photoeditor

Insane pricing. Still no LTE band updates to the older devices. With the demise of the SE and the 6s and raising the pricing floor of their lineup by $100, a withdrawal from value-priced phones. But they'll probably get away with it because of the carrier-locked phone and software mess on Android.

randominternetperson said:

Ridiculous.  What determines whether something is law suit worthy?  If a company makes a product that isn't durable and treats its customers poorly, the market will "reward" that company with poor future sales.  That's how the system to works.  Unless someone gets hurt or the company reneges on warranty obligations, why should I court get involved?

Yeah, like the market's really free to do that on a whim, with thousands in stranded costs per user around a particular software and hardware platform.

If a company screws up like this, it should go beyond the basic warranty. The real kicker for me is that Apple started using the 2017 part to repair broken keyboards on the 2016 model in the MacBook Pro. That tells me the 2016 keyboard is a recall situation, a fundamentally flawed part, and should be treated as such. By all means let them do a soft recall -- we don't want every Apple Store "idiot bar" gridlocked for a month. But it should be a recall. And maybe if they'd treated it as such before now there wouldn't be a lawsuit. Shades here of the 2011 AMD solder failure in 15-inch MacBook Pros, where Apple stonewalling it for years left many people without resolution of the problem whatsoever.

Apple needed to be hit with this. The keyboard on the 2015 and '16 MacBooks and on the 2016 MacBook Pro is appalling, weird feedback, tons of errors at least for me and a version of the butterfly mechanism that's now been discontinued. I've heard they're actually using the 2017 part to fix '16 Pros with failed keyboards. Even the 2017 one, I think, is still prone to jams from dirt ingress and I'm hedging my bets with one of those silicone keyboard covers. But at least it's a heck of a lot faster and more accurate to type on than the previous year.

It doesn't surprise me about the "B" key vulnerability; being where it is, it's the most prone to dirt ingress from around the spacebar, I would think. The way I type I suspect the "N" key might also be vulnerable.

To all those complaining about lawsuits....it's how regulation is done in the US. Either you have a system where you can enforce standards through discovery and litigation like in the US, or you have a system like France where you enforce them with lots of government inspectors and rules, or you have anarchy where everyone's free to con and rip each other off all the time as opposed to having to weigh whether they'll get caught.

1) I think it's overall a pretty fair review by CR.
2) Do these phone makers have to put a glass back on everything? Kind of fetishizes wireless charging, doesn't it--or maybe it's about fetishizing phone insurance.
3) The drop test result is interesting. I wonder if the softer aluminum on the Samsung takes gouges while the stainless on the iPhone transmits the shock to the glass?
4) As someone who is Apple for all computing, tablet and music player use, but "off brand" for the watch (Garmin) and phone (Samsung Note 4), I wish Apple would be a little more flexible in their approach to design, and incorporate some of the useful stuff of Samsung; better reception and carrier aggregation, a headphone jack, a rugged option, more flexibility with USB. Apple has a clear advantage over every Android attempt on the processor and on OS security -- why won't they provide the full suite of features?
5) I've been waiting for someone to come up with something significantly more practical than my Note 4, and I'm still waiting, but my hand's about to be forced by security issues. I could still go either way.

Some of these things are value-engineering, but the non-laminated display in my view is a bad mistake by Apple, heavily affecting the ergonomics with pencil, touch and even viewing for not much benefit in profit. There was a time when 10 or 15 percent profit margins were regarded as exceptional and when Apple is trying to push things north of 50 with certain items they're really pushing their luck. When you consider what they're going up against in the education market it's kind of short-sighted.