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The home was built by the current owners who were attracted here by the idea of raising their children on the beach. Their top two requirements were a creekside property to keep their boat readily at hand and a high elevation for storm safety.

One thing that hasn’t yet made it from the Nanoloaf Aurora design over to Canvas is the flexible connectors, which make it possible for you to set up your lights around corners or across multiple surfaces. The reason for this is, personally, kind of frustrating. The connectors you use for Aurora aren’t the same as the ones you use for Canvas, because reasons. This means you can’t connect Canvas and Aurora together, and when I asked Nanoleaf why, they said they didn’t think anyone would really want to do that. They also said flex connectors for Canvas were on the roadmap for the not-too-distant future, but it seems like such an obvious win to have a few of them in the box for this new generation after seeing how popular the previous generation was.

In use, the Kate Spade feels practically identical to the Oh Joy!, save for the harder back and the little plastic crystals in the flowers if you opt for the ‘Hollyhock Floral’ option. The frame is still TPU, so it’s grippy and absorbs shock, but the hard back makes it feel more premium, I guess. It’s all a matter of taste. The buttons are equally clicky, and the cutouts equally precise.

The Nolan Group manufactures three brands of motorcycle helmets: X-Lite, Nolan and Grex. X-Lite is Nolan’s high-performance brand and all of the helmets are made from composite materials, while the Nolan and Grex helmets are made from polycarbonate.

As we spoke, I removed links from an Apple Watch bracelet, and then put them back, and it seemed possible that the watch’s combination of distractions might, for some, be overwhelming. “I know,” Ive said. Like an iPhone, an Apple Watch is only “simple and pure”—to quote Ive’s film—until it’s a threat to sleep, solitude, or the happiness of someone near you in a cinema. Michael Ive, remembering his son’s hamster obstacle course, wondered if young people were now “too screen-focussed.” On a sidewalk outside the studio, I later saw an employee looking at his Apple Watch while balancing an iPhone 6 on his forearm.

Every last detail has been honed in order to let the Range Rover Velar pass through the air with minimal resistance. For example, the ridge on the taillights has been designed to induce clean separation of airflow from the bodysides, which in turn results in a cleaner wake structure and therefore reduces drag. Specially-designed air channels in the rear spoiler both cut drag and the accumulation of dirt on the rear screen.

A few years later, in 2004, a visitor to the studio might have noticed a rudimentary, oversized touch-responsive screen lying on a table. “It was very crude, involving projectors,” Ive said. The studio hadn’t invented the essential technology—nor, indeed, had Apple engineers—but the designers helped guide it to market, over years. Ive was now involved “in the fundamentals of the products—how to build them efficiently, the technology, how to cool them,” as Bob Mansfield put it. Ive told me that he initially pressed for a tablet, then agreed with Jobs that a phone should come first: a tablet would have presented consumers with a new category of machine, and a new way of communicating with a machine, all at once. By the time the iPhone was launched, in 2007, Ive had become “the hub of the wheel,” Mansfield said.

Bars and restaurants continued to merge through the 1990s and 2000s, and that’s a big reason restaurants, on the whole, got noticeably louder. Bars are raucous, and they present a different dining atmosphere from typical sit-down restaurants. As the bar and dining area began to occupy the same space, their clientele and atmospheres combined, and the result was a lot louder than either one alone. Open-concept restaurants and warehouse-style gourmet food courts have made dining out more casual and communal, but getting rid of the walls, ceilings, and soft goods that once defined luxury have also made them noisier.

The power cord that comes with Canvas is a great deal more streamlined than the one you get with Aurora, which includes a big brick in the middle and makes hiding it a little difficult. But the downside to this updated design is it supports far fewer panels out of the box. If you’re planning a large installation of 40-50 panels, you’re going to need two of these cables to make it work. Nanoleaf is working on selling more capable chargers so you can power more panels on a single panel, but it’s not something you can do right this second. And even then, it’s not the kind of limitation Nanoleaf explains particularly well in its documentation. It’s the kind of thing people are going to find out the hard way, which is not a great way to support the people spending the most on your products.

“Maybe we’ll do a little upgrade with some TVs,” said Darwin, who has put $31,000 into custom work on the bus, “so we can watch while we’re driving down the road a little bit. Don’t have a motion receiver for the thing, so it would be nice to have one of those and we can watch some football or whatever.”

Ive’s decision to offer choice was a challenge to Apple’s recurring theme of design inevitability. In one of our conversations, Ive was scathing about a rival’s product, after asking me not to name it: “Their value proposition was ‘Make it whatever you want. You can choose whatever color you want.’ And I believe that’s abdicating your responsibility as a designer.” Cook told me, “Jony has better taste than anyone I ever met in my life,” and Ive might not demur. Over lunch in an Apple cafeteria, Ive said that he wouldn’t think of challenging the technical decisions of “the best silicon-chip designers in the world,” who were sitting around us. But industrial designers, he said, are rarely offered the same deference—in part, because most people regularly make taste-based decisions, about shoes and lamps.

You’re not going to find a smooth-feeling glass back on the phone, or, indeed, most of the design bells and whistles other phones may have. That’s not entirely a bad thing, as the polycarbonate back is plenty sturdy and comfortable enough to hold in hand. The graphite black model I was provided looks…okay, but it’s certainly not going to win any awards for its good looks.