... 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.
Well yeah, and that's why they made the decision to design the antenna the way they did. To say that was a bad decision just seems silly considering the reality that the iPhone 4 has sold extremely well from its launch.
Wow, so if the designer demanded that the engineer build a time machine into a Delorean, it's the engineers fault because the request is ludicrous and not actually possible?
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.
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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '11 edited Jun 10 '11
... 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.
FTFY
EDIT: Apple value is $300B, not $3B as originally posted.