// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
In 2011, Apple released the Cards app. The app — which required iOS 5 — let you design custom letterpress cards, with your messages and photos printed upon them — which Apple would ship to your recipient on your behalf.
I recently learned the origin story of Cards, and that it was specifically a Steve Jobs product. It also wasn’t smooth sailing. But first, some backstory, and inserting myself into the narrative, because it’s my site and I can do what I want here.
I wrote about the app several times for Macworld. Apple complained first to me, and later to my editors, that I didn’t go deep on the fact that the cards Apple was offering were printed on 100 percent cotton paper. Apple thought my article should be updated to mention this. My editors and I disagreed.
I wasn’t the only person ever to get in trouble with Apple over Cards.
I saw your old review of Apple Cards linked on Twitter, and it brought traumatic flashbacks.
I ran the print program for Apple’s production and fulfillment partner in those years. In my decade working with Apple and in fact my 30-year career, this project — code named Speed Racer and dreamed up by Steve Jobs himself — stands unsurpassed as a pinnacle of incompetence, project mismanagement and intercontinental mayhem. I hope to never top it.
It is probably best left dead, but if you felt like disinterring it, I’m a witness to the crime…
Although Apple launched cards in 2011, and it’s now 15 years later, this person — despite his confidence that any non-disclosure agreements have long since expired, his knowledge that the Cards app was sunset long ago, and the fact that the printing companies involved no longer really exist — still asked to remain anonymous, for fear of angering Apple.
In 2006, Mike was hired at a printing company that already had a relationship with Apple, handling printing for iPhoto, which let you order custom books, calendars, and cards. The company had won that business because it was also, at the time, handling Apple’s in-box production of documentation — quick start guides, instruction manuals, and the like. (Remember those?)
For several years, this company worked as the exclusive Apple partner for those print products, after Apple had grown frustrated with a prior photo printing partner.