a clock which can also check with any device that is streaming music or video through AirPlay." These concepts smack of integration. In the past, I praised Apple for not introducing mai the main products that enhance and support another Apple product or service in some way. That's great. But I'll never win an Apple Design Award. If you want to own something that Apple designed exclusively for the sake of design, it must be a wristwatch.

Or a bottle opener. Or a bookstand. It doesn't really matter. I just want to see what they can do if Apple engineers are exempt from the mandates of universes, long-range strategies and commercial viability.

Are partially inspired by the work of artists and designers employed by second-most-famous Steve Jobs ' company: Pixar. You are familiar with the fantastic job that make feature films, but of course, do not cease to be creative when you climb back into their cars at the end of the day. They are still drawing and painting and building, taking the ideas that might not be enough viable as a basis for a movie of 1.2 billion-dollar-banking but worth the time.

Check out the blog of the artist Josh Cooley history, for example. It is equipped with sketch wonderful work, including an impressive array of art in progress in which he paints scenes of iconic films as would be represented in little Golden book a child version of flick. Never is the discovery of a human head in a window or the birth of a xenomorphic alien explosive from the breast of a man was so fascinating.

The difference between Apple and Pixar is that an artist can purchase art supplies and knock out a sketch killer for under five dollars. If your specialty is technology to display high-density low-power, you can't follow a flight of fancy without stopping off at Dragon's Den for $ 120,000 Angel funding and then spend a month touring factories in China.

So Apple is going to have to act as sponsor their designers. Once a year, let someone any silly product they want, as long as it can be sold in Apple stores for $ 50 or less. Let's not lose our heads here. I have been playing history of Apple's product and the product just really silly that I can think of was the 20th anniversary of the Mac. It was definitely cool for the sake of coolness, but at an MSRP of $ 7,500, was only an impulse purchase.

I suppose that Apple could afford to do a silly computer Back in 1997. The company was on the ropes, desperately shooting out all his ammunition remaining in every direction possible, hoping that something would score a great success. Now that you back up the Hill, every move making it has been carefully dissected and observed, creates ripples. If it produces a new type of can openers that doesn't immediately grab the market share to double digits and cause many people to rethink their definition of the word "may", this will affect the price of whimsical actions.

Still: I want a clock from Apple. I want a baseball cap that bill always points to magnetic north. I want an egg beater that is sometimes gets all get mopey from seasonal affective disorder.

I have great confidence in Apple. IPad, iPod, and MacBook line show a confident team of designers who understand how to fuse human unity and instincts to next-generation technology. However, underneath everything, feel a fool absolutely barking-mad struggling to be heard.

Macworld senior contributor Andy Ihnatko is also a technology columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.

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