And carrying an HP41 is just classy
But waitâthereâs more!
So theyâve got a whole big set-up in Cupertino to stress-test their phones and other gadgets withâincluding, get this, a robot that basically does nothing but the pants test. But, no, it took intrepid tech bloggers To Reveal The Horrible Truth To The World!
So if their tests work (i.e. mimic the real world), they should have identified the problem and came up with a corrective action (or perhaps they just decided that it only happens if X is true â aka âif in doubt, ship it outâ)
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They only ran the tests 9,950,000 times. The nine bad ones were in the batches at the very end.
Because aesthetics are⌠important?
And thatâs a reason good enough to give up functionality? That is supposed to be MORE important.
But thatâs assuming that thereâs even a âproblemâ in any meaningful sense of the word. Apple says that there were nine devices with this alleged problem. Letâs be generous and say that, say, nine hundred were extra-bendy. Thatâs out of more than 10 million sold. Do the math.
That larger phones are more functional isnât at all obvious.
And aesthetics is not independent of functionality. The visual quality of our surroundings has a demonstrably significant effect on our psychological well-being, as well as any number of factors more directly associated with the speed and quality of our activities. It is part of the functionality. Furthermore, how we dress, how we carry ourselves, the devices we use, and how those devices are used, are major features of other peopleâs environment. Courtesy demands that we are careful about these things.
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I canât tell if youâre criticizing the skinny iPhones or the skinny jeans that bend themâŚ
Iâm guessing less than 10 million iPhones have actually been delivered and put into use. And our standard of excellence is that there have only been a few failures in the first few days they have been available? Iâm not sure what kind of math that is, but itâs probably not the kind that applies to anyone who keeps each new phone they buy for more than a week.
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More data on the screen without scrolling around, or the same data with better readability and less squinting at tiny font. That itself is enough to validate the bigger-is-better claim. As long as it fits a slightly larger shirt pocket, it is not too big. And if it does not, get a custom-made shirt with a bigger pocket.
Which is somewhere at the bottom of the barrel in comparison with more important ergonomic factors. I have to deal with wrong compromises and they drive me MAD.
Virtually nobody of those people cares about more important things - they do not ask for service manual and schematics availability, do not think forward, happily go for proprietary protocols/interfaces (hi, Sony) instead of demanding mix-and-match across brands, ask for thinner phones instead of for separation between baseband and main processor, and generally donât THINK. Why should I have to care about their Delicate Aesthetic Sensibilities? When the most they can offer to me is slowing the adoption of new tech by couple years because it does not âlook the right wayâ?
I wonât let anybody dictate what I should or shouldnât wear and use. Courtesy or not. Fuck the plebes and the aesthetics they ride on. Too much crap here to be sorry for being angry about it.
Actually, both. Phones have to be robust and apparel has to be comfortable. Deviate from that and it becomes crap.
Well, what is your standard of excellence? What is an acceptable defect rate, given that itâs pretty unrealistic to expect every single unit of a new product to be flawless when millions of them are churned out in a pretty short period of time? What are we even considering a âdefectâ, given the example that I gave above of the Gizmodo blogger who somehow found it in himself to blame Apple when he dropped his new iPhone in Times Square?
âDefect rateâ doesnât really make much sense here, because these donât appear to reflect manufacturing defects but a design defect. While itâs not clear if the design actually is defective, if it is defective then the âdefect rateâ would effectively be 100%, even if the actual failure rate would be much smaller.
I donât know what an acceptable failure rate would be, but the problem is that we have no idea what the failure rate actually is. Simply counting the number of people whose first-week complaints about bending have made it to Apple HQ isnât a great way to accurately quantify
the magnitude of the problem.
He wasnât complaining that the phone was defective, he was observing that a non-glass covering would be more durable.
Phones arenât intended to be dropped. They are intended to be put in your pocket, and I believe Steve Jobs talked about how great the original iPhone felt in your pocket. Damage that results from being dropped isnât a defect unless you advertise how droppable your phones are. Damage resulting from carrying your phone in your pocket is a defect unless you start telling people to never carry their phone in your pocket.
Cars also arenât intended to be crashed and they have deformation zones. Many other examples are there of designs that have to withstand unintended handling that in practice is sufficiently common. Dropping a phone counts as common enough to warrant appropriate design features.
Edit: Dropping the phone to a toilet is also quite common. Could be handled by a conformal coating of the electronics, optimally vapor-deposited (CVD, e.g. parylene), to limit the damage to only few parts. Still, it is not being done. Should be available at least as an affordable aftermarket service - bring your phone, get it weather-proofed and tropicalized. (Todo: investigate the possibilities of DIY parylene coating. As a bonus, the thing is biocompatible, some compositions are implant-grade.)
On a side note, Samsungs are said to use crap for circuitboards, which sucks up humidity and degrades over time. I have this from a hearsay from a colleague engineer and would like to get it validatedâŚ
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Sure, but you donât expect to crash a car and not damage the car: passengers (and/or pedestrians) withstand crashes, not the cars themselves. If dropping a phone had the potential to kill the user (or a bystander) then there would likely be state-mandated safety requirements, though complete loss of the phone would still be acceptable.
The energies involved in crashing a car are many orders of magnitude higher than the energies involved in deceleration of a fallen phone, assuming non-insane falls.
The design measures can take them in account easily-ish, and do some sensible tradeoff (2-3 mm thicker, less brittle materials, elastomer coatingâŚ). There are some hiking/military models on the market, ruggedized nicely, but a little bit of an overkill for common use and the choices are limited; there are the common iFlimsies (of all the different brands) that break when you sneeze at them; and there is pretty much no middle ground at all.
And now youâre stretching terms to the point of meaninglessness, describing a characteristic of a device as a âdesign defectâ because an extremely small percentage of people have managed to break it (and not even really knowing whether or not it was a design or manufacturing defect in the actual devices in question). Edge cases are edge cases, and insisting that Apple has to design its gadgets to protect against every possible type of use or abuse is absurd.
Carrying your phone in the pocket of your skinny jeans = absurd edge case, because who wears skinny jeans and who carries their phone in their jeans pockets (other than Steve Jobs, of course). How absurd that we should want a phone to hold up in those conditions (oh wait, Steve was so annoyed about the original plastic screen being damaged by keys and coins in his pocket that he insisted on a glass cover, even though he could have simply carried his coins and keys in one pocket and his phone in another).
A characteristic of the device? That it bends when you carry it in your pocket? If Apple wants to prominently tell people they shouldnât carry it in your pocket because it characteristically bends when carried there, they could probably avoid a lot of criticism on this front.
It helps if you read what I wrote. I said that we donât know if the design should be considered defective, since we donât know how many phones will be affected (over their expected life span, as opposed to their first few days). My point from the very beginning was that saying that only 9 complaints percolated up to Apple HQ in the first few days isnât a great way to prove that everything is fine.
Apple hasnât suggested that the affected phones were improperly manufactured, and pretty much everyone has said that this is not unexpected given the thinness of the design. But donât just take my word on how the design likely contributed to this:
Unless you meant to say that itâs a bad idea to put a thin phone in your front pocket, but not because of itâs thin design, but because it might have been manufactured in a defective manner.
EDIT to respond to comment below:
My original comment simply called out your reasoning based on Appleâs self-reported 9 instances of bent phones. I havenât said I have the evidence on my side: Iâve explicitly stated on multiple occasions that there arenât enough data points. but this means not only that there isnât enough data to show bending is a serious problem, but also that there isnât enough data to show itâs âwildly exaggerated, at best.â If my saying there isnât enough data is a smoke screen, what is your claim that everything is OK because only 9 phones out of 10 million were affected?
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Youâre just thrashing here. You donât have the evidence on your side, and throwing out smoke screens about âwe donât know how many phones will be affectedâ ignores the real point, which is that the complaints about this alleged defectâwhich started almost immediately after people got their hands on the devicesâhas been wildly exaggerated, at best. Youâre just one more BB commenter who canât admit when theyâre wrong.
Corporation underreports a problem frequency. News at 11.
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