ascii

Sometimes I wish today's Macs were more whimsical and hand-made than corporate and slick.

anton zuykov said:

ascii said:

In order to make things thinner Apple do things like gluing components together. Would it be possible (or even interesting to Apple's designers) to design a new set of fasteners/adhesives that enable things to come apart easily without adding additional thickness?

Isn't it counter to the idea of glueing things together to provide contact and rigidity with minimal amount of material used? 

That is why the best driving and handling cars use ADHESIVES, instead of just welding or fasteners that connect different parts of the chassis together into more or less rigid structure..  

I'm not sure what the best current ways are of doing it, maybe adhesives from the car racing industry would work. I was thinking maybe everything is held together by special magnets, but then you apply some kind of electrical current to it, and all the magnets immediately demagnetise and you are left with a pile of 1000 parts ready to recycle. Something like that. Or more generally whatever Apple's excellent designers can imagine.

In order to make things thinner Apple do things like gluing components together. Would it be possible (or even interesting to Apple's designers) to design a new set of fasteners/adhesives that enable things to come apart easily without adding additional thickness?

I think the Mac and iDevices need to stay separate because they have separate futures. The iDevices will head in the direction of portability and AR, and the Mac will head in the direction of a stationary device using VR. Where everything will merge is in the cloud not the OS. As Tim said, each device will continue to have an OS custom designed for its form factor.

Microsoft beat Apple once, not by making a better computer, but by standardising everyone else on one OS and therefore making Apple non-standard. There is potential for them to pull the same trick again by standardising everyone on the same cloud. So anything Apple can do to encourage some kind of open cloud is good from a strategic point of view.