How haute tech can change the Apple watch face & get its mojo back

Long before Apple, the maker of beautiful tech devices, there were the great tech companies of Europe: the technology being the printing press. It took Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the mechanical movable-type printing press in circa 1440 some 20 years to become a profitable venture for 15th century Europe’s version of Silicon Valley. Laboriously produced by highly-skilled artists and copyists, intricately illustrated manuscripts gave way to mass-market printed books. Reading the printed word became democratised and the ‘software’ of words became available to anyone who could read. The rest, as they say, is Kindle.

And yet, as the printed book became cheap and widely available, the handmade book found a niche market: as a luxury object, expensive and sought after by – and restricted to – the higher nobility and royalty. As art scholar Giulia Bologna writes, ‘Even though it took at least six months for a speedy professional copyist to produce a single copy of a 400-page book, printing did not immediately bring to an end the production of manuscripts. For the cultural, social, and political elites, illuminated [by gold and silver ink] manuscripts for long maintained a special prestige.. [The] Duke of Urbino would have felt shame to have had a printed book in his library.’