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Comment by Gualdrapo | Hacker News Reader

One would wish the 'unintended consequences' of his work he should be tackling now would include the irrepairability, planned obsolescence and negative environmental impact the Apple products he designed have had just because of the sake of "aesthetics" or "I want to be the next Dieter Rams", but whatever.

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Excluding their cables Apple products held up incredibly well for me. Maybe I’m just lucky but they outlasted every single Android phone and non Apple laptop. It would be interesting to see actual statistics about the average lifespan of each category.

The milled aluminum laptop chassis deserves most of the credit for the build quality of Macbooks. With it, Macbooks easily last 10 years. I've never seen a similar quality chassis in any Windows or Chromebook laptop. Consequently, they last ~3 years.

Amount of laptops I had to throw away because the chassis broke in 20 years: 0

Amount of devices (laptops, phones, watched) where I had to switch out a battery that died: 5-10

Same. Apple products have very long physical lifespans, generally receive software support far longer than competitors’, and typically have good resale value after several years of use.

The kind of work you speak of isn't going to get highlighted at opulent photo op events like "an interview with Stripe". Necessity is the mother of invention, so conservation and repairability advances are being made where they are most needed: poor countries, where people can't afford to just throw thing away because the vendor forcibly EOL'd it. [0]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/tech/639126/india-frankenstein-lapt...

Which decisions?

Ive’s thinness obsession played a huge part in Apple developing the designs that permitted the M series becoming the computers with the best thermal profiles with great compute.

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