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.
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?
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.
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.
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.