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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • I don’t know what it is but I’ll read my posts before posting and then come back later and it will have an obvious autocorrect error I missed.

    It pisses me right off how bad predictions have gotten on every keyboard. SwiftKey and Swype were damn near perfect at one point and now I swear it purposely chooses the wrong word.


  • Yes, surface material and colour can affect the thermal performance of a device. However when it comes to a smartphone with different colours this difference is almost certainly negligible.

    Heat is transmitted by 3 methods, conduction, convection and radiation. For radiation heat transfer there are two properties that affect how much heat is transmitted/absorbed by the surface, temperature and emissivity. Generally darker colours have higher emissivity than lighter colours or reflective surfaces, but different colours of a phone are going to be close assuming they are the same material and radiation is a minor component in cooling a phone.



  • Because that is what people are willing to pay for them.

    A lot of those types of goods are priced extremely high compared to the actual cost to manufacture. Lighting is another example of this. You are paying for the design and brand in many cases even though they aren’t built better or with better materials compared to a more moderately priced faucet. High end faucets do have some more expensive components in them than cheaper ones. For example, orings are replaced by ceramic cartridges that feel better. Those changes maybe account for a couple dollars of manufacturing cost though.

    It can be frustrating knowing how much stuff costs to manufacture, so often I look at items like this and get frustrated because I know the manufacturer is selling for >10x what it cost to make.










  • This is a topic that could be a novel for how much there is to consider, but in the end it comes down to resources and companies trying to choose what it best for the company overall. For a company to do anything, they are giving up many other things they could be doing instead. Whether it is limited budgets, limited personnel, or company priorities every decision made is always a tradeoff that means you aren’t doing something else.

    Most companies prioritize releasing new product so they can start getting revenue from it as soon as possible. A new product has the largest potential market, and thus makes shareholders happy to see revenue coming in. The sales from a new product are the easiest ones in most product’s lifecycle. Additionally. releasing new products helps keep you ahead of competitors. So ongoing maintenance work is de-prioritized over working on new things.

    The goal of testing is to simulate potential use cases of a product and ensure that it will work as expected when the customer has the product in their hands. It is impossible to fully test a product in a finite amount of time, so tests are created that expose flaws within a reasonable search space of the expected uses. If an issue is found then it needs to be evaluated about whether it is worth fixing and when. There are many factors that affect this, for example:

    • How much would it cost to fix?
    • How much time would it take to fix?
    • Does it need to be fixed for launch or can it be a running change?
    • How many customers are actually going to see the issue? Is it just a small annoyance for them or will it cause returns/RMAs?
    • Is it within the expected use case of the product?
    • Can we mitigate it in software/firmware instead of changing hardware?
    • Is it a compliance/regulatory issue?
    • Would this bring in new customers for the product?
    • Was this done a specific way for a reason?

    Unfortunately, after considering all this the result is often that it isn’t worth the effort to fix something, but it is considered.