Redditor Explains Why Apple Continue Making Frail Power Cables

Full text, in case Apple catch wind of the comment:

> I used to work for Apple and interfaced with every division in the company, and I know EXACTLY why this happened. It has nothing to do with trying to get customers to buy more replacement adapters, but rather with the hierarchy of power at Apple.

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> But before I go into this, let me explain the engineering of a power cable. If you look at a power adapter cable for any non-Apple product, you'll notice some plastic "rings" where the plug transitions to the cable. These rings are called a strain relief. The purpose of a strain relief is to prevent the cable from bending at a severe angle if you bend the cable at the base. The strain relief allows the cable to have a nice, gentle curvature if you tweak the cable instead of bending at a severe 90 degree angle. This gentle curvature prevents the cable from being broken through repeated use.

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> Now let's look at the hierarchy of power at Apple. As with any company, Apple consists of many divisions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) THE most powerful division at Apple is Industrial Design. For those of you unfamiliar with the term industrial design, this is the division that makes the decisions about the overall look and feel of Apple's products. And when I say "the most powerful", I mean that their decisions trump the decisions of any other division at Apple, including Engineering and Customer Service.

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> Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it's pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I'm sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn't like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed.

I feel the explanation could fit in the headline.

Two other places where aesthetic form trumps function in Apple keyboards and Macbooks: (1) arrow keys are much narrower (especially on the 11-inch Macbook Air) than on most notebooks (probably because unlike most notebook makers, Apple decided against breaking the "clean line" along the edge of the keyboard closest to the typist). (2) the axis on which the two halves of the "clamshell" (the bottom half and the screen half) turn is in a different place than on most notebooks. In particular, on a Macbook, the axis is between the top and bottom surfaces of the bottom half of the clamshell whereas on most notebooks it is about .3 inches (whatever is just enough to allow the two halves to fold all the way together) above the top surface of the bottom half (and more or less in line with the plane of the screen whereas on Macbooks it is about .3 inches from this plane). The probable reason for this choice is that it gives Macbooks a distinctive look even though the way the other makers do it seems more practical to me (because the notebook is more secure when it is not resting on a flat horizontal surface and because the probability of disaster is lower if the notebook is open on the floor and someone catches the screen half with their foot). Since I do not have the patience to create diagrams, I will stop here even though I realize many readers probably did not get what I mean from just this textual description.

Design isn't just about aesthetics, its about balancing aesthetics AND functionality. Apple's designers certainly knows this.

This was a poor design choice on their part, not just the design department taking precedent over engineering and customer service. The designers are personally responsible, not just the structure