Apple Cards

~ the last words ~

apple cards was us-only at the shipping layer. apple printed each order on letterpress paper at a facility in california, then handed it to the postal service for physical delivery. domestic postage came out at $2.99 a card, anywhere else at $4.99 with international postage. that pricing said most of what you needed to know about the intended audience. it was a product for iphone users in the continental us who wanted to send a birthday card to their mother and never wanted to set foot in a card shop.

apple shipped cards on october 12, '11 alongside the iphone 4s and ios 5. the app let you build a card from any photo in your camera roll. you cropped the image inside a template, you typed a short message on the inside panel, you picked a font from a small set, and the preview showed the actual letterpress impression as it would appear on the real card. you handed apple a credit card on the spot, and that was the order. push notifications came back to your phone as the card went into production and then into the mail.

i had an iphone 3gs at the time and i was the kind of person who would never send a paper card from a phone. the workflow assumed a us postal address book stored in your contacts and a comfort with paying $2.99 to apple for an envelope, both of which were small psychological barriers but not nothing. cards landed at the height of apple's "the iphone can do this physical thing too" moment, the same impulse that produced the photo-book ordering inside iphoto and the print-from-imovie chain a few years earlier. each of those small loops eventually faded.

~ the record ~

~ the actual end ~

the shutdown announcement came on september 10, 2013, the day apple unveiled the iphone 5s, with ios 7 set to ship a week later. apple's email to cards customers said any order placed before 1 pm pacific that day would still be delivered, push notifications would keep working for a brief tail, then the service would close. the app was pulled from the store the same day. the suggested replacement was iphoto for mac, which had its own card-printing flow. iphoto required a mac, the previous workflow had required only an iphone. that was a real downgrade for the people who had built the habit on the phone.

~ the day it died ~

the cards retirement was a quiet one even by apple-quiet standards. there was no press release, only the in-app message and the wording inside the customer email. ios 7 shipped a week later with its flat icons and translucent layers, the kind of redesign that made any holdover ios 5 app look like a relic, and cards specifically would have felt out of place with its skeuomorphic letterpress preview. apple chose not to redesign it. they let it go on the eve of the new design language, which is the most apple way of letting a product go, a kind of door-closing that does not announce itself but is final the moment it happens.

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