Apple confirms some iPad Pros ship slightly bent, but says it’s normal
theverge.com
theverge.com
Still sucks, and I believe it's reasonable that that the iPad pro could still be profitable even with a high reject rate, but not profitable enough.
That's a bold claim. Can you back up it?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWRnDVcfA3g [2]: https://www.squaretrade.com/press/SquareTrade-Labs-iPhone-7-...
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_moment_of_area#Rectangl...
If anything, we should be congratulating those involved for their ability to bring organic design inspiration to the highest echelons of computing; and affordably too!
Considering that iPads are machined to very high tolerances, they are extremely flat as built, at least early in the process. Also many of the later steps in construction are highly automated, relying on custom fixtures that would tend to detect an out-of-tolerance part.
That suggests that bends in the final product happened late somehow, possibly from mishandling in shipping and final packaging. Depending on your quality inspections at that point, a certain number of out-of-tolerance devices might make it though (because early on all iPads are checked individually, but maybe not re-checked as late as in packaging.)
Apple is also known for holding its manufacturers to high quality bars that sometimes are often difficult to meet. So they are under pressure to both meet the agreed upon standards, but also ship tremendous quantities of product without high amounts of rework, the costs of which they, the manufacturer, would have to eat, not Apple.
According to Apple:
>The bend is the result of a cooling process involving the iPad Pro’s metal and plastic components during manufacturing, according to Apple
Apple is ultimately responsible. They designed this device. Their materials people knew how flexible this chassis would be. I find it highly unlikely they didn't know it would bend until manufacturing ramped up.
I think it's unfair to blame their QA team, either, as some of the issues should have been obvious without QA. Like the recent 6-core macbook pros that didn't receive a thermal capacity or VRM upgrade in response to using a CPU with a higher power usage.
It's just not really a thing Apple does. They focus their engineering on the parts you physically see & touch, not the ones you don't. They just deal with that later with repair & replacements programs or crude workarounds.
The reliability thing is true.
The narrative that it's reliable & well-engineered doesn't at all match the fact that nearly every single phone they've made in the last few years needed a special warranty program for a common issue. And that's ignoring things like antennae-gate & bend-gate, too, these are issues that Apple themselves are considering common enough to necessitate a special program to handle.
Perhaps there are tons of people willing to fix Apple products because tons of people need their Apple products repaired? That market doesn't really exist if the devices were "the most reliable things ever made"
Like it's great that Apple will at least do these programs for the issues, but they also don't have a strong reliability record here, either.
There's a story I heard from a former coworker who worked at Apple QA during the time of the first iMac (take it as you will). The infamous puck mouse had hundreds of reports filed against it. They were vetoed, from above.
So I would probably agree that Apple has a QA team, and that the company knew about this decided to ship anyway.
I disagree that any of this is just "in the recent years", though. The Titanium PowerBooks fell apart easily. The 2013 Mac Pro has no internal expansion, but it's far from the first Mac to suffer from that. For any problem I hear about Apple's hardware today, I can think of other examples of it happening years or decades ago. Lacking a real escape key seems odd on the new MacBook Pro, but the (otherwise cute if big) Apple Adjustable Keyboard had the same problem (and not even the TouchBar as an excuse). And so on.
Doesn't bode well for them holding up in, e.g., a backpack or briefcase that ends up being sat or stepped on. Or even just being shoved into an overhead compartment or beneath a seat.
Why would you want to?
I just don't understand the way people treat their tech devices these days. I see millennials putting iPhones in their back pockets and then wondering why the screen shatters when they sit down. You are putting a piece of glass against your butt and sitting on it!
I remember when flip phones, digital cameras, floppy disks, and even Atari 2600's were handled with care. Because they would break, and were expensive to replace!
Do people act this way because stuff doesn't cost enough? Because paying for stuff with credit makes it seem like it's free, and therefore not worth anything? Or has the magic just gone out of tech for the average butt-storing phone user?
It sounds like Apple has sacrificed too much in the name of being thin, and really botched their structural integrity.
Devices exist to be used, not kept in a museum.
A friend of mine had her horse stand on her phone. Carried on working for the next few days until it needed recharging, found some mud in the connector, cleaned that out, lasted another few years.
The nokia 3210 had a lot going for it.
I don't understand the link between price and resistance to damage.
If I buy a Faberge egg for $4 million, I don't expect that I can sit on it without causing damage.
A friend recently spent $20k on new windows for his house. I don't expect them to be baseball-resistant because they cost more than his previous, cheaper, windows.
It sounds like Apple has sacrificed too much in the name of being thin
I don't disagree with this. I'd rather have a little thicker laptop in exchange for a better keyboard. But because my laptop cost $4k, I don't expect that I can treat it anyway I like. It's a computer, not a rock.
People expect tablets to be somewhat durable, and they expect the best tablets to be especially so.
Then why is there a massive market for protective cases and screen protectors?
I'm not so sure, though, between the cult of Apple and consumers' well attested love of device thinness.
Why would I "upgrade" to a device that can't?
Cars cost 5-20x+ the price, not to mention fuel and insurance, and people get into car accidents all the time. Cost has nothing to do with it. People aren't robots, they make mistakes.
Good mass-market design is life-proof where possible. People will drop their phones, they will forget their phones in the pockets of the pants they just put in the laundry. Designers can either design for humanity as it is, or humanity as they wish it was, and the latter do all of us a disservice.
I'm not going to buy an expensive portable piece of electronics that can't survive being in a backpack. I do own expensive fragile things, but they stay on a shelf in my apartment. No way in hell would I bring them out into the world with me every day where they can be easily destroyed.
This isn't "millennials'" fault for being less careful with things; it's a simple failure of industrial engineering. And no, back in your day, people weren't more careful.
What on earth are you talking about? The meme of indestructible nokia phones came about because people treated flip phones terribly. People used to toss phones & cameras into bags all the time back in the day. And unsurprisingly they still do.
If anything younger generations are better at this than older ones as they are used to tech being fragile instead of the indestructible tanks of a decade+ ago.
Amazingly, there were other phones on the market besides low-end Nokias.
Any reason we shouldn't assume this is fake too?
> Apple has confirmed to The Verge that some of its 2018 iPad Pros are shipping with a very slight bend in the aluminum chassis.
Seriously though, they should add a structural frame even if it means making it slightly heavier and thicker. This is just NOT premium stuff.
Speaking of which, what happens when two kids are fighting over the tablet? They grab on, and...
I don't have kids. I've observed my friends' kids interacting, upon occasion. So, I am wondering about this.
Do cases provide enough added rigidity to these thinner models?
In the end, though, there’s little you can do to make a device that thin very strong against bending forces (steel tubes around the edge would make it harder to bend the entire thing, but would use a lot of the volume, add weight, and wouldn’t help much against forces applied to the center of the display)
I can see the lure of thinness and its associated decrease in weight, though. If you compare today’s iPad to previous generations, the weight difference feels enormous.
So it's a manufacturing defect. Calling it a "side effect" instead is just semantics.
Or, perhaps this is just damage control because it is fucking embarrassing on a "premium" device.
This is maybe the most bone-headed, indefensible response I've ever seen from them.
I get that these are really large, thin devices. I get that they are totally different than the iPad 2 someone might wrap in a case and give to a kid. But saying it is a feature, not a bug, is ridiculous.
Their response has immediately made this twice as bad from a PR perspective. Unbelievable.
But that said - it's replacing a MacBook Pro that had to be fixed by Apple 6 times, each time for a faulty SATA flex cable that failed every two months so it couldn't boot from the internal drive. So far the X1 Yoga hasn't had that kind of problem.
This is a pattern.
Apple must be working something really big for years with a lot of engineers shifted to that secret project. I am seeing lots of products not getting enough attention for the last 2-3 years.
- Safari is moving really slowly and not improved a lot except security-wise.
- iPhones haven't gotten a revolutionary feature for a long time.
- MacOS did not get significantly better comparing to last 3-4 years.
- Siri looks like a paused project.
and so on..