Extremely mild-mannered Apple CEO Tim Cook designed his own signature Nike sneaker. And it's so unsurprisingly tame that it's got us lamenting the far-superior shoes that Apple made for its employees in the 1980s.
Cook’s new Nike Air Max shoe were “designed on an iPad” the same way most anyone with computer access can design their own Nike sneaker colorways with the Nike By You app.
Expect the expected: during Apple's iPad-revealing livestream on May 7, Cook humbly wore a white Nike Air Max 1 '86 shoe beneath his usual Silicon Valley dadcore. The sneaker was dressed with a scribbled rainbow around the Nike Swoosh, as if someone drew it with a crayon. Below, rainbow speckles danced across the bottom of its paneled nylon upper.
The rainbow colors are a callback to Apple's OG logo: a rainbow-colored apple with a thick black outline.
Cook's Apple-ified Nike Air Max shoes aren't bad per se but they do look so broadly generic that it doesn't really feel like a reflection of the potency shared by two of the world's two biggest companies.
“That’s really not good,” one person commented on Instagram. Another stated the obvious, noting that anyone could design a shoe like that and, hey, it might even look better.
In fairness, these shoes are a one-off design apparently designed by Tim Apple himself so take it up with the big guy. And, no, they are not a collab.
Apple stopped regularly producing merch decades ago but when Drake wore an original Apple jacket to announce a new Apple Music platform back in 2015, it kicked off renewed interest in the kitschy gear.
Not long after, auction house Sotheby’s sold a pair of the original Apple employee sneakers, a pair of Omega Sports shoes embroidered with Apple logos, for $50,000. You can find other vintage Apple Collection merch on eBay, ranging in price from $125 for a simple logo t-shirt to $450 for a hoodie with a company tagline on it.
The Apple merch of yore was kitschy even back then, but that's what made it charming. And you'd think that a contemporary Apple x Nike collab would be sleek, stylish, techy.
And yet, Tim Cook's Nike sneakers look like they were made by, well, a tech billionaire.
