The truth about Apple's engineering [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
No company is perfect. Apple makes mistakes. But in my perception they deal well with their mistakes and are not shy to admit.
Dell e.g. has 100 different models each year -- each representing a small sliver of the overall units sold. So if a problem surfaces with one, it doesn't matter as much to as many customers.
Plus, other companies don't push the envelope and move to new technologies as fast, or use as specialized parts. They just throw some off the shelve components as is in their branded box -- with Apple half of the box components is custom.
So Dell does a much better job at mitigating failure. Sounds like Apple has a lot to learn here.
> Plus, other companies don't push the envelope and move to new technologies as fast, or use as specialized parts. They just throw some off the shelve components as is in their branded box -- with Apple half of the box components is custom.
Specialized parts are a liability, not an asset. How do you replace a broken component that only Apple makes, which they refuse to sell separately?
Or, you know, it's a tradeoff for a more streamline product line, that's less confusing to users, and can pack more for more general cases.
>Specialized parts are a liability, not an asset. How do you replace a broken component that only Apple makes, which they refuse to sell separately?
It's almost as if that is also a tradeoff, between having unique features that others don't and more control of integration, vs the ability to replace commodity parts.
What part of the idea of tradeoffs don't people understand?
As for whether people agree to said tradeoffs, well, being the #1 company is units and profit in the world, means people want what's on offer.
P.S. Not to mention that in fact in the past Apple was even more exclusive with their parts (e.g. PowerPC vs Intel).
My selection bias, for example, is the opposite.
I had my iMac 27” repaired three times in 2013 for a SINGLE faulty pixel. Under Apple Care (which was less than 10% the cost of the machine when I bought it), a technician was coming to my place with a new screen and replace it on the spot. Amazing service. Unfortunately I kept on getting a screen replacement with faulty pixel (apparently not so rare in such a big screen, plus the replacement part was probably reconditioned) so the technician kept on coming from 200km away with a new part. In the end it took three shots to get the replacement right. I’ve read how much each intervention cost to Apple in the repair bills he technician would leave to me as a receipt: 700$ each (560€). Never paid a dime. Make it times three and you’ll find out Apple spent almost as much as the cost of my iMac to get the repair right.
In 2016 my ex-gf the screen of my iPhone by dropping a mignon of vodka on it from the kitchen shelf. Screen was destroyed completely and I feared for the repairability of the phone itself. I brought it the Apple Store in Berlin for a regular paid screen or phone replacement. The Genius stopped me as I was telling him what happened and inspected the phone: “do you see this half-moon thing inside the front camera? It’s an hardware problem and we have a replacement program for that. Your phone is eligible for free replcement”. 10 minutes after I walked out with a brand new (reconditioned) iPhone, as If I chose the full replacement, without forking out a single dime. I told about the replacement program to all my friend with an iPhone 6s or 6. I think at least three of them got a new phone out of an old one, no matter how used or fucked up their phone was. One of them had dropped it and the phone screen was barely holdin together as well.
Does this make me an Apple shill?
Most of those amazing services story are from US, few from EU.
repair: 700$ subsidized cost by Apple: 700$ Grand Total: 0
The consumer gets complete transparency and has a proof of work in his hands. Nothing to do with an Apple decision. And even if it were, how would that be bad?
Of course, things would be different if they actually itemized what they bought, from where, at what price, what the technician's wage was, and so on.
I think a lot of people by Apple products because when their device fails they can take it back to a store run by the same people who manufactured and sold it to them to get it serviced.
Apple screwed me. My 2007 Macbook Pro died due to issues with the nVidia graphics chip desoldering itself. Again they went down the deny forever route, another law suit, and finally they quietly posted a recall notice on their web site that I missed the deadline on by a few days.
I just think it's crazy how much public subsidy went into creating Apple, and yet they're still seeking tax havens like Ireland
socialize the losses, privatize the profits i guess
all the stuff you're supposed to pay taxes for...
That's the point he makes in this video. People pay $2k+ and still have to pay for repairs of greatly designed and poorly engineered products. Seriously, that's a commonly known practice called rip-off. I simply cannot understand people's minds defending Apple's engineering. It's an incomprehensible cognitive dissonance.
Apple designs great products, sure, why not. But when engineering decisions have to take a seat behind design decisions? The fanboys see just the great product and irrationally defend any criticism on bad engineering. Sorry, that's just silly.
When products are super-designed to the extent that excellent (thus very expensive) engineering is required to make them last longer, Apple does an excellent job keeping the engineering budget low. While keeping the design strategy constant: thinner, lighter, finer.
At some point Apple hits a breaking point (those in the videos). Their handling of the problems is highly questionable, because they chose design over good and lasting engineering and refuse to take the responsibility. Apple products are throw-away products nowadays. Yet they refuse to admit even that (they built even a recycling robot for their devices!).
In fact, many get an ok repair for a trivial problem being charged a fortune, while just as many simply dont, because apple stores have very strict rules what they're allowed to repair and what not.
my wife had a sim card stuck in her iphone 4 or 5 once. they took the phone, returned after 20 minutes and said they couldnt fix it and offered a ridiculous discount if she'd buy a new iphone instead. she declined and we took it to some shady local repair shop. the guy took it into his back office and returned after 5 minutes with the card removed. charged 25 bucks.
and i get why people compare apple to religion. that fucking apple store was built like a temple, you had these superior 'geniuses' running around, an overly fancy waiting area. i see how it gives apple fans their fix making them willing to pay anything. it was the first and only time i set foot in one of their stores.
And also because of the whole, first such device of its class available, Android took a year to even emerge, first to create a huge app market that's not crap (like Windows mobile of yore, Palm, and Java ME apps), and so on things...
L.R. is probably especially disappointed by the luxury price. But apart from that, I'm sure all other manufacturers are as bad as Apple to deal with failures. Actually, I'd bet a dollar that most of them don't give a crap.. (the nvidia gpu problem affected everybody, and they all refused to repair most machines). Their machine are either covered a bit, and a replaced quickly or people just fall off warranty and will by another packardbell~ machine on deal at the mall.
We'd have to see how the pro lines are handled (I never had a pro hp and dell machine so I cant say, but it's possible they're quicker to repair it.[1]
On the other hand, Apple has the magic touch... and it's not all fluff, it's only partly fluff, and still above the magic threshold, that's why people still root for them.
The vertical integration is felt when you use it, it's so much leaner than most windows machines. They give you a little piece of tech art, and not some plastic gizmo. They catter to a lot of details other manufacturers don't. Kinda like mercedes vs tesla. Lots of people complained about bits of comfort that are surely not important, but this is the extra mile that people are paying for.
I knew a guy who was anti apple (walled garden, proprietary etc), he touched an ipad and grunted, asked him why he was angry, "it's so much better than everything else" he said sadly. I was playing with motorola flagship android 3 tablet that was released quite some time after the ipad IIRC, yet everything lagged even for basic camera usage.. Users notice that quickly.
[1] also, having dismantled a few printers, I've seen how pro lines have way more thoughtful design. It's paradoxically a much cheaper product to make, because it needs fewer parts and are so easy to fix.
Well, there's always the relative amount of value they get out of Apple's products vs the amount of how much Apple screwed them.
The balance can still come out positive. I've used Windows for 25+ years, Macs for 15 or so, Linux for 18-19 years -- and still use those things everyday (Linux professionally and for home use).
The productivity I get out of an OS X box trumps having to pay $300 to have some faulty part replaced that Apple should have replaced themselves anyway for a $3.5K laptop (which has happened to me a couple of times in the 15+ years I've used Apple laptops).
That said, I do both programming in UNIX like environment, and video editing, and write music (as a hobby) with DAWs and such. Someone who just needs a terminal or Word or just Premiere etc might be able to get by with another platform.
And of course I've been burned by IBM BS hard disks (and HDs from many other manufactures), AMD CPUs, and tons of other brands and third party products.
Did you watch the video in full? The examples of Apple screwing its customers are numerous.
Granted, computers have changed a lot in the intervening years, but it still makes me sad to compare what Apple was to what Apple became.
If you want upgradeable hardware then buy the Mac Pro since it was the model designed for that purpose. Otherwise you need to understand that upgradeability comes at the expense of thickness and weight since those clips/sockets take up valuable space. And people that want upgradeability simply aren't Apple's market. Go buy something else instead.
You might be able to purchase a replacement SSD for someone like OWC or upgrade to the higher spec Apple sourced GPU if you bought a low end model but Apple is not expecting you to do this.
You can update the RAM or use external thunderbolt peripherals but that’s a long way from the older “cheese grater” Mac Pro.
If I was to guess I would say that this deliberate removal of upgrade path is actually about design for reliability.
If you remove the upgrades you remove the chance of static damage or use of faulty parts. Also the case is easier to manufacture and more robust because it’s less complex.
I think that’s the real reason the SSD is now soldered in the current MacBook Pro but it’s just a guess.
The Mac etc is what Jobs wanted. A sealed beige box that only did what Jobs envisioned it to do (produce a GUI and look good).
And yet variants of the Apple II kept outselling the Mac all the way until the II was unceremoniously dropped.
He was also responsible for NeXT. That company was about trying to make the power of Unix more mainstream.
Modern Macs are far more decended for NeXT computers than they are from the original baige box >= system 9 Macs.
This in much the same way as Linux use used just about everywhere these days, hiding behind a myriad of custom UIs.
When Jobs founded NeXT in 1985 there was no standard GUI layer for Unix. What you’re referring to as the “base layer” was all of Unix.
X was only started in 1984 I believe and Sun also has a competing incompatible alternative at the time too.
It wasn’t at all clear that the X Windowing System would win out as the dominant implementation.
Although that was mostly due to price, not expandability (the Mac II with all its slots and RAM expandability was introduced 6 years before the Apple IIe was discontinued)
That was mostly school purchases.
So far apple's engineering mistakes haven't annoyed me that much. The fragility of the butterfly keyboard is probably their worse one yet. Makes me scared of buying a new macbook at this point.
The market has fever, and is going full retard.
I hope my iPhone lasts for many years, because I don't like Android... :(
I needed a new laptop with more RAM/storage/CPU but I was utterly disappointed in their 2017 MBP lineup. Switched to Linux on the X1 Carbon and I haven't looked back since. I do miss things like the touchpad, Preview app and other Mac-only software, but not enough to put up with their product flaws.
I and my family have bought Apple products since I was a kid (over 30 years). I have always found their hardware to be extremely reliable and to age well. Yeah I pay a premium but only need to make those purchases every 3-4 years. Laptops, desktops, phones etc.
When my laptop board had a problem, it was already well out of warranty. The Apple store tech still took the time to run diagnostics on it tried to find a way to get it covered. But beer counts as water damage so that was the end of it.
I will complain that the price for a replacement board ($1200) was a bit steep for a machine from mid 2013 but I know it would have been well tested and reliable. I ended up buying a replacement board from OWC for about $700 that’s worked fine.
Rossman constantly rants about Apple hardware for years. Take what he says with a huge grain of salt. Especially when he’s paying someone else to say them.
Also watch Linus' take on Rossman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-NU7yOSElE&feature=youtu.be...
That's him talking, there's daily live streams of him ranting and repairing that make that obvious. I do know he has a history in audio engineering and has multiple mics he uses for different situations, it seems to me the differences I hear in the videos below come down to capture/processing differences in his live capture and edited setup:
Livestream from this month https://youtu.be/WZK_rHzdTaA?t=85
"The Truth About Apple's Engineering" https://youtu.be/AUaJ8pDlxi8
OS preferences aside, I much prefer the ruggedized plastics and exposed seams of the ThinkPad to the metal unibodies. I'm a function-should-define-form kind of guy, and am deeply skeptical of aesthetics-first designs.
As far as anecdotal evidence goes, I have talked to various sysadmins who all tell me that Macbooks on their networks have very high failure rates. They realistically cannot plan on a Macbook surviving 2-3 years. And when they do fail, they fail in unexpected, catastrophic ways.
My only issue was a faulty power supply on my 1,1 MacBook Pro and it was fixed, for free, after the warrantee had expired.
But that’s anecdotes for you, not worth very much compared to actual stats.
I’ve heard more than a few stories from people about how they’ve repaired their own Thinkpad. When I hear them though I just think, your laptop failed and you had to repair it yourself.
My current MacBook Pro is a late 2013 model, it seems as good as the day I bought it bar a few scratches.
I don’t want my laptop be easily repairable, I _need_ it have a bathtub graph of reliability and not go wrong in the first place.
As a counter point I know two people with emoji bar MacBook Pros and both had issues with dust in the keyboard so I haven’t upgraded.
They could have gotten the laptops repaired via Lenovo. There was nothing stopping them from getting that done within the warranty period. Exactly like Apple.
> I _need_ it have a bathtub graph of reliability and not go wrong in the first place
Cool. That's you. But electronics do go bad, including Apple devices. And sometimes people's requirements and abilities change, and they need larger storage. The sensible solution to that is not "buy whole new device".
Nethertheless, the new machine feels a LOT lighter and, as such, I forgive the engineering team who had their focus elsewhere.
I just wish they’d redesign the speakers so that you can’t tell when tiny skin flakes fall in the microscopic holes (which you can’t get out .. at all). It’s very obvious when a hole is missing due to the pattern of the holes.
Yes some people get given huge quotes for repairs from Apple but the details matter. If you hear a horror story, ask whether there was AppleCare, ask whether the item was purchased from Apple either online at apple.com or at an Apple store, and ask whether there was accidental damage.
Little known thing I was told by a tech at an Apple store, that I doubt Rossmann would tell you: most Apple repairs have a per-model price cap for parts costs for repairs when repaired by Apple. Like around $400 max for a MBP, no matter how much hardware is being repaired at one time. This would not include repairs due to negligence, obviously (water, dropping, run over by a car, etc.) So third party shops can't compete... I guess Rossmann can't touch this kind of low price himself, as he would have to pay the full repair tech price for genuine Apple parts if he wants to use them, and this probably pisses him off no end. Labor charges do not have a cap, but Apple repair works quickly so these charges are low. And Apple treats you even better if you have AppleCare.
But, to get the best care from Apple, there are a few practices to follow:
1) Always buy direct from an Apple store -- this gives the techs there more leeway in their systems with what they can do for you, presumably because they have a full lifetime record of where exactly the hardware came from and what parts exactly it was made with (e.g. LG versus Samsung display, etc.), unlike when you buy from, say, Best Buy.
2) Avoid third party repairs, as afterward your device is basically tainted as far as Apple is concerned, and rightly so, because who knows WTF was done to it.
3) Buy AppleCare. You won't always use it, but the times you do, it often more than pays for itself and all the other AppleCare SKUs you paid for.
4) Get repairs done early. Apple stops repairing things after 5 years (even if you're willing to pay) in some states, and after 7 years in other states. Not sure if this difference is because of legal requirements, or proximity to Apple repair depots. In California, which has a repair depot, the limit is 7 years.
No company is perfect. You can look back into the past and find a long line of products that needed improvement. You can even look at current products and see that there are things that need improvement. That's just how things work.
Some of this stuff is pretty bad. They could of fixed some issues with a few more pennies into putting in better capacitors, but they don't do it for future manufacturing runs? A lot of the issues seem to have a theme of power management issues for the most part.
Yes but that doesn't rule out the data and chain of delivery being better for store-sold devices.
I keep trying the latest Lenovo’s and they still have garbage touch pads.
Apple is great at something--just not quite what they portray.
Starting with the touchbar laptops, he noticed a decline in longevity. He had his clients that saw these problems, sell off all post-2015 MacBook Pros and buy only good refurb/used 2015 or so, MBP. No problems after he did that.
That may be part of what he's seeing.
they BBQ it to a point where it's only going to last 2-6 months and then fail again