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Comment by TooSmugToFail | Hacker News Reader

You are 100% right, but I would not be as dismissive to the engineering team.

When you run a hardware startup, you can only hope for an experienced team that would do everything by the book and implement best practices from the very first production unit. Reality is: that’s a luxury for most hardware startup teams out there.

Typically, there’s a frantic rush to get your device to market that you simply skip, or more likely don’t even have time to think about stuff like climate chamber cycling.

One thing I’m almost sure of: these guys have learned something — the engineer’s way. Good chance there’s a guy there googling climate chambers to ask the CEO for a budget to buy one.

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>>Typically, there’s a frantic rush to get your device to market that you simply skip, or more likely don’t even have time to think about stuff like climate chamber cycling.

And that, right there, is the difference between a company oriented around myopic management vs a company oriented around robust quality.

Any company trying to build a quality reputation would spec this stuff out AT THE BEGINNING — what are the operational requirements, what loads will they see, in what environments will they run, etc??? Then spec every component, and test the whole lot against those requirements. Sure, this is more like the dreaded "waterfall" vs "agile", but the result is a quality product from the start that has far fewer of these problems (because they did this whole test & fix routine at the prototype or Alpha test stages), rather than showing up with stories like this of how they recovered from customer-reported problems.

If you're telling your customers that they're the Alpha testers because they get early access, fine. If you're selling it as a finished product, then we know your company isn't prioritizing actual quality.

> If you're telling your customers that they're the Alpha testers because they get early access, fine. If you're selling it as a finished product, then we know your company isn't prioritizing actual quality.

Sounds like Tesla... although it is public knowledge there that you are still alpha testers years after a model was introduced.

Sorry, but this is a bit rich:

> When you run a hardware startup, you can only hope for an experienced team

If you run a hardware startup and fail to acknowledge that places like Alaska or Ontario exist, you fail before even getting close to merely inexperienced. The most charitable word I can think of is "myopic".

It is not only startups and not only cold places that are overlooked. The iPhone documentation says that it should not be used outside of 32°-95°F.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201678

That seems reasonably accurate on the high end for me. For _sustained_ use, iPhones generally stop working well around 100-105F.

I suspect I would be disappointed by the performance of an iPhone that could operate in >125F temperatures (temperatures which I have worked in outdoors for several years)

I did not say the documentation is wrong. I am saying that it is not only startups that have trouble imagining their product being used somewhere other than Silicon Valley.

Ah yeah, the first part of my response was just fluff.

I’m undecided if they lacked imagination. I work with a lot of electronics that go in oil wells and we have to make different models for different temperature ranges. We usually have to sacrifice a lot of functionality to gain high operating temperatures.

I think it’s possible Apple decided not to serve the markets which need high operating temperatures, rather than simply didn’t even think about the possibility.

It affected me, when I worked outdoors in Saudi Arabia and UAE and even Houston. But I probably would still buy a high performance, high battery life 13 Pro Maxover a hypothetical lower performance 13 ExtremeEnvironment edition.

Operating at 125F ambient would require a whole lot of sacrifice on the power envelope and much greater overall size of the product. I like big phones but my current Pro Max is about as large as I’d like a phone to be.

I realize that there are physical limitations of the technology. I don’t have to go to Saudi Arabia for my phone to overheat. I have to be careful where I keep it in Florida.

It all looks so simple after someone else has debugged the problem and figured out it was temperature, that it's just too tempting to distill it down to some dismissive statement like "fail to acknowledge places like Alaska or Ontario exist". But ultimately it's about unknown unknowns. Sure, you can spend massive amounts of time and money trying to make the known unknowns into knowns (higher background radiation, higher cosmic rays, lower/higher air pressure, higher sun intensity, camera flashes, and so on). But even if you do this for a number of things including temperature, there will still be bunch of factors you won't be preemptively testing. In which case respecting the general lesson will come in handy, even though it's been explained by someone who failed to do testing that you consider routine.

This isn't about unknown unknowns. The blog post made it clear that the team did not anticipate temperatures to change much in their surroundings. That is a very narrow-minded view: places with around-the-year stable temperatures are the exception, not the rule.

I was born and raised in a place where the annual temperature range can be 90°K. From -55°C in the winter to +35°C in the summer. That is not even an extreme range, there are well-known places with large populations (>10MM) that can experience >100°K differentials.

Perhaps more importantly, temperature changes of 40°K in less than 24h are not uncommon. Daily deltas of 25°K are experienced several times a year.

If a company builds hardware, and they don't factor in a routine impact of thermal effects, they really have no excuse. Choosing to ignore these can be a valid product development or marketing strategy, but not being aware of them is nothing short of myopic.

I too am accustomed to weather, although not nearly as dramatic.

My point is that turning things that are unknown unknowns (from the point of view of the company) into known and checked for possibilities takes concerted effort, time, and money. It's easy to look at a problem after it's found and post-facto determine how to find the same problem quicker next time.

I agree that temperature is very basic, low hanging fruit. Especially for a device that seems to be aimed at operation by construction crews. But regardless of where you draw the line on testing environmental factors, you have to draw it somewhere. And so you will still end up with unknown unknowns that escape your QA or debugging process, sending you down the same path of needing to question your assumptions to figure out what's going on.

(Also you're not really giving them the benefit of the doubt here with this assertion that they didn't take temperature into account at all. It seems that they at least looked at the part temperature ranges. And it'd be courteous to assume that they did power dissipation and temperature rise calcs. What they didn't do was component or integration testing at varying temperatures.)

I’ve worked for a hardware startup. We didn’t have the budget for a thermal chamber, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t test and anticipate temperature related issues. We had plenty of setups like the one in the blog with units in the fridge or on a car dashboard on a summer day.

The difference is we did it before the units reached customers.

We skip stuff like the temperature chamber all the time. The difference is that we know what we're skipping and why. This can easily make for a "10x" team: we are experienced enough to know what we can get away with, and experienced enough to know very quickly what happened when we fail to get away with it. (So it's often a pretty quick and direct fix! Well, that or a C-level "you declined this part of our proposal so now it's failing exactly like we told you it would so you're looking at this big of a redo, exactly like we told you...").

But you probably have a cupboard full of freezer spray cans and a heat gun.

Nope, they're in a pile-mess on a shelf, not a cupboard! Got you there!

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