EEVblog #1222 - Apple's MacBook Design FAIL - Who's To Blame?

[floobydust]

Apple thinks their customers use the MacBook in a clean room. There's always food and drink around computers. Trendoids sit in Starbucks slurping on a latte and use their MacBook.
My coffee drips and splashes sometimes and leaves a spot on my desk. Coworker eats lunch while working, crumbs dropping. This is reality.
It rains outside, hair gets wet and a few drops fall onto the keyboard. According to Apple it does not rain, people always use an umbrella, your MacBook bag will never get snow or water near it.

It's not as bad as that car seatbelt recall, Americans eating in the car, dropping french fries into the seatbelt latches and it jammed the mechanism.

Engineering has to meet with Product Management when they are writing up the requirements document. "We estimate extra $12 cost to make the product splash resistant" and Product Management says "nah, we're not doing that".
Then when there are problems it's "blame the engineers" crap, or as OP questions "which engineer is to blame". That pisses me off.

It's nothing but corporate greed. Proven by the fact nothing is being done by Apple (for years now) to improve their product, to make it withstand life's splashes.

[james_s]

Apple has turned into a fashion company unfortunately, the form over function pendulum has swung too far. The Macbook Pro is too thin, so much focus has been placed on making it thin and sexy that it is much thinner than it needs to be, and it has sacrificed usability, expandability and performance to achieve that. There are many flaws in the design, but vulnerability to liquid is not a flaw, it was not a design objective, it is not an advertised feature, it was never claimed to be tolerant of liquid so if you need a laptop that is, then Apple is not what you should be looking at. It's not a flaw, it's a design choice.

I'll add that the company I work for is about 95% Mac in this location which has about 25 people and in the time I've been there we have had exactly zero laptops damaged by liquid. The last place I worked was larger, I remember *one* incident where somebody spilled a soda on a (non-Apple) laptop and ruined it, they were reprimanded for being careless.

[rrinker]

 I'd be curious to see the display connector pinout on my current work-supplied HP laptop (which isn't very repairable at a component level either, although I CAN swap the M.2 SSD and there's ONE swappable memory module (the other is permanently soldered). Or the old one I had, which is one of those big heavy 17" clunkers, very thick and heavy, but you can (and I have) completely disassembled it to component parts. In fact I have a spare screen for it, I can probably see which pins they used for what. But odds are there is SOME low voltage data pin next to the power pins. It may not go directly to the CPU, or to any sort of mux chip (since neither has a discrete GPU) but when the CPU is a directly soldered BGA part, even on those old machines, what real difference does it make? High voltage on a data pin is going to fry something, even if it's not the CPU. But even if it goes to a cheap and easily replaced SMD 74HC something or other logic, it's still got a great chance of damaging the traces as well as the part upstream from the connector. If the board itself is damaged, what does it really matter that the fried chip is a cheap logic gate or the whole CPU? Still need a new board.
 Bottom line, don't spill stuff in your laptop, unless you have something like one of those Panasonic Toughbooks that can take it. Don't spill water in your desktop system, either. Could they make a Macbook that's IP67 rated? Surely they can. But it's not, it doesn't claim to be, and if the water gets in there, even if it doesn't hit that connector, something else will get fried. That's not a design flaw if it can;t stand a glass of water being dumped on it, few others can withstand that either.
 I wouldn't buy one, I am just not a fan of the OS. Thing is, Windows laptops in the same sort of form factor are just as expensive and resort to the same techniques of soldering in things like the memory and not allowing much if any expansion. And have shitty short throw keys. You want a machine that thin and light, there's a price to pay. Just go up SLIGHTLY on Z height and weight and suddenly everything is user upgradable, and the price comes way down. Apple is far from aloe in building machines like this. Maybe it's because they more or less have just the one model, whereas with someone like Dell or HP, you can get a macbook-style machine, or you cna get ones that are thicker, heavier, and cheaper.

[rsjsouza]

I wouldn't buy one, I am just not a fan of the OS. Thing is, Windows laptops in the same sort of form factor are just as expensive and resort to the same techniques of soldering in things like the memory and not allowing much if any expansion. And have shitty short throw keys. You want a machine that thin and light, there's a price to pay. Just go up SLIGHTLY on Z height and weight and suddenly everything is user upgradable, and the price comes way down. Apple is far from aloe in building machines like this. Maybe it's because they more or less have just the one model, whereas with someone like Dell or HP, you can get a macbook-style machine, or you cna get ones that are thicker, heavier, and cheaper.

That summarizes everything. I can get quite a reasonably priced and still performing machine for a fraction of the price of the ultra-sleek models.

To attest to your point about PCs, my main work machine is a Dell Precision 5510 that was pretty much influenced by the current shrinking trend and its custom battery failed after mere 1.5 years after purchased new. It actually was still ok, but it was bulging and lifting the trackpad to the point of almost destruction. Pretty shoddy quality, especially considering the batteries of my previous work Dell laptops always lasted the 4~5 year replacement period.

Also, one of my test machines is a macbook pro 2015 that has all necessary ports (USB3, Thunderbolt, HDMI, SD Card, Headphone Jack), it is still moderately light, seems sturdy enough and has an excellent screen. It is not quite upgradeable as memories are soldered, but at least I can easily replace the battery and the M.2 drive. Quite a difference from their current offers.

[David Hess]

Apple thinks their customers use the MacBook in a clean room.

Nothing exemplifies this better than, "You're holding the phone the wrong way."

[JustMeHere]

Wow, where I live there will be condensation. No way to avoid it.

[KaneTW]

If I come in from the cold outside into my warm house, there's a pretty solid chance I'll have condensation occur. Not designing against that is unrealistic.

(and unlike phones, laptops aren't carried close to the body)

[maginnovision]

As far as I know condensation isn't killing these.

[KaneTW]

I wouldn't be so sure. It just gets lumped under liquid damage because it's usually very similar. Google certainly has a fair bunch of reports about condensation damage (and Apple not repairing because of discolored liquid indicators)

[TheDane]

As far as I know condensation isn't killing these.

The fan sucks all kinds of stuff into the machine,and not everything makes it out - I guess this is why Apple recommends that you give your device a blowjob regularly.
The 'in-sucked - stuck' stuff becomes Shmoo/Schmoo (upon condensation), and crap occours eventually. Watch some Louis Rossmann videos, and get grossed out by his findings.

https://avedictionary.com/shmoo-schmoo/  (gotta love his dicktionary  )
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schmoo

[SparkyFX]

Wow, where I live there will be condensation. No way to avoid it.

Turn the device on? Actually they get warm quite fast, so condensation is unlikely to really happen in an otherwise dry device. They only can heat up above ambient temperature, not get cooler.
Except you like to use your laptop in the sauna... i think most manuals state limits for humidity and temperature anyway.

[tszaboo]

I had a very similar issue a decade ago. There was this QVGA touchscreen, it had a narrow (0.65mm, maybe 1mm) pitch flat flex cable. The backlight connector pin was right next to some data pin. The screen bowed up regularly in the firmware-hardware team, because we were handling it without the enclosure. You needed access to the board to do stuff, and through handling, it was way too easy to make a short circuit on that connector. And there was practically nothing we could do, cause the screen was off the shelf.

In any case I dont think we can blame Apple for this. Pouring water down your computer is not the intended use. If you start worrying about pins too close to each other for water, there is a very deep rabbit hole. With rubber gaskets special packages, extra isolation, milling and so on. So where should they stop? "Sorry, we designed it to be IP69K, I know it wasnt the specification, but this way it only costs x$ extra?". Because that is x million dollar for apple.