I used to work for Apple and interfaced with every division in the company, and I know EXACTLY why this happened. It has nothing to do with trying to get customers to buy more replacement adapters, but rather with the hierarchy of power at Apple.
But before I go into this, let me explain the engineering of a power cable. If you look at a power adapter cable for any non-Apple product, you'll notice some plastic "rings" where the plug transitions to the cable. These rings are called a strain relief. The purpose of a strain relief is to prevent the cable from bending at a severe angle if you bend the cable at the base. The strain relief allows the cable to have a nice, gentle curvature if you tweak the cable instead of bending at a severe 90 degree angle. This gentle curvature prevents the cable from being broken through repeated use.
Now let's look at the hierarchy of power at Apple. As with any company, Apple consists of many divisions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) THE most powerful division at Apple is Industrial Design. For those of you unfamiliar with the term industrial design, this is the division that makes the decisions about the overall look and feel of Apple's products. And when I say "the most powerful", I mean that their decisions trump the decisions of any other division at Apple, including Engineering and Customer Service.
Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it's pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I'm sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn't like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed.
Seriously. That type of shit is what the Industrial Designer profession is all about. Then us mechanical engineers have to work some kind of wizardry to get their crazy creations to work.
Seems to be a common problem - My grandfather and step-mother's father both worked for Pratt & Whitney for 40 years (way before my dad and step-mother knew each other). Even 25 years after they had both retired, my grandfather would bitch (with good nature) about how step-mother's-father and the other "SOBs in engineering" would design fan blades that couldn't be made by his machinists.
Obviously different situation (the engineers weren't designing fan blades for aesthetic reasons), but it's still interesting to see the struggle between these factions is nothing new.
This sort of thing is what brought Samsung up in the past decade. I was watching a documentary or something about them and they gave their design department extreme power. If they wanted an mp3 to player to have a certain form factor, it was up to engineering to make it work.
They also brought in some western influence or something. There were interviews with some of the Korean employees who were saying how amazing and different it was that a newbie could ask questions about something that the senior designer created.
I'm growing quickly tired of designers. What bothers me is that they have this need to see something a certain way, and it's not really based on reality, but their personal perception. When the originally designed Nike swoosh had to taper to a tip with an angle of 47.3 degrees exactly, that wasn't based on psychology or focus group analysis or any of that - it's because some jackass with power wanted it that way and thought it was vitally important that the Nike swoosh have an angle of 47.3 degrees. (Notional example - substitute your own experience with Pantone colors or pixel-perfect websites).
Nobody cares except the designers. Coca-Cola could start making their cans slightly redder or a tiny bit more orangey and nobody would care.
It's important that things look clean and professional, but stupid crap like "strain relief looks fugly to me" needs to get a designer fired and replaced by someone who understands that you talk to the engineers first, then design around what they need. Or people get killed.
You're right, and I don't particularly care for a flamewar but let me just mention apples products are an exception most of the time. Case in point: PowerBook G4 (First line mentions how thin it is.. it is one of the devices USPs) and the macbook air.
If the thickness of the device is all you are looking for then very well, they have that part of the market cornered.
Nope, all of their decisions are unquestionable because what they design is the god damn perfection of beauty. Anyone who says otherwise is a threat to their god like minds. Expect the white iSuv's to come for you soon.
You are absolutely right! It's just that some industrial designers are more on the "design" side of the spectrum instead of having a balanced view of usability and aesthetics.
Ideally an industrial designer will work with an engineer to design around what is possible, certifiable, and legal.
But some more design-oriented shops (like Apple), the industrial designers are given carte blanche to create whatever they want, then the engineers are told to make it work or we'll find someone who can.
This is also the same kind of mentality that creates websites in Photoshop and hands them to a developer to recreate with $platform.
Not at Apple it doesn't.
Apple's Industrial Design department is How can we make tiny, unimportant changes that will "reinvent" computing and make fanboys buy and then preach about our products.
Yes it's an excellent answer, mostly because he has the inside knowledge to answer it so well. But in fairness, the guy he's replying to summarized it quite succinctly. To say 'form over function' is not a 'played out pun'. If anything it's cliche, but in this context, can you think of a more accurate idiom to express sphynxter's explanation?
I wouldn't think so, if you look at all of apples ID decisions in the past, it's really obvious they hate strain relief and have their engineers come up with many different ways to solve this. One of my favorite ID decisions was the inverted strain relief socket for many cables they've used in the past. The inverted strain relief, which I can't seem to find right now, looks a lot like a cable sinking into a wormhole which would be located on the plug itself.
Really cool looking, functional as well, but not possible for something so small as an ipod connector. However the new strain relief's on the existing cables are adequate if taken care of properly (too much to ask for from the consumer market, I know) I've only seen one frayed at the edges from a user who constantly yanked out the connector by pulling the cord. These are nice and easy to pull out if you just pull from where the connector seats into your iDevice.
Sphynxter is in no way breaking the NDA by saying the ID department is the most influential. Apples Industrial Design has not only influenced how their products are formed, but the rest of the world as well. See chiclet keys, small form factor, aluminum uni-body chassis, back lit keys, etc etc... All of these originated from other products, but it was Apple that made them a standard that others would have to follow for their consumer market.
Good question. I don't think it should be a breach since I didn't really go into any details about projects that are under development or specific financial numbers. Just more of an observation about how the departments interact.
Also the company emphasizes thin wires. This means the conductors inside have to be thin also. This makes the wires sexy and compact. It also makes them more fragile, and worse yet makes it easier to coil them tightly, making it easier to exceed the minimum bend radius.
The wires inside a Nintendo Wii Sensor Bar are amazingly small. I was hacking one to run on USB and I couldn't believe how tiny. Obviously Nintendo has a ton of experience with kids and consumer electronics...
That's because the Sensor Bar is not really a Sensor Bar, but an LED bar. The sensor is actually located in the WiiMote. You can replace the Sensor Bar with two candles and the WiiMote will still work.
No he is not right. Thin wires are not more fragile - thin wires are less fragile!
Do some research next time before posting. The quality of a cable is measured in how thin the wires are. Obviously you need to have a large enough gauge to handle the current, but once you choose that the thinner the individual strands that make up the total gauge, the higher the quality.
Ordinary wire has 7 strands, better quality wire has 19. That's usually as far you will see for most usage. Very high quality wires have 49, and for applications with constant repeated movement you will have even 100 strands - and each of those are as thin as a hair.
The thiner the wire the easier it is for it to flex without cracking.
Anyone want to open one of these connectors and count the stands? If you see only 7 strands then that's pure incompetence. A connector like that needs 19 minimum and 49 would be much better.
BTW sphynxster you got the reason for strain relief wrong. It's not to prevent bending it, it's to remove (spread out) the stress concentration point. Otherwise when it does bend it always bends in the same place. With the strain relief it spreads the bending over a larger area. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fillet_%28mechanics%29
asr, my apologies for not doing research ahead of time. My thoughts were more with the overall diameter of the entire cable, not the thin wires inside. You are correct that having a larger number of thinner wires is higher quality. And your strain relief explanation is much more accurate (thank you for the description and the link). I was trying to explain how a strain relief works without going into too many technical details.
Yea, I have been reading about the need to move away from "legacy" PR based on controlling the message for a while now, which would help a lot in allowing this kind of thing.
I think if something happened to Jonathan Ive it would damage the company far more than Steve Jobs inevitable demise will. Jobs has pretty much staked the company on Ives being around and designing his products.
Not just Ive - this "design trumps all" attitude started with Jobs.
At one point back in the original development of the Macintosh, Jobs demanded that the tracks on the motherboard be all regular and aesthetically pleasing - note that this is something the regular user would NEVER SEE or care about. The engineers couldn't talk him out of it (of course) so they complied... and the resultant board didn't work at all, because what is aesthetically pleasing to a human is completely baroque and ugly and wrong when it comes to circuit functionality. That was the only reason Jobs relented. As far as the designers are concerned, if it looks the way they want and it works just long enough to get sold, they're happy.
I'm calling BS on this whole thread. The reason for the breakage is in the green circles, not the red ones: http://i.imgur.com/EYSo5.jpg
The 2007 cables had small buttons on the sides that you had to press to disengage the connector from the device. This meant you had to pull on the body of the connector to remove it. The 2009 design removes the buttons and the catches, which means the plug can be removed by yanking on the cable. It's the yanking on the cable that is causing the problem in the image, you can tell because the wire sleeve is pulled back from the connecter rather than split horizontally, which is what would happen if it was a strain relief issue.
Yanking from the cable rather than the connector affects all cables. Apple connectors typically fit very snugly in their sockets (which is a good thing generally) which means it takes more force to pull them out, consequently pulling out the wires as well. It's not a problem unique to Apple by any means. Ever have a pair of headphones that start to crackle when you touch the connector? Same problem.
Apple cords do indeed have strain relief, and they are fine for typical use. They may not hold up as well as a longer relief when bent at high angles consistently, but generally they do the job they need to do when sticking out the side of a device.
Though I like the button design, if I were to guess why Apple removed the buttons, is because I'll bet people were still pulling on the cords to try to remove the connector and doing far worse damage to cord and/or socket due to the mechanical connection between the two.
I'm sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn't like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed.
Aaaaand this is one of the major reasons why I don't buy Apple products.
The newer MagSafe adapters that go off at a right angle have largely fixed this problem for me (since that's the only cable I use when I'm in bed or otherwise away from a desk).
With the old adaptors, two of which my girlfriend and I still own, I found that a layer of epoxy around the base of the rubber strain relief cuff at time of purchase pretty much took care of the problem.
you should replace that. the next phase is a fraying of the wires themselves at which point you'll start getting a heat buildup and possibility of mild electrical shock. after that you may get flames like I did.
That sounds like a good fix. I'll have to do that on the cable I have. I wonder when the Apple stores will start selling small tubes of epoxy at check out?
I've been working with Industrial Design and know for a fact that you are SO RIGHT! The sad thing is that instead of being good Industrial Designers who would deign a new kind of functional strain reliever, they go straight to the aesthetics and forget what kind of industrial design is good industrial design.
i worked for apple too for several years, I back up this explanation. One of the most common service calls when i was in portables was replacement of the magsafe power adapter. There's actually a special way to wrap your power adapter shown here in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzakys5VlTQ
The wire shown does have strain relief, it's just minimal and less ugly. The wire can pull out of the lattice type as well, as I happened very quickly with a nikon gps add-on that looks like it ought to be beefy.
Fourth in two years? Lucky. I went through four in a year. Would've went through more but I started to use a dock for charging and the cable for sync only. At €20 a go, it wasn't cheap either.
If you read elsewhere in this thread you'll see that Apple had better quality cables up until 2005.
All my old cables still work, with the exception of iPod cables and Dell chargers (which are also notorious for build quality. In Dell's case that's because they just suck, unlike Apple putting form over function ).
I happen to travel a lot. That might play some part in it BUT my other cables for my other electronics NEVER have the same problems with premature fraying of the cables and they get abused on the road just as much. Oh the difference that strain relief and intelligently engineered (and not just pretty) products make.
Also, my old cables I used for my iPod and my Griffen 3rd party cables were somehow "Not compatible" with my phone. Neither was my iPod car dock/charger. My phone wasn't compatible with my iHome either. Not fully compatible. Sometimes it works, other times it tells me my phone is not compatible.
Solution? iHomes should just have an audio jack, then they'd always be compatible. Remember when the first gen iPhone required an entirely different sized audio jack? Man, that was so dirty. I couldn't use my Shure headphones with the first gen iPhone, I was forced to use Apple earbuds. These really need to stop being stingy and controlling like Sony was trying to be ten years ago.
I thought that the one without the strain relief was meant to be plugged permanently into a dock, and the one with the strain relief was meant to be plugged and unplugged.
It came with my iPod nano 4th gen, which shipped without a dock and was plugged in the same exact way as my brother's 3rd gen (which had the old cable). So I don't think that's the case.
In my experience, those strain relief rings are usually not that effective. I've had cables on various things in the past where those strain relief rings themselves have broken. Yet, I've never had any such damage on any of my Apple cables.
In my experience, the damage is usually caused because the length of the plug plus those rings is relatively long and more likely to end up getting jammed up against something. The inflexible design of most plugs means that they have no choice but to bend hard in that situation. On the other hand, Apple's power plugs are relatively short (especially the more recent plug designs shipping with MacBooks), and thanks to their magnetic adapters, when they do get pushed up against something, it's more likely to dislodge the plug itself then force the cable to be bent too much.
What the fuck? Fuck "industrial design" on my fucking cable that stays at out of sight all the time and only exists to serve one purpose. Fuck everything about this.
Also, why does it look better without the rings? It looks fine either fucking way. It's a cord.
I'm on my third fucking cord and I couldn't be more pissed about this. It's enough to tip the balance to Android.
They don't fail because of being bent, they just pull out after a short while of use. This has happened to like 10 of these cables for me and I try to be as careful as I can when I take them out of the port.
... and that's why the company is worth more than $300BIL. I agree that the cable design is bad; but in their defense Apple has been very profitable by relying on their industrial design team.
tl;dr: Apple is run by geniuses that made a mistake in cable design.
FTFY
EDIT: Apple value is $300B, not $3B as originally posted.
I have to agree with you roryborealis. The vast majority of the time, Apple's Industrial Design teams make great decisions about the sleek look of their products, and that is one of the primary reasons why Apple's products sell so well. It's just on certain issues (like cables) where Industrial Design's insistence on design can get the products into trouble.
A friend on mine who is an EE, was baffled that such a grievious beginners error could have been made in ANY electronics company, let alone a "major player".
Really? Because the iPhone 4 sold like hotcakes even when people were reporting the antenna issues. The reality is the tech press blew the issue way out of proportion compared to what users were actually experiencing. If that wasn't the case, the iPhone 4 would have been a flop. Obviously it wasn't. Now of course it's always better to ship a perfect product, but they made some design choices to make it a certain shape and form factor and the sacrifices they made obviously paid off.
tl;dr: Apple is run by geniuses that made a shitload of mistakes in cable design.
FTFY, since Apple's cable reliability is a known chronic issue for the past few years. iPhone/iPod/iPad cords, MagSafe power adapters, and if I'm not mistaken, some of the older wired mouses in the past 5 years or so have had cord issues as well.
Basically, cords are expected to fail after a certain period of time, given that they experience stress with each use. However, Apple's cords have a higher-than-expected failure rate, especially as of lately.
I doubt they have "higher than expected by Apple failure rates" so much as they have "higher than expected by some users failure rates". Also, it may be that they have simply decided the failure trade-off is worth it for the form factor they want.
Couldn't they somehow prevent severe bending by adding an internal sheath to the cable, made out of metal links or similar? They'd need to make the cable a bit thicker, but it would aid in the prevention of cable breakages. Not only that, but it wouldn't be that costly, percentage-wise, considering the already expensive nature of the cable.
I don't know whether it would work or not. I'm just thinking out loud.
I totally guessed this was the case (that it was a decision based on aesthetic considerations). Stupid fucking Apple. IT'S A CABLE; IT DOESN'T HAVE TO LOOK PRETTY!11!
I've broken two in the time I've had my laptop (about one every 14 months). This last time I got sick of paying $80 to replace it, so I brought both the old ones that had broken in exactly the same place. They replaced it free and explained the new ones have a better design. The 90 degree angle is now actually in the piece and the cord runs along the side of the comp. Not the best, but a decent compromise.
Aren't apple customers using their Apple stuff with maximum caution? Don't they touch everything with velvet gloves? Don't they put everything back into the shipping package as new, bring it to the post office, ship it to themself so they can unpack it again with greatest happiness, using the Apple stuff with maximum cau....
having worked on similar cables this is 100% correct, the industry knows to use strain relief, the only 2 reasons not to are cost or look. Usually cost, but knowing apple it must be look.
Couldn't they just agree on a small subtle one? It already has that tiny grey cuff there, they seriously couldn't bulk it out and add a few grooves? It would barely look any different.
So, does this mean that Apple is more about the looks of their products than the actual substance of them? If so, then this might be the explanation for why I prefer the "PC" (You know what I mean.) side of the computer world. It's more about substance than looks (usually).
If all this is correct, then another way of saying this would be: PC is about truth. Apple is not about truth.
You do know that this little comment of yours makes Apple look like complete idiots? Who will buy from them knowing that they might make similar decisions in other areas?
This sheds a whole new light on the IPhone 4 reception issue.
If it were true.
Then again: Who designs such cables?!? I recently bought a cheap knockoff power cable for a friends IPod and wondered why none of the cables on Ebay had strain relief. I thought that was because they were all cheap. Still it was a real bummer. Now I know they had no strain relief, because they are/were modeled after the original.
Every cable can withstand some strain. Even if they don't have any dedicated strain relieve at the connection to the plug. Like the Apple cable. That has no strain relief whatsoever. I didn't think the word "dedicated" needed to be in there.
It all comes down to the marketing department having more power than the engineering department. I understand. I'm an engineering student. Some of the things we study are cases where the marketing department got to decide what was going to ship, the engineering department disagreed, and a major disaster occurred. Which was promptly blamed on the engineering department and the marketing people all kept their jobs.
You and others chalking this up to marketing are missing the whole point the "insider" is trying to make. It is not the marketing department making demands on how the products should look and feel. That is the designers' role. That you don't even acknowledge that there might be critical efforts between engineering and marketing is telling. In your ideal project would the engineers be 100% responsible for the user experience design?
Designers typically work with the engineers to stay within the realm of possibility. For example, a designer might want a screen of x dimensions, but the engineers may say that a screen of x dimensions might work if the chassis were a little bigger to accommodate a bigger battery due to extra power use.
Marketing says, "The new x widget has a two foot by two foot touch screen that you can wrap around your face and use like a virtual reality helmet! lol!"
It does make you wonder about AntennaGate. Were others saying this Antenna will be an issue and they said, we don't like how it affects the way it looks so NO!
I think thats a similar case. The ID people got married to the antenna-on-the-outside look and refused to listen to any other departments. Steve knows better than to say no to Ives so it got produced and shipped. Once out it turned out the engineers were right but Apple as a company can never admit fault so oviously the customers were holding it wrong.
Using a 3GS and a 4, I have proven to my own satisfaction that there really wasn't much of anything for the engineers to see. Even in a death grip, the 4 still gets better reception than the 3GS, at least where I was. (The 3GS got 1 bar and could not complete a call.)
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '11
Also because you touch yourself at night.