Apple's Calculator App Is Almost a Pixel-for-Pixel Braun Calculator

Dieter Rams ran the design team at Braun, the German appliance maker, from the mid-1950s through the 1990s. The radios, record players, hair dryers, kettles, and pocket calculators that came out of his studio defined a particular look — light, sober, mostly white, almost no decoration, every visible element doing a visible job. In a 1976 New York speech he distilled the philosophy into ten principles, the most-cited of which is less, but better — explicitly not the same as less is more.

The Braun ET66 calculator, designed by Rams and Dietrich Lubs in 1987, is the cleanest example. Round buttons, color-coded operators (orange and green) on a flat panel, sans-serif numerals, no chrome, no shadow, no nothing. Compare it to the calculator app shipped on the original 2007 iPhone: the same button layout, same color accents, same typeface, same gridded geometry. Jony Ive, then leading Apple's industrial design, has never claimed it was a coincidence.

The parallels run through the whole Apple product line. The Braun T3 pocket radio (1958) and the original iPod (2001) share a wheel-and-screen face. The Braun L60 speaker resembles the iMac G5. The PowerMac G5 enclosure echoes Braun's 1962 LE1 speaker. Ive, asked about it directly, has said his design philosophy was shaped by Rams's principles before he ever joined Apple in 1992.

Rams himself has said it doesn't bother him; on the contrary, it suggests the principles still work. "It's a compliment," he told CNN, "that they use the basic thinking about what design can be." The line from a postwar German calculator company to a Cupertino phone is direct, traceable, and openly acknowledged. Most design lineages are messier than this one.