Let's get one thing straight here. Apple is not an engineering company. It is a Design+Innovation company.
LOL, an "Innovation company"! Please!
Anyway, yes, they design their computers. But are you seriously thinking that that is _defense_ for the poor engineering?
For the record, my wife has an old Ti book, and having lived a pretty rough life, that thing is still kicking.
For the record, she's very lucky to have one of the few surviving ones.
Remember what laptops looked like before the Ti came along? Some engineering companies still think laptops should be big boring black plastic coffee tables.
I don't care if a computer looks "boring". It's a tool. And it should be rugged, unless you you just want it to lay on said coffee table as a coffee table book looking "neat".
Where are all those hotshot engineers who claimed (backing up their blathering with supposedly 18+ years in the electronics industry) that machining a laptop out of a solid block of Alu. was impossible?
What? Who said that? But you do know, that it's not the entire notebook which is done like that, right? You can take the bottom off, so it's not a one-piece.
"I'm not an engineer" but that must be the first class in engineering school; "You can't do that 101".
Are you done with your strawman?
You're right, there is quite a difference between engineering something and "merely" designing it. The engineering realm of thought revolves around what is; the known, what has been done before.
It revolves around what can be done within constraints. Good engineering will make beautiful working solutions. Just slapping parts together is not good engineering as you seem to imply.
Take a look at the millau bridge:
Sweet, isn't it?
The thing is, the Millau bridge amongst many other things aren't exactly done by thinking "oh, it hasn't been done before, thus it cannot be done". That, at best, is ignorance to what engineering is, and at worst a full on strawman argument.
However, the design process peers beyond what has been done; it aims to achieve the impossible and change the way people think about products.
Ah, you weren't done with the strawman argumentation. See above.
Apple's magic comes from not just design, but also innovation, which is taking what is known to have been done before and rather than using these facts as an excuse to not change, using them as a springboard into the future.
Magic? Innovation? Are other companies not innovating, and are you seriously suggesting that on the laptop front Apple has "innovated" much or jumped much "into the future"? If anything, they throttling back to the lowest common denominator. The ditching of firewire and removal of choice isn't exactly what I call "innovation", nor "a springboard to the future".
So, is the engineering perfect? probably not, it couldn't be. Apple doesn't engineer designs, they design engineering.
Wow. What a twisted way of saying that they will disregard the demands and basic premises for good engineering to cater to the people who buy stuff on looks alone.
They innovate. With innovation comes quirks that might have to be tweaked or possibly rehashed altogether.
Ah, yes, it's "innovative" designing a laptop that looks thinner than it is, introducing a shape that makes good engineering an impossibility, resulting in numerous workarounds such as a mechanical plastic lid for the plugs and core shutdowns.
But at least they try, and either one appreciates that or they don't. An engineering job at Apple must be one of the toughest jobs on the planet, and notice, it takes an army of engineers to keep up with the handfull of designers there. Innovation is hard work, but someone's gotta do it.
Sigh. The stench of fanboyism is becoming too rancid for me.