I would like to share some thoughts that I am sure might upset some of you.
In my humble opinion, Apple iPhone might be over-engineered. Don't get me wrong, Ive is a genius but did he overengineered the iPhone? I am not sure what the useful life of these phones are but most of the iPhone 3s and 4s in our family are either given to grand parents that don't really know how to use all the functions or they are given to kids that use them as iPods. But when you look at these phones, they are in grate shape. I wonder what happened to all the S1s and S2s? Are they collecting dust or are they already in recycle bins?
I also wonder how many more iPods would have been sold if the kids did not get these super iPhones passed on to them from their moms and dads. It seems that the iPhone is very complex to make as well so why go with this amazing aluminum cases which is very hard to produce if some of the consumers are ok with flimsy plastic S3s?
I believe Apple needs to decide if they are after the market share or not. If they are, then give the customers the ability to choose between a cheap plastic phone with big screens in different colors and still provide the high end product to more sophisticated customers.
From Wiki:
Overengineering (or over-engineering) is the designing of a product to be more robust or complicated than what is necessary for its application, either (charitably) to ensure sufficient factor of safety, sufficient functionality, or because of design errors. Overengineering can be desirable when safety or performance on a particular criterion is critical, or when extremely broad functionality is required, but it is generally criticized from the point of view of value engineering as wasteful. As a design philosophy, such overcomplexity is the opposite of the less is more school of thought (and hence a violation of the KISS principle and parsimony).
Overengineering generally occurs in high-end products or specialized market criteria, and takes various forms. In one form, products are overbuilt, and have performance far in excess of needs (a family sedan that can drive at 300 km/h, or a home video cassette recorder with a projected lifespan of 100 years), and hence are more expensive, bulkier, and heavier than necessary. Alternatively, they may be overcomplicated – the design may be far more complicated than is necessary for its use, such as a modern text editor asking whether files should be saved in ASCII or EBCDIC format. Overcomplexity reduces usability of the product by the end user, and can decrease productivity of the design team due to the need to build and maintain all the features.
A related issue is market segmentation – making different products for different market segments. In this context, a particular product may be more or less suited for a particular market segment, and may be over- or under- engineered relative to an application. |
