Comment by carabiner
5 years ago
They prioritize form over function in their Lightning cables. Inadequate strain relief is a far more consequential problem in an airplane wing. I can't see Apple practices being applicable to mission critical fields like transport engineering (with high regulatory burden). They're different worlds. Apple also simply has a huge amount of money from hardware and software (App store etc.). I suspect they're far looser with resources for their teams than Boeing, whose mechanical/aerospace engineers have salaries a fraction of most Apple engineers.
Edit: Overarching point is that Apple has a focus on aesthetics that is far less important in aerospace engineering, and has no experience on ensuring human safety.
Apple isn’t perfect, no one is.
But it’s better than almost everyone else, including Boeing because it does one thing very well. It doesn’t ship products unless they meet a high bar. It never puts schedule first over product quality.
Example: original iPad was canceled by Steve Jobs because he didn’t think it was good enough. Instead he had the team enter the Apple phone competition, where it best out the iPod team with its design for the iPhone. Five years later they got to apply all their improvements to make and release a much better iPad.
Apple canceled their AirPower charging mat rather than release something that didn’t meet their standards, even after pre-announcing it.
When I ran an product development organization, I made it clear that QA wasn’t responsible for our schedules. Sure they needed to test well and quickly to ensure that Product Management had the necessary info to make good release decisions. But their job was journalistic, to fairly and honestly report all issues. It was up to the engineers to find ways to meet quality goals in our schedules.
Boeing had test pilots misleading regulators to hide known issues. That’s the exact opposite of a test Organisation should be run.
Yes, but they make consumer products and not airplanes. Why would you assume they’d build an airplane the same way they’d build a cheap cable?