Putting aside all the business model stuff, man, Apple makes some seriously pretty hardware. The packing, the cables and connectors, the wrapped motherboard - the whole thing is gorgeous.
Teardown: https://dbrand.com/shop/limited-edition/teardown
X-Ray: https://dbrand.com/shop/limited-edition/x-ray
I've got one on my S24 Ultra and love it. Personally, I prefer to have the decal directly attached to the back of the phone with a clear case on top.
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/make-the-back-of-your-iphone-...
Source: Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography.
(Sadly, Sir Ive's obsession with thinness and minimalism did not mesh with actual ergonomics equally well.)
And, goddamn, it doubled the effort for finishing a jacket.
To be fair, at that point the replacement rate was so fast that I can see why it didn't make sense to spend time making it repairable. The issue is they kept that philosophy for way too long into models that would last quite a while and need repairs in the long term.
Now they have started fixing their act (well under a lot of both public pressure and legal pressure from EU) and the latest model doesn't just look pretty, they start to make sense from an (dis)assembly/fixing point of view.
A least now they have figured out that they can put the port on a separate board so you don't have to literally disassemble the whole phone just to replace the port (that tend to fail under heavy use, especially the models based on the 6 that needed a lot of juicing).
Looks are deceiving, don't be fooled, just because it looks neat doesn't mean it is.
In the same way, artillery shells and landmines are highly regular and neat in their internal structure which affords them the ability to bear immense loads and release large amounts of energy. But it's never about the ease of disarming them, it's exactly about the opposite, about making safe disassembly hard or impossible.
Here are the firsts 2 definition of the word neat: - free from dirt and disorder: habitually clean and orderly - marked by skill or ingenuity
And modern iPhone's internals do not really feel like that at all. They are interesting to look at, but the whole design is clearly made to cut costs and meet some arbitrary requirements. There is not much neat about it.
There are dozens of screws, with many different imprints (for some reason) with all kinds of different lengths (when it surely wouldn't be complicated to figure out a cleaner approach). They overuse fragile ribbon cable, often putting them in place where they can get easily damaged during disassembly/repair. They still haven't figured out a neat way to make batteries not move without relying on stupid glue stripes that always break. There are plenty of small pieces that need to be screwed down when it feels that they could be part of larger assemblies or have a better/easier way to install.
Now don't get me wrong, the iPhone is a very technologically advanced device, with extreme miniaturisation of some things that are just incredible.
But it's not something that you could call neat. It's not a perfectly symmetrical engine with shinny tubes well laid out that is just as beautiful to look at as it is powerful.
It is just a pragmatic design to accomplish a form factor at a specific price point, the rest are just side effects or nice to have. And in a way it makes sense they have this approach, because they change the thing every year, never committing to a particular form factor or set of functionalities (which is the whole point to entice replacement) but that doesn't come with neatness.
As for reliability, iPhones are not any more reliable than equally priced Android smartphones. It seems that way because Apple has higher exigence and thus better-quality control for parts and also will often swap phones for factory problems easily (under warranty or not).
But they are not any more reliable when you put price/costs into the equation, most people make the mistake of comparing a cheapo 200/300 dollars Android with a minimum 500 dollars iPhone (more likely minimum 800), it would be sad if they couldn't figure out to make them more dependable at 2-3 times the price. Hilariously, the way they do it is with forgoing neatness and adding a lot of annoyingly small parts at ingress points and using very strong glues. Not neat at all.
How is that considered “gorgeous”?
What about the last 15 years of MacBook models that never claimed to be waterproof but still require heat guns and risk of catastrophic immolation to extend their life beyond 3-5 years?
But for some reason the internals of an iPhone 16 are still “gorgeous”…and merit a stage appearance and endorsement from Mother Earth herself!
If that's what you are looking for just get one. It may come even with spyware preinstalled. Then try it underwater, should be fine if it's in specs, right?
I just switched from Android for security primarily. The rest is a bonus. The problem is smartphone becomes a single point of failure. If it gets stolen I can't even work without authentication apps.
A commenter complains that Apple uses a lot of adhesive inside their phones so they are not really a thing of beauty. Someone replies that it's because of water proofing. Another person points out that, no, actually plenty of companies make waterproof phones without using glue so Apple could. You tell them to go buy other another phone.
How is it in any way related to beautiful design, waterproofing and glue use in manufacturing?
Then I started to buy waterproof phones, and my life was noticeably better. those still die from water damage, just slower. Every time you drop the phone and the case pops off, the water protection gets a bit worse, and after a year or so, the rubber gets hard, especially in winter, and its no longer waterproof. I wouldn't dare to put it in actual water.
Now I have had my smartphone for many years, and I had the previous one for many years. So yes please, glue it together, glue it shut, at least if you're serious about water damage and dust ingress
Its cheaper to make something pretty, than good. Humans use this shortcut and have a hard time resisting it.
My experience opening an iphone box, giving all my personal information, and seeing the home screen of my work iphone was fun and exciting.
Then within a few minutes, the swiping/changing between apps was noticably slow, the podcast app had a bug in it, and it kept asking me to 'sign in' by typing my password. The illusion had broke, and its not like I was going to return the phone now.
The slowness might be explained by the background tasks of restoring previously installed software and data. I have an iPhone 13 Pro with tons of apps and it’s still pretty snappy. But those specific bugs do pop up from time to time. Especially since they release new phones concurrently with new operating systems.
What is the point of this? Does anyone enjoy this? Everyone knows what is being said based on the context?
>The slowness might be explained by the background tasks of restoring previously installed software and data.
No, it never went away. I had been coming from a Pixel, so I wasnt really forgiving about bugs, limited features, or slow animations. It felt like I bought an old phone. That + the otterbox really dispelled the illusion.
> its not like I was going to return the phone now.
Sounds like you're your own worst enemy here. You're well within the return window and could easily do so and replace it with, uh... well... let us know which mobile OS has more polish than iOS, I guess.
They're not repairable, they're quite restrictive, and they're perhaps too simple. But definitely high quality.
Did it say "we care about quality so much that we've very carefully designed and built these, and tested them extensively to ensure that our customers have a quality experience"? No, it did not.
Not only that but there has been a refusal to acknowledge almost every single critical flaw in Apple's products and when they're finally pressured to do so, they brush it off.
This is just more culty bs.