About Apple design, tell you something you don't know

Da Fei was chatting with entrepreneurs on the weekend. Before he finished, he asked me a question: "Why are you wearing a hoodie with the Apple logo?" I told him slowly about my experience as a part-time employee at Apple Retail and said that the hoodie came from the Apple Company Store in Cupertino. He smiled "satisfiedly" and said to me: "Oh, I used to be a PM at Apple China, so we are colleagues."

I know that you or people around you have more or less owned or come into contact with Apple products, but you must not have heard much about the design details and the stories behind them. So let’s follow Da Fei Ge and my “former colleague” to recall the second half of the conversation that day.

Apple MagSafe

At first glance at this bold title, some people may ask: "Are you kidding? Apple has never released this thing." But if you are a Mac user, even if you don't know its "real name", you know that you actually use it to charge your MacBook every day.

Like many people, I fell in love with this power adapter when I first came into contact with a Mac a few years ago because of its pure white color and unique design. I thought to myself: "Damn, Apple is different from you. Even the way it handles the cable is so different."

But in the eyes of Apple engineers, this is a substandard product.

Take the simplest circular conductive metal and detachable adapter for example, neither of them can satisfy Apple. If you have any Mac Apple MagSafe, you might as well remove the detachable adapter and see if the circular conductive metal surface inside is mirror-like. If not, then this power adapter is unqualified.

Now let's take a look at the adapter you just removed. If you take a close look at it under bright sunlight and find "insignificant" scratches, I'm sorry, according to Apple's standards it also needs to be destroyed and remade.

Even though you might think the Apple MagSafe is the best power adapter in the world, it still doesn't measure up in Apple's eyes.

Apple Magic Mouse & Magic Trackpad

You must have heard of these two "star accessories" related to Mac. Whether it is the choice between the two when purchasing an iMac or the Magic Mouse that many people choose to equip their MacBook with, their usage scenarios and user experience are obviously more direct than the power adapter just mentioned.

But if I told you that a Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad is made up of four to six of the best parts of finished products, would that dispel your doubts about their high prices?

Anyone who has used Magic Mouse knows that the curved surface and glass texture make this unique mouse look very high-tech, but like Magic Trackpad, they both failed to achieve the original design intention during production. The former, because of the curvature of the glass, makes it difficult for the components inside to fully fit the curvature that fits the palm, and the latter cannot control the yield rate of the upper and lower connection of the trackpad.

In other words, to achieve Apple's quality, not only does it require the hardware experience of the foundry, but it also requires a lot of investment costs. It is conceivable that in the early stages of trial production, it may take ten Magic Trackpads to put together a "fairly qualified" product. This greatly increases expenses, but there is no other way, after all, it is Apple.

iPhone 6

If you're an iPhone 6 upgrader from an iPhone 5s, you might notice a slight change in the Home button with Touch ID, but you can't quite tell where.

There are at least two changes to the small Home button. First, the button is higher than before. Although it still maintains the arc, it is almost on the same level as the entire screen. Second, the silver ring around the Home button is a compromise choice. It obviously did not exist in Apple's original design.

But this actually does not affect our use of iPhone, and we even love it more.

Why

Why did Apple do this? There are two reasons that may hold back “Designed by Apple in California”.

One is the "inaction" of the foundry. In order to deal with Apple, the foundry usually selects the best batch to be submitted to Apple for acceptance when submitting the product review before mass production. In other words, if Apple wants to see the trial production results of 100 Magic Mouse, the foundry may select the best 100 sets of original parts from 1,000 trial production Magic Mouse, and put them together, they are of course the best.

Second, due to cost considerations, Apple's annual profit is declining year by year. Even though data agencies often reveal that its annual profit is several times that of Amazon or the sum of several giants, it still cannot stop its downward trend. At present, when the global smartphone business is saturated, quality or cost? Apple has to make a compromise. It is foreseeable that Apple may not continue to make the last "money-losing thing" from several or even dozens of products.

When I got home, I remembered what the entrepreneur said at the beginning when I talked about Apple: "There are a lot of revelations about Apple, all of which are shady." I thought about the story about the iPhone 4 "antenna gate" a few years ago, and I thought so too. Even if a hardware company makes a mistake, it will never admit it. Even Jobs said that you took the wrong phone and gave you a free bumper. What else can you say?

"If Jobs were still here, these products would have to be redone," he told me before we said goodbye.