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.
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.
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.