Early on it seemed like Apple took a Bauhaus-like approach to design, where the motivating principle can be summarized as "form follows function". From an outsider's perspective, there's so much time spent discussing Apple's design on aesthetic merits that the focus shifted over time from making supremely functional devices to ones that signal high class and taste at the expense of more mundane concerns. Let's try to re-center the discussion on device/product design as driven first by function, and then by form.