A look at how Macintosh accessories are prototyped and tested | Hacker News Reader

A look at how Macintosh accessories are prototyped and tested

medium.com

47 pointssteven25 comments

As the owner of many Macs and accessories over the years, my presumption is they maximize fatigue per square cm of desk space occupied.

Magical. Tzar. Lots of nlp in that article. Is this some kind of covert advertising offensive today? Or I am being too paranoid after reading "if you're not paranoid..." article?

Apple did release peripherals today, so that's likely.

no it's got some serious red flags in it, for one, I can't even imagine a real practical workspace being that immaculately clean and organized. Pure white on everything. no scuffs. Something really smells.

When you invite someone you clean up … I mean, what’s with the weird conspiracy mongering? That just makes no sense.

This is the most ordinary thing in the world, Apple just doesn’t normally do this, so it’s kinda surprising to see it from them.

Apple gives journalist access to their lab they don’t usually give anyone access to. Of fucking course they don’t have to pay anyone to write about that! Not a dime! They could probably get journalists line up for a chance of getting this access. Or they could charge an admission fee or something and still get people to write about it.

The assumption that Apple would have to pay anyone to write about their trip to the Apple lab is just mind-bogglingly out of this world. It’s so weird, I can hardly believe anyone would seriously consider holding such a view for any amount of time.

there's clean, and there's not used.

Though, I agree. I doubt they needed to pay anyone to do this.

A little over-exposure fixes all sorts of small defects in white. Also, I've seen clean labs at NASA and elsewhere that aren't dissimilar.

Getting a janitor to clean your office would actually make it stop smelling.

I've been inside the McLaren F1 factory and the assembly workspaces are spookily clean so the Apple stuff wouldn't surprise me

Content and advertising have always blended together in some form. Traditional editorial independence created a sort of firewall between the means of monetization and the product. Today it looks a little bit more blended. Note: I don't know the specifics of this article or of Medium's monetization.

This article discusses specific instances of Medium blending of press releases and articles. http://www.businessinsider.com/medium-pr-newswire-revisited-...

There is no need to think in conspiracies.

This is dead simple: If you give a journalist access to Apple’s labs they will write about it. If you are Apple PR you pick a journalist you know who shares your values and you are done. That’s it.

Apple is too big and too interesting a company and too secretive a company for that to not work. They don’t do this often so of course it works when they do it. Of course. And it’s timed with the release, because that’s just easy to do.

I mean, what do you expect? It’s enthusiast press reporting. It’s also super-fucking-interesting, no doubt about it, not even a tiny little bit, so that’s that.

No grand conspiracies, just Apple knowing how news work. If you give them access they will come. And you can pick who will be allowed to come. You don’t have to do anything, really. I don’t even think you can call this immoral or unethical.

The two other times, when new iPhones suffered from antenna issues and when iPhones (again) seemed to bend under pants induced stress, we saw apple (probably) sponsored content over Wired and others about how amazingly careful they were on testing iPhone antennas and how wonderfully amazing they were on making bend resistant iPhone bodies.

Please don't get me wrong, as I am a apple fan, but I must ask: Which Apple product is broken this time?

Maybe they can make some ergonomic input devices next? The magic mouse might as well be called hand cramp mouse.

Well, they really do have a great rate of success when it comes to purchases and marketing.

I thought the same thing you did. It'd be really cool if they marketed towards the more niche crowd. I love me some mechanical keyboards and trackball mice..

Too bad they didn't catch the fact that most if not all of the 2014 MBPr's have a terrible flaw in their screen coating [1]. (One of the worst things about it is that many people think it was their fault, when it wasn't.[2])

If they had a lid closing/opening robot in the mix, maybe they would have caught this.

[1] http://www.staingate.org/

[2] https://www.facebook.com/groups/607572909386595/

I've seen that going on with other people's laptops, and was wondering what it was all about. Thanks.

I am honestly amazed they allowed a Dell monitor to be photographed in the lab.

Lots of equipment makers only support Windows and the hardware may well be spec'd also.

I like how un-mac-like the space looks. It's kinda messy with raw cables and industrial machines laying about. It looks like a place where you get real work done - ironically designing stuff for the mac.

I thought the exact opposite. This is insanely clean and organized for a physical lab. Though I assume that's because they cleaned up in preparation for the press visit.

The pictures are blown out to make it seem more white\clean. The space likely looks a lot different in real life.

After the VW incident I do wonder how many laboratory style tests are actually useful. I can't help but think 'that's not how a human interacts with it!' when I see the robot arm doing its monotony thing for 5 million or so keypresses. Add in a reality distortion field and you can see how 'Hockey Puck' mice get to see the light of day.

Most of them. You can't simply test in an uncontrolled environment because then you introduce variables that distort your test results. Sometimes to the point of rendering them meaningless.

So you end up doing both: most of the testing under controlled laboratory conditions, and the rest in the "real world" with "real users."

Some nice insights but unfortunately some of the pictures are overexposed, presumably to get a "sciencey" look.

EDIT: language.

Totally tongue in cheek, but no mention of "Can we make this just different enough so that it works like a past product but won't be backwards compatible?" seems a little suspicious.

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