Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story — Lex on Tech

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.

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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.

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In 2019, someone wrote me this email:

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…

It took me seven years to reply. I don’t know why.

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.

I get it.

I’m going to call this person Mike.

The prints of darkness

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.

Order volume was massive, Mike told me on a Zoom, especially between Thanksgiving and Christmas when card and calendar volume exploded. The printing company had to spin up several sister companies to handle the load. They printed internationally, too; Mike, as essentially the program manager, also stood up print operations in the Czech Republic and Japan.

In 2010, Apple added a new product to the iPhoto print lineup — codenamed Downieville. Apple wanted fine letterpress printing on very toothy cotton stock. Your photo would be digitally printed on these preprinted shells.

This, Mike told me, was an enormous technical challenge. The printing company had to work with a shop in upstate New York that had two dozen restored Heidelberg Letterpresses from the 1850s.

The Steve Jobs origin story

In 2011, Mike said, “Steve Jobs was on one of his famous walks after having had a dinner with someone,” and he said to his walking companions from Apple, Mike was later told: “Wouldn’t it be great if I could just right now on my iPhone send [the dinner companion] a thank you card?”

Apple decided to build an iPhone app just for creating and mailing cards. And the project moved fast, because it was a Steve-initiated one. As it turns out, the app was built and launched during the final year of Steve’s life.

The project kicked off in the beginning of 2011, and it didn’t reuse the card designs that were in iPhoto. These were new designs and letterpress templates and shells. And Apple wanted to ensure that Cards could be printed and shipped in both the US and Europe.

And Apple would stamp and ship these cards for you. Which meant the printing company and their letterpress subcontracted company were printing and stamping and shipping these cards for you.

Well, I of course went to letterpress expert Glenn Fleishman. He clarified that these cards weren’t just printed. “They were heavily debossed by the letterpress contractor into that toothy paper. (Debossing is pushing down; embossing is pushing up.) Letterpress printing historically didn’t try to put much bite into printing, preferring what’s called a kiss impression—just perfectly laying the ink on top of the paper. Martha Stewart popularized debossing because, unlike real letterpress, it felt like letterpress. The real thing seems less genuine than the re-creation.” (Glenn knows a lot about this. He even has some old photos of the letterpress printing on these cards.)

The post with the most

Mike told me that Apple worked with the US Postal Service and the Czech Post on several aspects of Cards that were unique to Apple wanting things done its way:

For one, Apple was unwilling to have visible barcodes printed on the envelopes — but it wanted every step of the shipping and delivery of your card tracked. That wasn’t something the US Postal Service did. Apple and the printing company created an invisible barcode that was sprayed on the envelope, visible only under certain UV light, so that the envelope itself would remain unadulterated. And the USPS agreed to scan cards when sent, when processed at mail facilities, up to and including when they went out on a mail truck for delivery.

The lack of visible barcodes made what would typically be a robot-driven process an extremely human-powered one, Mike said. “We wanted to make sure your baby photos were never sent to someone else,” he told me. “It was not infallible. And when cards were mis-sent, it became an emergency-level event from Apple.”

Apple also wouldn’t let the printing company print postage. In fact, in the US, Apple worked with the postal service for something Mike believes had never been done before: a custom, Apple-designed stamp that all Apple Cards bore. It was a heart. You can see the design in this old Apple publicity photo.

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The Czech Post didn’t let Apple design a stamp, but Apple chose a specific stamp to use there.

The USPS had high hopes that Apple’s focus on this process would save the struggling entity the high volume of direct mail Apple was forecasting. That didn’t happen.

Mike describes the process of getting all the equipment set up — Bell + Howell sorting equipment, the custom barcode printing and scanning, the printing — as “mayhem” before launch. Apple was flying in engineers from China. Mike and some of his team slept in conference rooms. The Cards app’s code name was “Speed Racer,” and teams were definitely racing to get all the logistics ready for the October 2011 launch.

Even printing the cards themselves was enormously complicated. Getting the cotton Crane stock to work with the industry-grade HP Digital Indigo Press was a challenge: Ink wouldn’t adhere to it. Mike said the final printing process involved three passes: a pre-treatment to get a pre-coating on it, the letterpress shell design, and finally the digital imprint of your photo.

“Getting that to work was just painful,” Mike said. “And of course, Apple wouldn’t budge on it.”

Ready for launch

Apple insisted the printer be ready for hundreds of thousands of cards to ship on launch day. “I’d been doing their volume forecasting for the iPhoto print program,” Mike said. “So I knew their forecasting was always terrible.”

The day the app went live, Mike said, “The global demand for Cards could fit in a shoebox.” The Czech Post and the US Postal Service had trucks on site ready to go, and the stack of first-day orders could nearly fit in a glovebox.

“It grew gradually,” over time, Mike said, “but not significantly.”

Cards was announced on October 4, 2011. Steve Jobs died on October 5.

“No one had the heart to pull the plug on the program” until September 2013, Mike said.

Throughout the process of ramping up the printing and shipping capabilities, and the actual deliveries of tens of thousands of cards, “Wow, I took some abuse,” Mike told me. “I got yelled at by [Apple] a lot on this project.”

You can order prints from within Apple Photos even today — but Apple’s barely involved. Now, the iPhoto successor’s Create menu option simply pushes you to the App Store. I guess Apple didn’t really cotton to printing partners longterm.