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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

So I guess bike-shedding has now become mainstream, seeing that the CEO of the second-largest company on the planet has mentioned the color of one of his company's products as a thing to be amazed about.

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Tim simply tweeted about a relatively minor aspect of iPhone production, which isn't what "bike-shedding"[1] means.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

Well, if it really is that hard to produce a green ink that doesn't involve harsh materials, or if Apple is spending extra to use such an ink over the cheaper nastier inks, then it's notable and something worth bragging about and putting on the tin.

Does this new color cost extra? Or are they subsidizing a higher cost across all sales?

No, they charge the same price for all colors. Frankly the only products I’ve seen with different prices for different colors is autos.

There were also black MacBooks.

In some years they do differentiate so some color is only available on the expensive models.

I think the RED editions were slightly more expensive, if i remember correctly.

One person's "bike-shedding" is another person's "actually giving a shit instead of participating in a lowest-possible-quality race-to-the-bottom".

a company known for making billions out of the stylishness of their products, it's bikeshedding, really are you sure?

Bike-shedding is effort wasted on things that are irrelevant, like if an electronics startup paid this much attention to color. In Apple’s position as a fashion company as much as a tech company, and at Apple’s scale, they can and do invest hundreds of people’s time in making sure that the paint jobs are as good as they can get them.

I was still looking at Apple as mainly a tech company, the “style” thing I reguarded as a distraction. We’ll see if they’re be able to keep their current valuation by ignoring their tech roots. And yes, I am bitter because just the other day an iPhone of our family experienced the infamous “white screen of death” for not having sufficient storage space left (it happened on a restart), the phone is one-year old. I hadn’t seen such low quality in a mass-produced OS since the days of Windows Me and Windows 2000.

> Windows 2000

I urge you to reconsider.

That was the last OS I used for which the acceptable troubleshooting solution was to “format the disk”. 20 years later and I came to the same point with this iPhone 7, thought that we had left that behind us. And I can’t even do it myself, I have to wait for the local Apple service store to open, which it won’t until January 6th (the phone broke down on December 27th). But hurray! for the new color, I guess.

The original bike shed was at the gate of a nuclear power plant.

In the anecdote, the “board” spent its time debating what color to paint it because that was something they understood, as opposed to safety coolant system engineering, for instance.

Given the original anecdote, perhaps it’s less that the thing is not relevant, more that (a) it’s not the critical thing to worry about, and (b) it’s getting discussed because that’s all the decision makers are familiar enough with to debate.

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