I was just thinking after the news about Apple's MB/MBP's being built out of a solid block of aluminum that maybe future plans include manufacturing a new iPhone in a similar fashion..... All the reasons that are talked about for the notebook would certainly apply to an iPhone. Anyone else think about this too??
I was thinking of that today. I think that would be a great idea, especially to add to the durability of the phone.
When I read the title of this thread, I thought ergonomics rather than manufacturing processes and ended up with a mental picture of a horizontally opening clamshell iPhone, a bit like the DS except really sleek and slim, with a physical keyboard on the bottom half and the usual iPhone screen on the top half. Kind of like a really mini, mini MacBook. Probably not very practical but it would be endearingly cute.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20) the first Gen iPhone was made that way.
The main reason with the Macbooks is that they can make structural elements part of the case that used to be seperate parts. In other words, the Macbooks have fewer parts which makes them easier to put together and makes it less likely they will break. Now, look at what's in an iPhone: http://www.iphonebuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/iphone_dissembly_1.jpg I don't know about you, but I'm having a tough time imagining much fewer parts than that. So the main reason they did it for the laptops isn't very helpful with the iPhone.