This was a poor design choice on their part, not just the design department taking precedent over engineering and customer service. The designers are personally responsible, not just the structure
And yes, Apple probably know what they're doing. But they're not building failure into their cables, I can promise you that. They may be making a trade-off between the look and feel of the cable and its longevity, but that's very different from designing failure into the component.
Even the mere act of removing an Apple product from its packaging when first bought -- something that only happens once -- is extremely well thought out.
Why they couldn't do this - I don't know. But there must be a good technical reason for it - if I -a software person- can think of something like that, I'm sure they already thought of it too
(not saying it's not a good idea, my pile of broken cables is evidence of that!)
...or using a hot glue gun to 'decorate' a flexible, protective layer around the wire/connector.
But there must be a good technical reason for it - if I -a software person- can
think of something like that, I'm sure they already thought of it too.
Consider a hypothetical cable that's flexible, but fragile. Fold it in half, and it explodes violently, killing your customers and inspiring such a mighty class-action lawsuit that it leaves your company a smoking grease stain on the surface of the Earth; and leaves a five year stretch on your resume really hard to explain at future job interviews.
So you add reinforcing ribs to the cable. Now when your suicidal users try to bend the cable in half, the ribs mash into each other, preventing the minimum bend radius from being violated, and thus preserving shareholder value.
But your designers spit out their macchiatos in shock on seeing your brilliant solution, and start waving their smooth, untouched by actual work, hands around; demanding that you cover up the cable strain relief with a thin plastic tube.
Well, that's kinda tricky. You can use thick plastic, and prevent the cable from bending entirely, or you can use thin plastic, which will buckle over the unsupported areas when bent, since of course a concentric circle has a smaller circumference, and look really obvious and terrible. There's no way to cover it and still have it work.
Parent's point was that if we assume Apple is optimizing for showroom appearance, better to put the bling over the function bits and let the going break after a few months, instead of having only bling and letting the bling break and kill the device and user with it.
And I'm sure they did think of it and given the product they shipped, the idea was obviously rejected or delayed beyond the shipping of the current generation.
I'm not a huge Apple fanboy, (I'm in the minority at my organization using PC notebooks) but given how much Apple puts into designing the precise way in which users will experience and interact with their products, I can't imagine that they didn't evaluate many designs for this component.