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by alwillis 1211 days ago
> I'm sure they'll do it since it saves money.

It’s not about money—we’re talking about pennies here. The Pro series iPhones start at $999.

It’s always been an Apple thing to get rid of as many buttons, ports and cables as possible.

Unlike other smartphones, the iPhone never had a physical keyboard or SD card slots. In the US, new iPhones no longer have SIM slots, only eSIM.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that they may remove the physical buttons—but it should also mean additional functionality of some kind.
2 comments
izacus 1210 days ago
When we're talking about saving money on hardware it's not just the cents on a part that matter - manufacturing time and complexity (do we need a robot for the button? a hole drilled? will it fail? does it has to be repairable? do we need an additional employee on a manufacturing line to install those buttons?) is a bigger weight than just the part itself.

And companies will absolutely build a crappier product for you to save on manufacturing time. You're talking about a company that led the field by removing a headphone jack to make their manufacturing easier.

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jareklupinski 1211 days ago
assuming this number is true: 95 million + iphone 14 units https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-orders-95-million-iphone...

95 million * a few pennies is still $950,000 at least.

As long as that number is more than the salary of the person who was hired to make that button go away, in Apple's eyes that's good news.

You just have to repeat this mentality over the entire ecosystem to get to a trillion: a button removed here, a port removed there, year after year...

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alwillis 1210 days ago
> 95 million * a few pennies is still $950,000 at least. As long as that number is more than the salary of the person who was hired to make that button go away, in Apple's eyes that's good news.

While I appreciate how pedantic HNers can be, it’s meaningless because that’s not how Apple works.

Nobody at Apple is incentivized to shave pennies off the production cost of an iPhone.

This should be obvious in a world with plastic phones with off the shelf, generic components.

A multi-trillion dollar marketcap company doesn’t invest several billion dollars to create their own custom silicon to then change the design of their most profitable product to save a few insignificant cents.

Let’s be real here.

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