[giantrobot]

> Manufacturers like Samsung and Apple are delivering what is convenient for the manufacturers--what the consumer actually wants is a second level consideration.

Apple and Samsung manufacture hundreds of millions of devices per quarter. They have to optimize for the manufacture of devices. They couldn't achieve their production volume without some manufacturing-friendly concessions. It is extremely difficult to manufacture hundreds of millions of complex things.

There's 31.5m seconds in a year. If it took one second to build an iPhone, Apple could only manufacture 31.5m of them. To meet the demand for hundreds of millions in a year Apple needs to build half a dozen per second. So shaving a half second off manufacturing time by using glue instead of screws is not just a consumer durability win but simply enables their production at the necessary rates.

But to suggest that manufacturing needs override consumer demands is just silly. There's no need to produce hundreds of millions of devices without consumer demand. I don't see how you can suggest Apple and Samsung produce only convenient to manufacture phones when both are offering incredibly complex devices. If they were only interested in devices that were convenient to manufacture they'd but the BOM by a third, source only the shittiest quality screens with huge defect rates, and allow the sloppiest fit and finish while still shipping something that didn't immediately fall apart or explode.

Both companies (and many other manufacturers) are shipping tens of millions of extremely high precision manufacture and high complexity devices festooned with gewgaws and features. There's nothing easy about their manufacture. They're selling features first and then figuring out how to manufacture them at scale.