'iPhone 5 is so easily scratched we just can't get them out the door'
Fiendish mobe impossible to make in any numbers
Foxconn boss Terry Gou has said that the iPhone 5 is tricky to make and that he is shipping out "far fewer" than Apple has asked for.
Gou, boss of Hon Hai, parent company of Foxconn, said he was struggling to keep up with orders for the iPhone 5, in remarks at a local economic forum reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Market demand is very strong, but we just can't really fulfill Apple's requests.
Gou said that the delay was because the latest iPhone was hard to make, but wouldn't explain which part in particular was causing the problem. It's been previously suggested that a lot of iPhone 5s get turned back by quality control inspectors, perhaps because they get visibly scratched during assembly.
The complicated ultra-thin screen that embeds capacitive touch sensors in between pixels is one reason that has been given before for the difficulty of manufacturing the iPhone 5, and the newly buffed slate-coloured back is cited as another.
Apple's sales for the iPhone 5 have not been reported since the Apple announced sales of 5 million after the device's opening weekend.
It's not the first time we've heard the line that iPhone sales have been held back because it's so innovative - see this report from October. ®
COMMENTS
Design goals 101...
1) Design must be manufacturable
2) Design must be sellable
3) Design must be profitable
Did apple forget #1?
The only IPhone5s I've seen have all been encased in 5mm thick protective cases, the owners desparate to protect them. So what's the point of Apple trying to make them into items of jewellery if they end up hidden behind layers of hideous rubber and plastic?
Re: Design goals 101...
[pedantry begins]
Aluminium, as any fule kno, is very soft in its pure state. Suitably heat treated and alloyed, it is quite hard. Unfortunately the cycle of manufacturing, machining while cold, and then heat treating, is rather expensive.
You get good results by bending sheet aluminium, which is why most cases which use it (like the Asus on which I'm typing this) use sheet metal. But then you cannot claim the thing is made out of a single piece of metal.
You can make the surface of aluminium harder with heavy anodising but then you cannot get the sharp edges.
This is why other, more sensible manufacturers make their mobile devices out of a magnesium alloy chassis with a suitable polymer injection moulded around it. Strong, light, withstands deformation, just not quite as pretty.
Sympathy for Apple? Nonexistent. Sympathy for Jonathan Ives? Zilch. British industry used to be overloaded with products which were supposed to show off engineering cleverness rather than be well designed from a functional point of view, like the awful Austin Rover integrated gearboxes, the dreadful Enfield drive that was the bane of so many glass fibre boats, Concorde, Evening Star (the locomotive), any number of motorcycle designs, and the Doxford marine engine. On the other hand you had a company which made stuff which worked practically forever by simply concentrating on the best possible engineering. Of all of these, only the last (Rolls-Royce) is still around. I wonder why?
Hi, I'm trying to reconcile the headline
'iPhone 5 is so easily scratched we just can't get them out the door'
with the article
Gou... ...wouldn't explain which part in particular was causing the problem
If Anna Leach doesn't write the headline, it doesn't seem fair to saddle her article with it.
Just make sure that when you fondle it...
...you wear silken gloves, and that you're prepared for it to go off in your hand. Same goes for the iPhone too.
Just call it a design feature
Each iPhone has a mathemtically unique fingerprint of fractal generated surface features which make it special just to you.
