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> Based on the fact that easily 90+% of phones I see in the wild have cases on them, physical size and thickness isn't a big factor Everyone says this, but I w

> Based on the fact that easily 90+% of phones I see in the wild have cases on them, physical size and thickness isn't a big factor Everyone says this, but I wonder if the sales data says otherwise, because device manufacturers, especially Apple, REALLY love to advertise how thin their devices are. Personally, I don't want a super thin device because I feel like the slightest bending force is going to snap it in half. It's absolutely wild to me that people will store their phones in their back pocket.

Syonyk 2y ago
Apple's mobile division still seems to struggle with the ghost of Jony Ive. At least their laptop division was willing to rethink things with the Apple Silicon transition and go back to things that worked. The late Intel-era portable Macs were simply broken, because of Ive's apparent obsession with "thin for thin's sake." Or, more probably, "thin for the sake of industrial design awards." They innovated 20% too much on keyboard design with the butterfly keyboard that was simply a bad design. I don't know what else to call a keyboard that reliably breaks after a few years of service. But, bad though that it is, it was even worse because you couldn't replace the keyboard. You had to replace the whole top case and battery, at something like $700, when one key went bad, because the whole thing was integrated to save a mm or two. Not only did they un-solve a solved problem (reliable laptop keyboards), they even un-solved the ability to replace a keyboard when it gets mangled, or something spills in it, or a random failure happens. But, worse, they went with the USB-C only design (the thinnest port!), meaning that every owner of one of those laptops I knew had a pile of assorted adapters in their bag so they could do things that most people want to do every now and then with a laptop, like drive an external display for a presentation, read a USB-A storage device, or read a micro SD card. Yes, the laptop was thinner, but at the cost of needing to carry extra stuff with you to work around the lack of ports. And then, because it was so thin, they didn't have space to properly cool the zorching-fast Intel chips they put in them, and the chips would throttle badly while baking the machine. The M-series laptops, shocking me incredibly, threw all that "design" out the window, and went back to something actually useful. They cool well (admittedly, that's mostly the Apple Silicon barely needing cooling), they fixed the keyboard, and the machines have a useful set of ports on the side for "common tasks with a laptop" (SD, HDMI, headphone, plus the USB-C/Thunderbolt ports - still no A ports, though). And then enough battery to last just about forever. Anyway, I hope their phone division works this sort of thing out too.

Syonyk 2y ago

Apple's mobile division still seems to struggle with the ghost of Jony Ive. At least their laptop division was willing to rethink things with the Apple Silicon transition and go back to things that worked. The late Intel-era portable Macs were simply broken, because of Ive's apparent obsession with "thin for thin's sake." Or, more probably, "thin for the sake of industrial design awards." They innovated 20% too much on keyboard design with the butterfly keyboard that was simply a bad design. I don't know what else to call a keyboard that reliably breaks after a few years of service. But, bad though that it is, it was even worse because you couldn't replace the keyboard. You had to replace the whole top case and battery, at something like $700, when one key went bad, because the whole thing was integrated to save a mm or two. Not only did they un-solve a solved problem (reliable laptop keyboards), they even un-solved the ability to replace a keyboard when it gets mangled, or something spills in it, or a random failure happens. But, worse, they went with the USB-C only design (the thinnest port!), meaning that every owner of one of those laptops I knew had a pile of assorted adapters in their bag so they could do things that most people want to do every now and then with a laptop, like drive an external display for a presentation, read a USB-A storage device, or read a micro SD card. Yes, the laptop was thinner, but at the cost of needing to carry extra stuff with you to work around the lack of ports. And then, because it was so thin, they didn't have space to properly cool the zorching-fast Intel chips they put in them, and the chips would throttle badly while baking the machine. The M-series laptops, shocking me incredibly, threw all that "design" out the window, and went back to something actually useful. They cool well (admittedly, that's mostly the Apple Silicon barely needing cooling), they fixed the keyboard, and the machines have a useful set of ports on the side for "common tasks with a laptop" (SD, HDMI, headphone, plus the USB-C/Thunderbolt ports - still no A ports, though). And then enough battery to last just about forever. Anyway, I hope their phone division works this sort of thing out too.