41–50 of 78 posts
You can always make something more beautiful. So how do you know when to stop?
There really isn’t an objectively correct answer. You’re basically asking what is good taste?
I think this is one of the things a good mentor can help you with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a job wire-wrapping circuit boards in college. I expended effort to lay out the wires so they formed a neat pattern. Why spend time doing that? It made it easy to check for errors in wiring, as then the pattern would be disrupted. The end result was I almost never made a wirewrap mistake, and the work was appreciated. I also soldered components on, and also took care to orient the resisters all the same way, an…
Which would all be very useful if Apple actually did board-level repairs and not logic board swaps. But they don't, so it is all just for show.
Apple device innards are made to appeal to people who have no idea about hardware engineering / repair. For the rest of us the design just screams wankery. No one who has practical experience wants to deal with black solder mask, adhesives, non-uniform screw sizes / driver kinds, lack of repair docs, proprietary ICs and underdesigned charge circuits. A macbook's innards isn't a beautiful piece of wood. It's a gaudy e…
Contrast that with a Mercedes I used to have of similar vintage. It had expensive parts sabotaged by being bolted to inexpensive parts. It was difficult to assemble correctly. Money was spent in the wrong places. I had a long list of complaints about the erratic engineering in it.
For example, it had sodium-cooled valves, something one finds only on a race engine. They are used for cooling. The values slid into bronze valve guides. The bronze valve guides were pressed into aluminum heads. The trouble was, aluminum expands at twice the rate of bronze. So when the engine got a little hot, the valve guides would come loose, and you'd have to rebuild the cylinder head. The sodium-cooled feature was completely sabotaged by those valve guides. A proper design would have mechanical retention of the valve guides, and not rely on a press fit.
It is a little funny that car manufacturers have figured this out in a silly way. Basically, a lot of new cars are very simple and elegant when you open the hood, showing clearly fluid reservoirs, a sculpted engine, and some elegant plastic covers to tie it all together. ... but basically the plastic covers are a "second hood" with the ugliness pushed down one level. I will say that powermac G* and mac pro systems ha…
Somewhere in hell, there are a bunch of automotive engineers doing difficult maintenance tasks which they designed into vehicles such as bleeding the brakes on Ford Escorts, or spark plug changes on AMC Javelins (it actually required unbolting the engine and using a hoist to get at the last sparkplug).
Apple device innards are made to appeal to people who have no idea about hardware engineering / repair. For the rest of us the design just screams wankery. No one who has practical experience wants to deal with black solder mask, adhesives, non-uniform screw sizes / driver kinds, lack of repair docs, proprietary ICs and underdesigned charge circuits. A macbook's innards isn't a beautiful piece of wood. It's a gaudy e…
I've had an interesting experience taking apart my 72 Dodge and putting it back together again. It's clear that there was a great deal of thought put into its design. It's simple, easy to take apart, easy to fix, easy to put back together. The money is only put where it is needed. Frankly, it's first class engineering. Contrast that with a Mercedes I used to have of similar vintage. It had expensive parts sabotaged b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a job wire-wrapping circuit boards in college. I expended effort to lay out the wires so they formed a neat pattern. Why spend time doing that? It made it easy to check for errors in wiring, as then the pattern would be disrupted. The end result was I almost never made a wirewrap mistake, and the work was appreciated. I also soldered components on, and also took care to orient the resisters all the same way, an…
Which would all be very useful if Apple actually did board-level repairs and not logic board swaps. But they don't, so it is all just for show.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which would all be very useful if Apple actually did board-level repairs and not logic board swaps. But they don't, so it is all just for show.
I dunno man, Apple's PCB designs are incredibly space efficient. Compare the sandwich PCB of a modern iPhone against the main board of something like a Samsung Galaxy. Apple is sweating out every cubic millimetre it can, while Samsung is perfectly fine with a load of empty green PCB all over the place.
As a working furnituremaker, it depends on the client's budget. I try to get a sense of budget early in the design process so that I can both provide the best bang for the buck for the client and also a uniform level of quality throughout the piece. If push comes to shove, though, I'm not going to turn a job down because there isn't budget for a frame and panel back. I'm not going to turn someone's work away because…
The same applies to software: it's common to criticize someone's work without knowing the context or the story behind the system. The typical triangle dilemma is budget, time, and quality.
This quote comes up often in SJ biographies or anecdotes and they universally attribute it purely to aesthetic concerns. Admittedly the man cared quite a lot about "beauty", but I've always thought this was more about the caring and less about the beauty. To spend time making something most people never see look just as good as the things they do see you have to care quite a lot. This care begets a wide range of (usu…
A real estate agent walked through my house I was putting for sale. He examined the switch plates carefully. I asked why. He replied that a good craftsman lined up the slots in the top screw and bottom screw, and this was a "tell" that he'd done a good job.