
Jony Ive’s Fragmented Legacy: Unreliable, Unrepairable, Beautiful Gadgets - mrzool
https://www.ifixit.com/News/jony-ives-fragmented-legacy-unreliable-unrepairable-beautiful-gadgets
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delish
I don't disagree with anything in that article, but Jony Ive's legacy is not
merely the iPhone, the Watch, and the most recent MacBook Pros. It's also the
iMac, the PowerMac G5, the Wall Street PowerBook, the unibody MacBook Pro--I
can go on. And don't forget that Steve Jobs hated that there were screws on
the Apple II and Macintosh--he wanted the devices to be appliances you sell
when you're done with, and buy a new one. And another point: Phones and
computers were plastic before Jobs and Ive. Now they're the strongest glass,
and aluminum and steel. Those are improvements both to reliability and
repairability.

The article may be justified in saying that Ive's most recent products form
his legacy, but I remember much more when I think about Apple.

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jadell
> he wanted the devices to be appliances you sell when you're done with, and
> buy a new one

Appliances used to be repairable. People kept things like ovens, fridges and
washing machines for decades, repairing them when needed. Companies long
before Apple started the "planned obsolescence" treadmill for appliances, but
companies like Apple sure didn't help. It's arguable they made the situation
worse, because a lot of the components in tech are more damaging to the
environment to extract, process, and throw away than many of the components in
household appliances.

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delish
Thanks--maybe I'm misquoting Steve Jobs. He meant that you-the-end-user
weren't supposed to open it up. If they were repaired, he wanted them repaired
by professionals. Unfortunately I don't have the quote in front of me.

And my point is: The article says it's about Jony Ive, but he's a metonymy for
iFixit's bete noir: Apple.

(I'm not saying iFixit is wrong!)

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jadell
Changing the battery in a phone isn't a job that needs to be done by
professionals. Normal people do it with their other battery-powered devices
all the time. The only reason to make it any other way is so you can make more
money off of people who've already paid for your product, or to upsell people
on getting a new phone for only a small increase over the price you would
charge them to change the battery. There's no other motive here besides greed.

~~~
Tempest1981
I wouldn't say "the only reason". A sealed case can help with waterproofing,
strength, and of course thinness.

You can now have BestBuy replace your battery for $49, which isn't too
terrible. Other shops charge $39.

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GoofballJones
I know it's trendy to hate on Apple in this type of community, but why is all
the blame for their unrepairability laid at his feet? Did he decide all that
on his own? He DID have bosses, yes? They have meetings on all this stuff.
Someone sat in a meeting and told Ive to "design it so it's a closed system"
or whatever.

Don't get me wrong, Ive was a huge part of it, no doubt. But he didn't do this
alone.

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e40
I think the consensus is that after Jobs was gone, Cook gave Ivey a lot of
power to make these decisions on his own.

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maxxxxx
I think he just needed people like Jobs and others to keep him in check. With
Cook at the top I would expect more business people to run the show who don’t
have much input in the product.

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Terretta
Unreliable and unrepairable but “well deserved” highest ease of service for
screen and battery “unmatched” by any Android phone...

Nice title versus content:

 _”The iPhone is the highest scoring flagship phone on our chart right now,
and it’s well deserved. The fundamental repairability challenge with
smartphones is making the display and the battery, the parts most likely to
break and wear out, easily removable. It took Apple many generations, but they
nailed it with the iPhone 6 and haven’t looked back since. No Android phone
design has managed to replicate the iPhone’s ease of service for these
critical components.”_

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java-man
... without the headphone connector.

~~~
PunksATawnyFill
Yep. Nothing epitomizes Ive’s war on usefulness better than music-centric
devices with no audio outputs. What a “genius.”

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threeseed
iPhone has two external audio outputs: Lightning and Bluetooth.

And you can get adapters for both to connect them to legacy headphones.

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starsinspace
„Legacy“ headphones? They are just... headphones. I’m sure that long after
Bluetooth has become an obsolete and widely unsupported protocol, and long
after all the Bluetooth headphones like AirPods and others have died from
failing glued-in batteries, good old normal headphones will still work fine,
with any device which can output analog audio at suitable power. (Heck, given
their incredible resilience, my old AKGs might still work then too.)

