I have some suggestions for future videos from this guy:
Hopefully this ends the unreal practice of putting these things in the back pants pocket
Actually, the complaints have come from people who found the phone got bent when they sat down with it in a front pants pocket. I mean, those people could be lying about what happened, but the evidence suggests the iPhone 6 genuinely is too flimsy to be practical.
If you want high stiffness, carbon fiber beats aluminum any day. Or nanotube/carbon fiber composites.
Yes, clearly you should just hold the phone in your hands and never put it away for the rest of your life.
For some reason this reminds me of the (original) movie of “Day of the Jackal” with the late, great Cyril Cusack playing the grandfatherly gunsmith designing the weapon that the Jackal wants to use to assassinate de Gaulle.
The Jackal wanted the gun to be made out of aluminum to avoid detection but the gunsmith says “I tried aluminium [pronounced in the British manner], sir, but it just bends, you see.”
You’re holding it (in your pocket) wrong.
came for this, leaving satisfied
I think I will begin hoarding apple products from the Jobs era.
That’s my approach. I have a tattoo on my palm that says “if you can read this, I lost my phone.”
Photo or I call BS
That’s what you get when you hunt millimeters of thickness. Sooner or later, but usually sooner, you hit the level where the cons start overshadowing the pros; the lack of mechanical integrity is just one of them. Give me a quarter-inch thick, robust and reliable phone instead of the flimsy paper-thin ones. If thickness is the cost of repairable design, without use of those double-sided adhesives I would wish to shoot the developers for, it’s a bargain cost.
On the other hand, maybe this can of thin worms will be what is needed to push the development of truly flexible displays, both e-ink and LCD/OLED. The superthin glass in the contemporary ones is just not a good idea; it may work in a lab environment but is not ruggedized enough for field deployment - as evidenced by the myriads of cracked displays, and the 80-90% (or even higher) prevalence of damaged displays in ebay lots of for-parts devices, whether phones or ebook readers.
On the third hand, there is the proliferation of at-home manufacturing that includes CNC milling and hopefully will soon include also laser or microplasma sintering of metal (or, best, combo of both - lay down rough layers of melted-together metal powder, then mill it into precision shape; you can even mix different metals this way, e.g. one for thermal performance in the bulk, one for wear resistance on the surface, or mix it with ceramic powder or fibers and get metal-matrix composite, possibly even with graded properties through the bulk (by varying the ratio of metal/ceramics) so you can match thermal expansion of ceramic block on one side and metal on the other). I can see these problems solved by custom-made replacement parts. Buy a flimsy phone with the features you want, then swap the guts into a robust ruggedized milspec-compliant casing. 3d-scan the parts, make a VR model of what has to be constant (the space for the electronics, the mountpoints…), design the alternative shape of the components, print/mill, assemble.
They just need a ruggedized steel case and everything will be fine.
God, I fucking hate Apple’s shitty industrial design.
Yeah, I know- They’re supposed to be the best industrial designers in the world- But really, can we think for five minutes about any other design consideration besides “thin”? I LOVE what the Apple products will do- Use Logic in my studio and swear by them for anything graphics or video related- But REALLY.
I don’t care if my laptop weighs 20lbs at 4" thick, if I could drop it down a flight of stairs safely. And a desktop? Why in the world is “thin” a design consideration at all? It’s sitting immobile on a piece of furniture, for fuck’s sake.
See now, to me this is good design.
Me brah broke a 5 by wearing too tight jeans. 
Sounds like apple’s design team needs to consult with materials scientists on a more regular basis. They got so excited about saphire glass at one point, until drop tests proved them wrong.
There was an article on /, recently.
why you can’t manufacture like apple, which would tend to contradict your faith in low volume/home based manufacture.
Not really a contradiction. Some things don’t scale up well for mass production. That’s why we need a 5-axis CNC with a metal powder/laser material depositing head (and plastics-depositing heads), inter alia, in every garage.
Okay, every other garage. Let’s not ask for extremes.
So if you want 10,000 pieces machined, you can either buy a factory for the CNC machines like Apple did, or do one piece in each of the 10,000 garages of people who want the thing. Both approaches work.
…then there’s the third approach, do it some other way. Nobody says it has to be milled from one piece, you can braze it from several. Or injection-mould. Or hydroform from tubes, and it will be a bit bigger but also lighter and stiffer and if you coat the inner sides with sintered metal it can also act as a heat pipe system for cooling. Apple tech is sexy but also more often than not also cumbersome to not only repair but also to make. Learn from Russian aerospace tech, instead. And if you cannot achieve the result you want, you either overspecified it or should ask if you can make the tools/jigs if you cannot make the result directly. Cannot print from metal? Print from PLA and then cast the metal.
…and the fourth one, send the file to Shapeway or their ilk and get it done there.
Take 10-20% of the IT tech development we got in last few decades and put it into the machining segment, and you’re pretty much there. It’s a rather big change of paradigm but bigger ones sneaked up to us (intercontinental air transport, multimodal global logistics, cars, computers, Internet-everywhere, laser and photo-quality inkjet printers, cellphones…) and not only we did not notice them biting our asses, we barely noticed the stink when we got crapped out.
This, just on cue. A TinyG CNC controller board. What I miss in the developments are some feedback systems for precision position sensing, preferably optical (there are some hacks using digital calipers but I consider them rather dirty). (Todo: try out with an optical mouse.)
Or, even better, maybe this will be what is needed to curb the popularity of circulation-limiting, phone-bending skinny jeans.
You and all your science! I <3 science!
