I know, I’m writing about the Apple Watch and a subtle shade of blue while illustrating the piece with a dumb watch with very unsubtle blue face, but bear with me here.
A report yesterday suggested that the iPhone 17 Pro is going to be available in the Sky Blue, the name Apple gave to the subtle blue tint of one of the M4 MacBook Air options …
While there’s clearly interest in some colorful MacBooks, with more than two-thirds of you on board, the Sky Blue tone didn’t overly impress. Reviewers universally agreed that it was less Sky Blue and more Barely Blue At All. Gizmodo’s Kyle Barr had a take that was representative of the consensus.
Will somebody please tell me if the new Apple MacBook Air M4’s “Sky Blue” color is blue or just a cold shade of gray? I have tipped over the edge of delirium staring at Apple’s latest laptop refresh in different lights, hoping to determine its actual hue […]
If you compare it to a cloudless sky on a bright, sunny day, at most, it’s a cool gray color with a bare hint of blue. I went around my office and found everything with a sky blue hue, including last year’s Microsoft Surface Pro. That Windows tablet laptop is certainly blue. This latest Macbook is certainly not.
When I checked it out for myself at an Apple Store, I had to agree. If the Sky Blue model hadn’t been labelled as such, I would have described it as silver.
As for iPhones, well, I’m on record as saying I’m unconvinced that the color even matters to most people, and my opinion remains unchanged.
I could buy any of the colors and it wouldn’t really make any difference. The total time my iPhone remains caseless, with its color visible, is about two minutes per year – between removing it from the box and putting it in the case, where it spends the rest of its natural born days. The same is true of almost everyone I know.
But where I can see a case for a subtle color tone is in an Apple Watch. At least in warmer climes, where the Watch isn’t hidden beneath sleeves, it probably spends more time being visible to us than either our iPhone or our MacBook.
The very nature of watches – intended to serve as part functional devices, part jewellery – also means that it’s not uncommon for designers to incorporate colors and finishes which are intended to appear to change appearance in different lighting.
For example, the Nordgreen watch I’m wearing right now. The blue face is anything but a subtle shade, but it does look surprisingly different in different light. It can vary between looking near-black to almost corn blue.
That’s exceedingly difficult to convey in photos, far less a single photo, but I think you can see how the same color looks like three completely different shades given the way that the sunlight and shadows are landing on it. That’s probably my favorite thing about this watch.
So if Apple can achieve the same thing – a constantly-changing color effect – then it could be an appealing aesthetic even if it’s a more subtle shift between gray and blue. But in my view there’s not too much benefit in a MacBook, and almost none in an iPhone. The place where Apple should be experimenting most with colors is in the Apple Watch.
What’s your view? Would you like to see a Barely Sky Blue Apple Watch, which appears gray or blue depending on the light and viewing angle? Let us know in the comments.
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Photo: Ben Lovejoy
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