Apple Watch in Short Supply Due to Taptic Engine Bottlenecks

[mightyjabba]

If they did find fault with one of the suppliers parts and then removed them from earlier build watches and removed the supplies from the production line. Then they should be applauded... Most companies just care about the bottom lined and would of shipped all of the units and just fixed the problem later, but Apple has pull the part from the supply chain and taken a big it on the stock and in the press for the slow shipments...

I would rater wait for a quality product!

They did the right thing, but realistically it's not as though they had a choice. It would have been many times worse for Apple if they shipped a bunch of these with defective parts and then had to institute some kind of recall.

 

[rv0005]

This explains why all watches had a range on the delivery date instead of 24th specifically. Also explains why some models never had the 24th-8th as a range for delivery from the moment they went live. Im appreciative that they arent shipping defective products but really thats what they are supposed to do. I think where they have epically failed is in their transparency. Why not make a statement or send emails. Instead you are on record boasting about the launch instead of taking ownership for the shortcomings. I think Tim and the others need to go to my daughters Kindergarten class when they are having their ownership and responsibility lessons. Steve Jobs (rip) is rolling over in his grave right now.

 

[mikefla]

This explains why all watches had a range on the delivery date instead of 24th specifically. Also explains why some models never had the 24th-8th as a range for delivery from the moment they went live. Im appreciative that they arent shipping defective products but really thats what they are supposed to do. I think where they have epically failed is in their transparency. Why not make a statement or send emails. Instead you are on record boasting about the launch instead of taking ownership for the shortcomings. I think Tim and the others need to go to my daughters Kindergarten class when they are having their ownership and responsibility lessons. Steve Jobs (rip) is rolling over in his grave right now.

Haha yeah I think their PR sucked so far. I have not received one darn email besides a general email from Apple with a subject "Apple watch is here". No it's not! I'm still waiting!

-Mike

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Doesn't really come as any surprise that the Japanese manufactured taptic engines are far superior than the Chinese made ones. Probably costs more to make them in Japan though, so that company might have just been "filling the gaps" for the Chinese supplier and now the Japanese company will have to seriously ramp up production.

Yeah I like the idea of getting them made in Japan better!

-Mike

 

[kdarling]

hat's fine, but go back and have a look at the teardown of the 1st generation iPhone:

(inside photo snipped)

It's pretty ugly, too, and that was 100% Steve Jobs' baby. What is that in there? Packing tape?

I don't think Apple advertised the internals of that iPhone. You've just pointed out why not

A watch is different from a phone, though. Apple has said they want people to think of their watch as being like a fine "timepiece".

So really, the complaint is that the watch internals don't look as good as the marketing images, which to my eye at least, are quite obviously idealized CG images.

Nobody's really complaining of course. Just noticing that things like the linear oscillator are kind of cheap and rough looking (like an old toy car part), instead of being more crafted like a fine watch... as Apple marketing clearly wanted buyers to picture it with those idealized images.

I suppose you could argue it's misleading advertising, but that's a bit of a stretch, innit?

You're the one who brought up the idea that it could be considered as misleading advertising. What do you think might happen?

(I supposed, if anywhere, the UK advertising board can be pretty strict about misrepresentation sometimes. Apple's gotten dinged by them before for unrealistic iPhone ads.)

But I don't think anyone will care that much.

 

[ttss6]

First, think about how phones used to vibrate. They used a motor with an off-balance mass. The frequency (rate of rotation) could change, but it was difficult to control the amplitude.

A linear actuator is also a magnetic motor, but instead of rotating an eccentric mass, it oscillates a mass back and forth. Here, I've made an animated GIF of the torn-apart insides of the actual Apple Taptic Engine for you. (Note that the spring on the right would be held tight against a right hand wall that's missing here.)

View attachment 547638

Of course, it normally vibrates back and forth much faster than that . Because it's a mass attached to a spring, it has a natural resonant frequency where it works the best. Haptic actuators usually run about 175 Hz.

But while the frequency can't be changed, the amplitude (how far it swings back and forth) can, which is considered an advantage for creating various haptic feedback sensations.

(This is partly why Samsung switched over to linear actuators back in 2012 starting with the Galaxy S3. Apple finally switched from eccentric mass to linear actuators with the iPhone 6.)

Btw, Apple had a patent on a "tapping" version a while back, which probably applies here as well. The idea was that with a high amplitude applied, the mass was allowed to hit one side, not just run in the middle.

Thanks so much for the insightful explanation!

 

[Rogifan]

Mr. Kool Aid. Don't even begin to lecture me on being a Troll junior. I currently use more Apple products than most, and have used a Mac exclusively since 1990. Tim is about Margins. Not QC.

BS. And I don't give a crap how long you've used Apple products. Doesn't make you any more of an expert on anything.

 

[Glideslope]

BS. And I don't give a crap how long you've used Apple products. Doesn't make you any more of an expert on anything.

Man, that took you long enough.

 

[dgdosen]

BS. And I don't give a crap how long you've used Apple products. Doesn't make you any more of an expert on anything.

I'd say it gives a person enough experience to have a valued opinion. And it's one I agree with.

Apple has great design, but they have no better quality than what you're going to get with outsourced overseas manufacturing as any other vendor. You could argue that Apple's design makes their products more susceptible to quality issues simply because their bleeding edge looks are harder to work with than your garden variety Dell.

You can also point to Apple's continual changing of suppliers for parts as a problem because that tells us they value lower parts costs more than the increase in logistical costs of switching vendors has on a smoothly running supply chain.

That all said - the quality bar for all electronics manufacturing continues to rise - and it won't be long until we have watches that:
- work
- are more easily repairable
- have fewer parts inside
- completely waterproof and ruggedized

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They did the right thing, but realistically it's not as though they had a choice. It would have been many times worse for Apple if they shipped a bunch of these with defective parts and then had to institute some kind of recall.

Exactly - Apple shrewdly compared the cost of fixing the existing supply of watches to the cost of shipping a broken piece of kit at premium price would be to their reputation.

Apple has come down on the other side of that issue *cough-trackpad-cough* at times in the past...

 

[alfonsog]

I have a Dell that is over a decade old, that is still working. I have had 2 different models of macbook pros that both died because of GPU issues, just after the warranty ended.

I have an 2001 iBook G3 that still works... my 1st gens' iMac G4 (hard drive/screen), iMac G5 (transistors fried twice), and Mac Pro (power supply went and all 4 drives fried after 7 years) all died. Now get this my ancient CP/M machine still works and still reads its 2 floppy disk drives and still runs Wordstar 1.0 which I wrote my freshman college papers on in 1991 with its daisy wheel printer. Such a noisy machine

 

[thenumbersrbad]

There hasn't really been anything posted here lately but I was a week 13 build and took my 42mm stainless steel watch into my local Apple Store with a weak haptic feed back and it was compared to a couple other watches and the consensus was that mine was weak and most notifications would be missed without sound so they sent it off to be repaired/swapped