Design isn't just about aesthetics, its about balancing aesthetics AND functionality. Apple's designers certainly knows this.
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
Exactly, I've broken two of the cables so far and they are just bad. Period. Then, someone gave me a different, much more robust, cable, and I thought: "oh ok they realized their flaw, finally they improved their power coords". - Now I look at the image on the reddit post (http://i.imgur.com/yAywo.jpg) and realize the cables I've broke are the new ones, and the good robust ones are from 2007. Funny. Well Apple is usually top notch with these kind of things, and I don't believe the industrial design department didn't know about strain relief rings (that's their job FYI). So I'd go with the theory of planned obsolesce on these ones. Apple certainly is capable of pulling shit like this.
It doesn't have to be "planned obsolescence" which suggests an intent to get users to buy replacements. It could be that the trade-off just came out that way. I mean, I don't think they designed failure into the component so much as they deemed a higher than you'd want failure rate OK given the user experience they were chasing.
You really think so? I mean these are cables, there's no secret how to make them and they've been making them for decades, so they'll probably know what they are doing. There's no user experience on cables. It doesn't seem so far fetched to me.
I think it’s completely wrong to say there’s no user experience on cables. What about the fact that my sofa has to be a full four inches away from the wall because of the strain relief on the cord of the lamp I need to plug in behind it? There is no reason the cord actually needs that four inches of horizontal space—it’s just poor, thoughtless design that results in a poor user experience. Whoever designed the lamp should have put as much thought into the cord as they did into the rest of it, but instead it’s just an afterthought. To my way of thinking at least Apple has the guts to experiment with a different approach and see what happens instead of just applying the same good-enough solution everyone else mindlessly does.
Your comment "There's no user experience on cables" makes it clear that you really don't understand Apple. Users experience the entirety of Apple products and there isn't a user-facing component that doesn't get serious design scrutiny.
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.
> Users experience the entirety of Apple products and there isn't a user-facing component that doesn't get serious design scrutiny.
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.
There is no reason they couldn't take a flimsy piece of a plastic tube and cover the ugly-but-functional rings on the old style adapters. That way the rings retain functionality, and they are covered, everyone is happy. When the tube breaks, it just exposes the "ugly" rings, but the cable won't actually break.
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
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.
The rings have to be exposed, that's how they work.
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.
But the blingy solution breaks anyway, and is also ugly, beyond being dangerous.
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.
"f I -a software person- can think of something like that, I'm sure they already thought of it too"
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.
I think if it was any harder than "flimsy" (on a scale from flimsy to unbendable), the stress angle would happen at the end of the stress relief part, which would be the same thing as not having the stress relief part. So, I think there needs to be some compromise that leverages the durability of the old model, but the design of the new model (I think it's better to have a more functionally-durable product, than design-durable product)
And it's not just about balancing aesthetics and functionality for every component of the system, but about the experience of and interaction with the entire system. So trade-offs aren't always obvious within the specific component that might seem to lean too far in one direction.
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