5 ms·

>I'm really curious what their differentiators will be Extremely good build quality? Accessories notwithstanding, most of their products look and feel like the

>I'm really curious what their differentiators will be Extremely good build quality? Accessories notwithstanding, most of their products look and feel like they were built extremely well. Even their failures like the butterfly keyboard looked and felt like they were built to extremely tight tolerances.

api 6y ago
Tolerances and build quality weren't the problem with the butterfly keyboard. It was just a fundamentally flawed design that was not durable enough for real world use.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  I can't imagine that it didn't stand up to very extensive lab testing, before getting approved for mass production across Apple's laptops. It would be very interesting to hear some inside accounts about what went wrong there. I wouldn't at all be surprised to learn that the mass-produced parts didn't quite measure up to the prototypes, whether because of less consistent materials, part manufacturing defects, slightly off assembly, .... To be fair to the designers, the height budget they were working with is an extremely hard target to hit for a part that gets as much physical abuse as a keyboard. I was pretty impressed with how passable the keyboard was for typing on, given the height constraint. (However, I was not impressed with the dropped actuations, double actuations, inconsistent key feel after a few months use, broken keycap that my 1-year-old keeps removing and hiding around the house, etc. Overall it ended up being a catastrophically bad design based on poor reliability.) The biggest problem at company scale was that they couldn't revert to something like their previous keyboard in a shorter time frame. The lesson is to avoid completely locking the whole rest of the system design around a brand new untested part for which there is no alternative. It would have been better to test the new keyboard design in a context like an external iPad keyboard where if it turned out to be a dud there would be an obvious path to an alternative, and customers wouldn't be left with a broken $2000 machine.
  - novok 6y ago
    I think their lab testing did not include dusty home, outdoor and food crumb simulations that the real world has, probably fairly clean factories with high amounts of ventilation sucking out all the dust with robot fingers doing fatigue tests.
    - jacobolus 6y ago
      It didn't seem to me like dust was the main problem, or at least not the only problem. I could believe that their test rig didn't adequately simulate the motions/stresses of finger keypresses.
  - FireBeyond 6y ago
    What was even worse was the usual Apple cycle of deny there's an issue, begrudgingly acknowledge that it "may" be an issue, and then tout a new, improved version that fixed things and resolved the problem (and then didn't - how many iterations of the butterfly are we on now?).
    - xvector 6y ago
      > and then didn't [resolve the problem] - how many iterations of the butterfly are we on now? Uh, the butterfly isn't used in Apple keyboards anymore. They reverted to the old scissor switch design some time ago.
      - jacobolus 6y ago
        They got through at least 3 versions of the butterfly design, and kept using it from early 2015 through late 2019, before finally switching to a new (thinner than pre-2015, but still substantially thicker than the butterfly switch) rubber dome scissor design. It would have been much better if they had figured out how to cut their losses and revert the keyboards in 2016 or early 2017, even though that would have taken a substantial redesign of the rest of the laptop internals. Selling 4.5 years of laptops with keyboards that broke easily under ordinary use was a huge black eye for the company.
temac 6y ago
Apple build quality has nothing special in the absolute. It's just that most of the phones or laptops of tons of manufacturers have cheap plastic body. But there are also plenty of less cheap but really nice products from other brands, and there are plenty of consumer electronics devices that have nice mechanical build quality. You can even easily found really cheap objects, compared to premium phones or laptops, with a nice build quality. You don't see that often for computers and phones because low cost models are low margin and the market for a nice mechanical design but otherwise low end specs is too small. Instruct an engineer to design something that is not crap and they will do it, and it will be mass produced with tight tolerance if specified like that. On the manufacturing side... Apple does not manufacture anyway. And that brings me to: a car is not exactly the same thing as your small household appliance. Like we saw with Tesla, it is not trivial to do with a good build quality, both on the design front and on the build front (way more difficult than small and mostly static objects) -- and it is harder to reject a car with a not stellar build quality because that's more expensive and a huge part of the value is in the mechanics. And quite related: for now Apple does not manufacture, if they start to do cars, will they? Otherwise who will?

api 6y ago

Tolerances and build quality weren't the problem with the butterfly keyboard. It was just a fundamentally flawed design that was not durable enough for real world use.

jacobolus 6y ago
I can't imagine that it didn't stand up to very extensive lab testing, before getting approved for mass production across Apple's laptops. It would be very interesting to hear some inside accounts about what went wrong there. I wouldn't at all be surprised to learn that the mass-produced parts didn't quite measure up to the prototypes, whether because of less consistent materials, part manufacturing defects, slightly off assembly, .... To be fair to the designers, the height budget they were working with is an extremely hard target to hit for a part that gets as much physical abuse as a keyboard. I was pretty impressed with how passable the keyboard was for typing on, given the height constraint. (However, I was not impressed with the dropped actuations, double actuations, inconsistent key feel after a few months use, broken keycap that my 1-year-old keeps removing and hiding around the house, etc. Overall it ended up being a catastrophically bad design based on poor reliability.) The biggest problem at company scale was that they couldn't revert to something like their previous keyboard in a shorter time frame. The lesson is to avoid completely locking the whole rest of the system design around a brand new untested part for which there is no alternative. It would have been better to test the new keyboard design in a context like an external iPad keyboard where if it turned out to be a dud there would be an obvious path to an alternative, and customers wouldn't be left with a broken $2000 machine.
- novok 6y ago
  I think their lab testing did not include dusty home, outdoor and food crumb simulations that the real world has, probably fairly clean factories with high amounts of ventilation sucking out all the dust with robot fingers doing fatigue tests.
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    It didn't seem to me like dust was the main problem, or at least not the only problem. I could believe that their test rig didn't adequately simulate the motions/stresses of finger keypresses.
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  What was even worse was the usual Apple cycle of deny there's an issue, begrudgingly acknowledge that it "may" be an issue, and then tout a new, improved version that fixed things and resolved the problem (and then didn't - how many iterations of the butterfly are we on now?).
  - xvector 6y ago
    > and then didn't [resolve the problem] - how many iterations of the butterfly are we on now? Uh, the butterfly isn't used in Apple keyboards anymore. They reverted to the old scissor switch design some time ago.
    - jacobolus 6y ago
      They got through at least 3 versions of the butterfly design, and kept using it from early 2015 through late 2019, before finally switching to a new (thinner than pre-2015, but still substantially thicker than the butterfly switch) rubber dome scissor design. It would have been much better if they had figured out how to cut their losses and revert the keyboards in 2016 or early 2017, even though that would have taken a substantial redesign of the rest of the laptop internals. Selling 4.5 years of laptops with keyboards that broke easily under ordinary use was a huge black eye for the company.

temac 6y ago

Apple build quality has nothing special in the absolute. It's just that most of the phones or laptops of tons of manufacturers have cheap plastic body. But there are also plenty of less cheap but really nice products from other brands, and there are plenty of consumer electronics devices that have nice mechanical build quality. You can even easily found really cheap objects, compared to premium phones or laptops, with a nice build quality. You don't see that often for computers and phones because low cost models are low margin and the market for a nice mechanical design but otherwise low end specs is too small. Instruct an engineer to design something that is not crap and they will do it, and it will be mass produced with tight tolerance if specified like that. On the manufacturing side... Apple does not manufacture anyway. And that brings me to: a car is not exactly the same thing as your small household appliance. Like we saw with Tesla, it is not trivial to do with a good build quality, both on the design front and on the build front (way more difficult than small and mostly static objects) -- and it is harder to reject a car with a not stellar build quality because that's more expensive and a huge part of the value is in the mechanics. And quite related: for now Apple does not manufacture, if they start to do cars, will they? Otherwise who will?