This year shame as the last
Last year I wrote an
article about the difference
between Samsung and Apple industrial design. It attracted
hundreds of thousands of readers and sparked a debate about the difference
between aping a look and nailing the details.
Galaxies S6
The gist was, on
last year's Galaxy S6 line, almost nothing was actually in line.
So, a year later, did Samsung get their ports and buttons in
order?
Galaxies S7
From the looks of the just-announced Galaxy S7, not so much.
The ports, microphones, speakers, jacks, and other elements
still don't line up. Not even close.
Seriously, again?
In fairness to Samsung, the Galaxy S7 is more of a Galaxy S6s —
an updated version of last year's phone. That means there was probably little
time or opportunity for Samsung to re-engineer between then and now. And that
shows why it's so important to take that kind of care from the very beginning.
Like I said last year:
To align everything along the edge of a
device takes designing and mounting the boards in a certain way, and the ports
and speakers, and the buttons and jacks, and the grills and every other detail
so they all line up at exactly the right place at the end. Painstaking is
likely an understatement.
Is
it worth the effort? For me, as a customer, knowing that Apple had the
consideration and took the time and effort to align their hardware speaks to
the overall quality of their work. It reassures me that the same consideration
and effort were likely spent making sure not a millimeter nor milliamp of
battery space was wasted, not a nanometer of die, not a gap left around the
screen, or a dead zone in the capacitive sensor.
It's the kind of care that might
seem superficial or even superfluous at first but that permeates every aspect
of product design. It's why Apple took the trouble to protect fingerprint data
on a secure enclave of the A-series system-on-a-chip, for example, instead of leaving them in a
world-readable directory.
Apple can and will continue to make its fair share of mistakes,
and Samsung will continue to earn its fair share of accolades. Different phones
will always appeal to different people.
But there's something about knowing a company cares enough to
build everything right, down to the smallest of details. Like Steve Jobs said,
you don't always notice it but you notice it when it's missing.
And what's missing has become increasingly noticeable.
Source: iMore
