Fifteen years later: the inside story of Apple's Cards app

In 2011 Apple released the Cards app for iOS 5: it let you design a letterpress card, add a photo and a message, and have Apple print and mail it. Fifteen years later, the manager who ran the print program told his story to Lex Friedman, who published it on his site Lex on Tech under the name “Mike”.

A Steve Jobs project, codenamed Speed Racer

Mike calls the project, code-named Speed Racer and “dreamed up by Steve Jobs himself”, the most painful of his 30-year career: an unsurpassed pinnacle of incompetence, project mismanagement and intercontinental mayhem. He asked to stay anonymous for fear of angering Apple, though the app was sunset long ago.

His company had printed books, calendars and cards for iPhoto since 2006. In 2010 Apple added a product code-named Downieville: fine letterpress on very toothy cotton stock, with photos printed digitally onto preprinted shells. Cards, kicked off in early 2011, launched in the final year of Steve Jobs's life.

Invisible barcodes and a heart-shaped stamp

Apple refused visible barcodes on the envelopes but still wanted every step tracked, so an invisible barcode was sprayed on them, readable only under UV light. The US Postal Service agreed to scan cards from posting to the delivery truck; the Czech Post handled Europe.

Letterpress expert Glenn Fleishman notes the cards were heavily debossed into the toothy paper, not simply printed. Ink would not adhere to the cotton Crane stock on the HP Indigo press, so each card took three passes: a pre-coating, the letterpress shell and the digital photo.

In the US, Apple also designed a custom stamp for the cards: a heart, something Mike believes had never been done before. The Czech Post did not allow it, so Apple picked an existing stamp there.

Demand that fit in a shoebox

Apple insisted the printer be ready to ship hundreds of thousands of cards on launch day. Mike, who had forecast volumes for iPhoto, knew better. On the day the app went live, “the global demand for Cards could fit in a shoebox”, and the first day's orders nearly fit in a glovebox.

Cards was announced on October 4, 2011; Steve Jobs died the next day. The program ran until September 2013, when it was shut down: “no one had the heart to pull the plug,” Mike says. Today, the Create menu in Photos still lists Card, but only to open the App Store.