There's a 0.618 sitting on this Braun calculator's display — the golden ratio, left there like a signature. Dieter Rams designed it. His work at Braun basically wrote the rulebook for how electronics should look, and when Steve Jobs and Jony Ive were building the iPhone calculator, they kept coming back to what Rams had done. This piece walks through how it all fits together — the color-coded buttons, the printed panel on the back, all of it.
The Design Behind the Design
Dieter Rams — people call him the father of industrial design, and honestly it's not overstating it — made this calculator while he was at Braun. The whole philosophy was simple: matte finishes, minimal color, buttons organized by what they actually do. That approach became the template. Everything that came after in consumer electronics borrowed from it.
Jobs and Ive looked at Rams' work and used it as their reference point. The iPhone calculator inherited that DNA. And that 0.618 on the screen? That's the golden ratio. Designers can't stop using it. In the photos here, the calculator's resting on a design textbook opened to proportion diagrams, and it fits almost too perfectly.
How It's Put Together
Up close, you've got a matte black body with rounded corners and a recessed screen. The display's frozen on 0.618. The keypad tells you what everything does just by looking at it:
Dark green keys — these are your memory row. M+, M−, MR, MC, and the sign-change button.
Brown keys — the functions. Square root, percentage, delta percent, all the arithmetic operators, CE/C, decimal.
Black keys — your digits zero through nine.
Pale yellow equals key — stands out on its own.
And those two small dots in red and green sitting above the memory section? They light up to tell you when something's stored.
Flip it over and the back's just as thoughtful. Ribbed finish, model number BNE001BK, a little printed reference table for the percentage buttons, battery info (1 × 1.5V LR44/A76), Made in China, CE mark — everything's in its place.
Braun Meets Apple
Put the Braun next to an early iPhone calculator and you see it right away — same four-column grid, memory row at the top, functions down the right side, one accent-colored equals button. The Braun's more explicit about color separation; the iPhone simplified it into something almost monochrome. But the skeleton's identical. That's the whole point. iPhone designers measured everything against this thing.
The Long Shadow of a Small Object
A calculator might seem like nothing. But this one changed how we think about design. Its proportions, the way the buttons are grouped, that single warm highlight — you still see it everywhere. Pick up your phone and look at the calculator app. Rams is there. And that 0.618 on the display? That's his way of saying what he was really after.
5 comments
Come play with it together.
Very satisfying to hold and fiddle with.
Yes.
Looks good.
The beauty of industrial design.