Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story

As the co-founder of Sincerely (at this time in 2011), I remember this keynote very specifically because it felt like we'd been Sherlocked. We were busy building out Postagram and Sincerely Ink, both from-iPhone-to-printed-card apps. afaik we were the first app to do this, and we were at that time gaining a lot of momentum. I remember seeing the announcement for Cards and feeling a mix of fear and anger that it felt like Apple was using their clout to take our idea.

I seem to recall my co-founder being somewhat more optimistic about the whole thing. And sure enough, we found that the announcement really only seemed to boost awareness.

Apple Cards was an extremely limited and flawed product, and we already had some distinct technical and feature set advantages. It was clear Apple didn't have their heart in it nor know what they were doing. When they retired it shortly thereafter it wasn't a shock, and I ironically recall feeling somewhat sad.

> For one, Apple was unwilling to have visible barcodes printed on the envelopes — but it wanted every step of the shipping and delivery of your card tracked. That wasn’t something the US Postal Service did. Apple and the printing company created an invisible barcode that was sprayed on the envelope, visible only under certain UV light, so that the envelope itself would remain unadulterated. And the USPS agreed to scan cards when sent, when processed at mail facilities, up to and including when they went out on a mail truck for delivery.

This is classic Steve Jobs. Sheer force of will.

The part of "founder-led" companies nobody talks about. For every groundbreaking tech project, there's 100 other people sleeping in conference rooms working on some rich guy's latest brain-fart that everyone knows will never work.

> Letterpress printing historically didn’t try to put much bite into printing, preferring what’s called a kiss impression—just perfectly laying the ink on top of the paper. Martha Stewart popularized debossing because, unlike real letterpress, it felt like letterpress.

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided… It’s the sound of failure.”

I would use Cards while on vacation to send a spontaneous photo to elderly family members who weren’t online, and the experience was perfectly frictionless and very Apple. I don’t know if I ever saw the finished product.

I emailed Eddy Cue when the shutdown was announced and he agreed it was a great app but confirmed it wasn’t popular enough.

I don’t think I’ve sent a card since.

I worked on a similar project for a non-profit at a previous job. No letterpress though, which I'm kind of bummed about.

The software in this space is execrable (I wrote a TeX tool to do it based on a CSV and it would've been okay if they'd allowed it to run on the server as each order came in, but they insisted instead on ganging things up which added complexity and made the files large enough that csvtool in TeX had a hard time working through them), and dealing with the USPS can be quite thorny, but as noted, customer relations is a potential minefield and managing customer expectations could get really expensive (once we had to pay $800 to have a single card delivered same-day because it was that or lose the contract).

I also argued that we should integrate the preview, generating a pixel image of the actual addresses from the typesetting system so as to push the responsibility for address verification onto the customer, but even though we were doing that for custom order books in a separate project by a different department it was shot down as an unnecessary complexity.

I completely forgot about this app. It was a few years later that I had my own experience of using a letterpress machine (and debossing) and tracing my finger on the debossed letterforms. I don’t have a letterpress machine now but now I really wanted cards with letterpress. I guess more than a decade of dealing with exclusively digital invitations and the sort made the pendulum swing the other way.

It's funny, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard fame) made PhotoCard - a very similar app around the same time:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-legend-bill-at...

Pretty sure that, even though the source name is changed, the article has enough detail to identify them.

Wow, I can see this type of service becoming a big hit these days. Similar to LP and analog photography comeback.

It is correct.

Such a pretty website / blog. You don't see many of these nowadays.

> Apple worked with the US Postal Service and the Czech Post

Like many Apple products, it was a really neat service, but was a PITA to deal with internationally.

This and the photo prints service were the two that really made me ignore the pompous advertisements during the Keynotes. The photo books were also gorgeous, just extremely late, pricey, and dealing with UPS was utterly to exotic for the receiver. I ordered twice and gave up.

Learned to wait for what Apple would actually do outside of their bubble.

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