SEJU

cgWerks said:

No, an industrial designer is more like an architect or a UI designer, as opposed to an engineer or graphic designer. It is a blended discipline where they have a good handle on both (or multiple) disciplines, but don't necessarily go as deep as the specialist. But, this experience allows them to better blend the disciplines and they *should* be going to those experts whenever they run into something that goes beyond their depth.

Precicely, that is what I was referring to.

rogifan_new said:.

Anyone who think industrial designers are just stylists don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Well said. By the way “style” is a word which should not be used neither in the context of architecture nor of industrial design!

Marvin said:

lmac said:

Apple has kept this quiet remarkably well. I won't buy a laptop with the butterfly keyboard because I've seen so many problems with them. Apple needs to fix this! Take into account that by the time it fails a third time, it's usually beyond even the extended AppleCare, and that renders a repair cost prohibitive. And this recommended fix rarely does the trick: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205662

The keyboard doesn't really need to be permanently attached to the laptop. They could just have a solid, flat, recessed area with no key holes and have a keyboard overlay attach magnetically. This would allow people to easily switch keyboards to a different nationality or different input device like a drawing or touch input. It may need the keys to be recessed when the lid closes but this is ok to do with an overlay as it would be inexpensive to replace and can be done with a retail purchase. This would also make the middle of the laptop waterproof. It would be possible to replace the keyboard with a flat display panel, even if it was from a 3rd party, which wouldn't be much different from typing on an iPad.

I mean seriously ... at this point just put a display where the keyboard is and some actuators below to make it vibrate when you touch a key on it and have some feedback. At least nothing that can brake down in a 5000,- euro machine someone would like to work with for years without loosing sleep over how easy it is for it to brake down and how costly it will be to repair. You already took away one of the most important keys on my MBP: the ESC. Now coding or CAD drawing in Autocad is a nightmare, but I accepted it somehow. To change a top case for a key is unacceptable from a design and service point! By the way: what does greenpeace have to say about it?

SpamSandwich said:

And this is why an industrial design stylist, Jony Ive, should have no responsibility over functional areas of design. Yes, let him design or supervise the superficial elements of Apple products, but let engineers make the final call. Tech journalists like Andy Ihnatko said when the butterfly mechanism keyboard was announced that he didn't like it because it felt unnatural. Apple should've extensively tested their keyboards in high use simulations and with real people before moving ahead with an inferior keyboard.

I don't agree with this point. That is what industrial designer do for a living: design, which means invent, draw, assemble, objects and pieces that work, are functional and beautiful. At this scale design work is teamwork.

The point is that apple as a company did make a mistake here, no problem ... that is normal ... when you work something might go wrong ... but you should take responsibility when you screw things up, which is something else.

bsimpsen said:

SEJU said:

It depends from what Mike is referring to A) units sold dataset gathered from a certain number of service points ...

Yes it does depend on what the statistics refer to, and since that has not been described, the statistics may be as meaningless as the anecdotal evidence provided by others here. I have a 2016 MacBook Pro that's seen constant use and abuse for a year and a half and is still working fine. That means nothing, I am statistically insignificant. If anything, what I'd take away from Mike's numbers is that, even with a slight uptick in MacBook Pro unit volumes over the last two years, the aggregate number of service calls has gone down. Still, we've no idea whether that's because of improving quality, or a change in allocation of service calls to the centers Mike has been surveying.

If an Apple service center opened across the street from my own, cutting my business in half, I would not claim that Apple's field failure rate had been cut in half.

Lucky you! My MBP’s keyboard broke in Novembre. At first I thought there might be just some dirt under the key, but brought it to AppleCare. Than hell broke out! I had to return 3 times. It took over a month to have it solved. They exchanged the motherboard twice, because they broke a connector the first time. 

To to be precise: it is obvious that theoretically there should be less repairs, since the new design almost resembles an iPad. There are no moving parts (apart from the keyboard and display hinge), no HDD, no dvd drive. Today everything is integrated into the logicboard. When you open the machine it is actually really simple, very few parts there, and you see how far they have gone since the PowerBook or MBP 2006, but this keyboard appears to be a major design fault. Not for how you type on it, but for how fragile it is and how difficult to service it is!