So what do you do when you are not designing Apple’s next cool product, you design guns for Beretta.
Australian designer Marc Newson who was recently given a job at Apple has just designed a decidedly low-tech masterpiece in the form of a high-end engraved shotgun for the famous Italian firearm manufacturer Beretta.
Beretta, still owned by the Beretta family, traces its roots to the early 16th century and makes metal-and-wood tools that are4 designed to kill, even James Bond used a Beretta in his day.
Newson has designed a shotgun similar to the Beretta 486 Parallelo it is set to be released shortly.
The Italian Company said “Newson’s design will be released on 13 November, when the gun is officially unveiled at an event in London. It will be a version of the existing 486 Parallelo – a 12-gauge side-by-side game gun that features a round body receiver and lavish engravings. Beretta currently produces 1,500 weapons a day, with ‘sporting firearms’ counting for an estimated 90 per cent of production. Its repertoire includes shotguns, pistols and rifles. American Armed Forces and Australian Police Forces started using the Beretta 92 pistol series in 1985.”
Best known for dreaming up highly functional components for aircraft, Newson has earned international fame and moves in celebrity circles. Last year, U2 front man Bono asked him to collaborate with Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president for design, on a series of items for the Red charity auction at Sotheby’s to raise money to fight AIDS and other diseases in Africa. Newson and Ive came up with an inventory “ranging from a one-off Hermes red leader saddle and a white Steinway grand piano with a red inside lid to a red version of the cutting-edge Mac Pro tower desktop computer,” the Financial Times reported.
The collaboration with Ive must have gone well, as this September, Apple announced that London-based Newson would join the tech titan.
