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Apple's 'Fanatical' Attention to Detail Revealed in Apple Campus 2 Report
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I've added that part to my earlier reply, but will mention it here. One of the main if it basically inherent reasons for the existence of wireless mice is specially to get rid of the connecting cables. The whole advantage and essentially experience of a wireless mouse essentially goes away if it's being used while attached to a wire.
None of this is to say that mice can't or shouldn't be used like that, since clearly that's how they have been used for ages, it's simply saying that it's no longer a wireless mouse when it's being used like that. And if a company wants their wireless mouse to stay true to its literal meaning and use case and how they would like their customers to use it then they could certainly design for it.
Another recent post touched upon this aspect of it fairly well:
I'm not a fan of this building, but its construction does give us insight into the working of Apple's culture. If you think this culture has changed significantly since Steve's passing, think again. Whether you believe they are always paying attention to the details that matter most (or not), the company still definitely has Steve's OCD dialed into its genes. For better and for worse.
Strange that people seem to have found it a good idea to combine their decimal numbering system with octal (or whatever) measurements.
They had a choice regarding the dongles. Make a machine that needs dongles now, or make a machine that needs dongles later. They made the right choice.
USB-C/Thunderbolt is the emerging standard. Loading up a new machine with those ports means you use dongles now to plug in your legacy peripherals. As you upgrade your peripherals, you lose the dongles and have the right ports to take full advantage of the higher speed and power capacity of your new devices. When dropping a few grand for a new machine, that seems like the right choice.
The other option was to include a variety of legacy ports and reduce the number of USB-C ports. The result is an unnecessarily bigger machine for which you will have to buy dongles as you upgrade your peripherals over time, keeping in mind that those legacy ports will choke down the speed and power capacity of your new devices. That seems like a dumber choice to make.
I think attention to detail is precisely what led them to make the first and vastly wiser choice.
"If engineers had to adjust their gait while entering the building, they risked distraction from their work"
Is it possible to laugh at this statement without being called an Apple hater?
Is it possible to laugh at this statement without being called an Apple hater?
If only they had the same attention to detail for their own code.
Ha of course not though surely we all know to take second hand 'news' with a pinch of salt. Chinese whispers etc. Wouldn't be surprised if this has been blown out of context for click bait
These are $2,000 laptops. There is no way it is landfill in a few years. Now you might sell it or pass it on to someone in your family. But 2017 MacBooks will be in circulation in 2023 and much later. I know plenty of people using Macs that are older than five years. And some folks try to get 10 years out of their Macs.
Looks like you have an issue with an old display. But you will figure it out. Maybe it is dongle to dongle.
We're rabbit holing and thread jacking and will never come to consensus on this. Good discussion though. Thanks.
Hiding parking underground is a common architectural exercise that does not suggest this solution. This building actually has no "public" areas. It's an intensely private space that goes to great lengths to be separate from the surrounding area. For all its trees, it is not friendly in any apparent way. I will give it five minutes after the official opening for it to be called Apple's Walled Garden.
Architects make for notoriously poor social scientists, and Steve Jobs wasn't even an architect. What be did like to do was walk, so he had his architects design a building that would make 14,000 Apple employees do a lot of it.
What the architect says is stupid.
This has nothing to do with tolerances. Tolerances are unintentional deviations from the intended measurements (e.g. due to manufacturing). Obviously, you wouldn't design a door to fit exactly into its frame and then hope for such deviations to allow it to be opened. Ideally, you would specify smaller measurements for the door to begin with.
If the intended measurements are correct, small tolerances are good, because they prevent the door from being too big (or small) in the end. Keeping tolerances small can never be bad.
If your doors don't open, there are essentially two possibilities:
1. They have been designed too big.
2. Tolerances are too high and thus the doors are bigger than intended.
In no case is the problem tolerances being too small.
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You're right about the CPUs, but maybe more people would get that if only Tim Cook or another Apple exec had stood up and explained why the current CPUs were still the best available, and (e.g.) debunked Microsoft's silly claim that the Surface Book is twice as powerful as the 13" MacBook Pro. Instead, we get watch straps and "Hey look at my iPad pro, who would want anything else?"
As for batteries, that story has been told. There was a better technology - it hit a snag - they decided to go with the current design rather than miss the holiday season (for a pro product? The results for Mac don't look nearly as seasonal as other products). We can't second guess how many of these "technical" problems could have been avoided by better management/resource allocation.
Building materials naturally shrink and swell. Foundations, no matter how well they are constructed, settle. Walls that were true when built are with time no longer true. This is why doors are hung to a tolerance that isn't so close that they get stuck. Trying to construct a building as if it is a consumer product is fraught with peril.
Where "this" means ambivalence to the fact that wood swells and shrinks with environmental changes.
I don't think this is what tolerance means. Tolerance is not the gap between the door and the frame.
When Apple say they want the tolerance to be (e.g.) 1mm, they don't mean the gap should be 1mm at max. What they mean is, the door's measurements shouldn't deviate from the planned measurements by more than 1mm.
Since the planning should take into account the circumstances you mentioned, deviations from those planned measurements should be as small as possible.
That is what it means, hence these comments:
The point being you can't design a building with perfect engineering tolerances.
It is not fair to compare building office campus to building software. When building you are working with one configuration and it is easier to get everything right. With software this is much harder because you will never know specific hardware model, particular unit you own, time, location and series of events which lead to a bug. That said, I am not saying they should stop improving software quality. I am just saying chill, I am using app from one of the most famous indy iOS developer, he devoting all his free time for building just one app and he has massive experience and still I got occasional crashes (this is not 1.0). There's no software without bugs.
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I am from UK and I prefer inches. They are shorter, easy to remember and to operate.
Nope. See, the architect knows something that Apple never could. Doors are often made of wood or wood composites. Wood, unlike metal, shrinks and swells as the humidity and temperature changes. Therefore, you HAVE to give that door some extra room or else is is going to stick. PERIOD.
USB-A and HDMI aren't going anywhere, anytime soon. Everybody including Apple is still selling new machines that have them. There are a zillion USB sticks in circulation. No PCs have gone all TB3/USB-C. I've been looking in vain for a PC motherboard with 2 TB3 slots - even the ones with TB3 tend to go for 1xTB3 + 1 x USB3.1gen2 type A. Don't see any graphics cards with USB-C/TB3 outputs (you have to put in a TB3 card with a flying internal lead to the motherboard and an external DisplayPort cable to the graphics card). Only PCs I've seen with 2xTB3 are the Intel Skull Canyon NUC (which, NB, shows what the Mac Mini could have been by now) and the new Dell XPS 27 iMac-alike (which has a full complement of other ports, too).
You're going to need those dongles forever unless you live in your own little closed environment which you can make all-USB-C. Also, TB3 is severely hampered by only supporting DisplayPort 1.2 which can only drive 5k by using MST (albeit with a single cable).
Meanwhile, if you want a working system today... There's one 5k TB3 display (which is now off the menu until they fix the shielding) and one TB3 dock (which can't charge a MBP) actually available. Other stuff is "coming soon" but I remember that game from the original Thunderbolt days. I'll consider the 2016 MBP when all the stuff I need is available and proven.
Little remembered fact: in 2012, when Apple introduced the Retina MacBook Pro without (shock, horror) optical drives, ethernet or firewire ports, they also updated the 'Classic' MBPs to the latest CPUs and USB3. Because then they understood that some people needed to replace/update existing Macs without having to adopt a whole new philosophy.
Sure. My current Mac is 6 years old and going strong: but only because I've upgraded the RAM, put in a SSD, and swapped the optical drive for a second HD. Good luck doing that with the 2016 MBP.
Looking at Dell's XPS 26 iMac-a-like: it has TB3 for future-proofing, a good range of regular ports for today-proofing, the back comes off with a couple of screws, the SSD is in a standard M.2 socket, the HD is standard 2.5", the RAM is socketed... I've used Windows before and could do again...
Wish I still worked at Apple just to see if they let contract workers have space in there or are kept to the satellite buildings scattered all over Sunnyvale.
Of course one good earthquake and it's all out of tolerance. Just like when you drop your iPhone and it's never the same again.
I was all up for us going metric back in the 70's, but popular opinion (reinforced by media who played up - quite fancifully - the problems it would cause) kept that from happening. Sigh. Metric is better for many things (but not temperature, Fahrenheit is particularly suited for human habitation: below 50 is too cold, 50's are cold, 60's cool, 70's nice, 80's warm, 90's hot, above 100 is too hot -- on the other hand, the proposed decabet was awesome, even if SNL got the idea from "Mark Twain").
But relevant to this article, giving construction workers here, who have life-long experience using foot/inch-based measurements, a bunch of blueprints and construction plans done up in meters and millimeters, would be a recipe for disaster. We've had multi-million-dollar interplanetary probes crash and burn because of improper conversions between the two measurement systems.