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Comment by snazz | Hacker News Reader

The most important quote from the article:

> But the bigger problem is that, in an apparent effort to make the display as thin as possible, Apple designed the cables as part of the display, so they cannot be replaced. This means that when (not if) those cables start to fail, the entire display unit needs to be replaced, as opposed to one or two little cables—effectively turning a $6 problem into a $600 disaster.

This is beyond crazy. How much more space would it take up to make the ribbon cables replaceable?

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I tend to defend Apple because I believe their commitment to "quality" as a being defined by every possible angle of hardware and software design as opposed to one, simple, established measurement, is something computer/device design needs (i.e., putting "unmeasurable" quality aspects like good UI design on the same level as measurable ones like processor speed). But they fuck up, sometimes. The one-button mouse made no sense, for example. But in terms of raw hardware, it's their over-commitment to thinness. Like, who cares?

I think there was a good movement to at least try and make laptops thinner, somewhere around the late 00s. There's a point between 4cm and 2.5cm that really made sense to me, in order to make laptops more portable (their main feature). But then, it got ridiculous. They shaved off a millimeter every year and at one point, it started to negatively affect the products. You could probably heighten the battery life quite a bit by adding 2 or 3 millimeters of thickness, you would prevent the keyboard rubbing onto the display (see "staingate"), and now this shit about cables being so goddamn thin they literally break.

This is their "Pro" line, as in "professional". I use my MacBook Pro professionally. I could not care less about whatever millimeter they shaved off the thing at the cost of making it more brittle. Sturdiness is a very "professional" quality and it looks like it's not in their list of priorities anymore. Meanwhile, MacBook Pro prices reach the $3000 mark.

It seems obvious enough to me for Apple to realize they've fucked up. Just like their last iOS update – oh wonder! – focused on speed rather than gimmicks, I hope their next MacBook hardware update will re-discover sturdiness as a selling point.

Even ignoring the "couple mm will add battery life", what about a couple of mm actually allowing the fucking machine to breathe and not thermal throttle?

My largest complaint with laptops is their performance just cannot match that of a low end desktop, and you're certainly not helping your customers by releasing a machine that (let's face it) is designed to not run at its fullest potential. It's the equivalent of buying a v8, but after you get past 35mph a couple of the cylinders shut off.

Making a portable device that never thermally throttles means a non-practical thermal system, likely consuming power and generating noise by running 100% all the time.

The reality is that the thermal output differs by well over an order of magnitude depending on what you are doing.

When a complicated task comes along, the system may: 1. spike to full CPU usage at max power usage (possibly higher than rated TDP) 2. if the work continues, get temporarily throttled while the cooling system catches up 3. settle on a "steady state" thermal performance

Since the design of the cooling system is different on a case-by-case basis, the thermal properties are now customizable by the laptop manufacturer to match their system.

This can cause issues with certain "stress test" benchmarks which do not take into account the more complex nature of both modern CPUs and cooling solutions. The performance curve from start to stop of a CPU load task no longer looks like a square wave.

I assume you were referring to the 2018 MBP with i9 chip (which I own). Initially there was an issue because the thermal and power profile that the machine shipped were not appropriate (and actually in some cases made the i9 machine perform inferior to an i7).

They fixed this with a later software update, which AFAIK resolved people's issues. I didn't purchase my machine until after the software update was released, so I never saw the original behavior.

The Wal-Mart of laptops: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/01181...

...instead of consistently asking suppliers for 1-3% wholesale discount per year, Apple is asking engineers for 0.3mm-1mm thinness reduction per year.

It wouldn't take more space. That decision was made for the same reason as the decisions to make as much hardware locked down as possible - So you have to pay Apple more to replace them.

I would suspect, if apple will ever think on those lines.

Service cost would deter their credibility.

I saw this design pattern in a high end plasma screen TV back in 2007. Tons of paper thin ribbon cables sealed to the glass. We got it broken in an auction, fixed it by plugging one of the tiny cables back in, then destroyed it trying to put it back together due to a cable sheering in half.

Not sure if it's related but I had this monitor problem that involved wire that would wear with each laptop opening. It was with the old plastic MacBook though, which was made while Steve was still alive. Eventually the screen would stop working as well. The only good part was that the multiple Apple Store repair sessions were all free.

Overall, nothing, but when you have an organization that prioritizes thinness and people are promoted based on their contributions to thinness you do what you can to make the laptop thin. A company that prioritizes modularity to the same extent will end up with laptops the size of micro ATX cases.

Not much, actually. But you have to keep in mind that adding anything extra to something that is going to be massively produced cuts into margins quite noticeably. Mass manufacturing is a relentless exercise of cutting corners and this is not the only place where Apple did that. It's just the place where they cut one too many.

As mentioned in other comments here Apple products may be designed to look "sexy", but from "where do we cut the costs" point of view it is no different from Dell or Lenovo. In fact, from this article it seems like both quality and serviceability of Apple products are definitely worse, and unless the looks and thinness are #1 and #2 considerations in a laptop -- you shouldn't buy Apple.

"Cutting corners" is the wrong term. Systems engineering is all about compromises, and there's a whole lot more driving these decisions than a lot of the simplistic analysis in the comments here. And at the end of the day, Apple's systems engineering is generally pretty top notch.

There was a design fault here, and that happens. I'm sure they'll replace any affected displays free of charge, and roll a fix for the assembly into production in the next couple of weeks. But in general, if you've ever compared a teardown of an Apple product with something from other manufacturers, there is often a pretty clear difference between them. I'm always very impressed (as somebody who only gets to design very low volume, high margin products).

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