if Apple of all companies -- after decades of moral high standing about polished user experience and charging a premium for their brand -- is shaving pennies off the cost by removing physical buttons ... that's a shame!
if 3nm chip manufacturing receives so much interest -- why not a fraction of that investment in engineering more durable, lasting, and cheap physical components too.
years later Apple might be the company doing "radical innovation", being "uncompromising when it comes to UX" and add a physical button and charge a premium for it
> is shaving pennies off the cost by removing physical buttons
These are not pennies at scale. These are 9-10 figure costs at scale.
Just using the iPhone 15 Max as an example [0], your BoM is around $550-650 (including labor), but sells for $1,200.
50% margins are not great, especially because the the BoM grew from $400-500 for the iPhone 14 Max (Edit: "The parts costs for the Max series ranged between $400 and $450 during the 2018 to 2021 period", not iPhone 14), which also sold for $1,200.
A 50% decrease in margins on the flagship phone is a massive decrease in margins, and it's most likely similar across all Apple SKUs.
Every single component if you're in the hardware space costs money and overhead to manage, and supply chain issues can push back releases.
This is why companies are moving towards digital displays. It's the same principle why EVs can be more reliable than ICE vehicles due to less parts
As an (I presume) Engineer drill the following mantra into your head: MARGINS, MARGINS, MARGINS.
This is what gives you your paycheck in the environment we are in today.
> if 3nm chip manufacturing receives so much interest -- why not a fraction of that investment in engineering more durable, lasting, and cheap physical components too.
3nm chip manufacturing is expensive and costs money. That money needs to come from somewhere. Turns out, a portion of that budget came from the budget for buttons.
> The 15 Pro Max's cost-to-price ratio, or the cost of the parts divided by the phone's price, came to 47%, a 1 percentage point increase from the 14 Pro Max
Your claim is contradicted by the article you linked.
I can tell you having been responsible for the aspects of a TINY scale in comparison button, about 30,000 units a year, that buttons are fucking hard man! It's so much harder to make a button than an entire PCB. You wouldn't think so, but you need to be GOOD at injection molding, stresses, DFM (design for manufacturing), cost analysis, generally know ALL the options to produce something, production tolerances and more just to talk to the actual experts in those fields.
Other poster is correct, it's a big deal, and it's why screens have replaced buttons in cars. It's so much cheaper to make a screen. Which is funny because as an EE, I judge a new vehicle first by how many buttons they still have.
As an electronics hobbyist who operates at an even smaller scale (where the cost of a pushbutton itself is trivial), I could not agree more strongly with this. Physical buttons are, counterintuitively, an absolutely massive pain in the butt from a design point of view. I tend to use touch sensitive pads instead. It makes the firmware more complex but the physical design so much simpler.
if 3nm chip manufacturing receives so much interest -- why not a fraction of that investment in engineering more durable, lasting, and cheap physical components too.
years later Apple might be the company doing "radical innovation", being "uncompromising when it comes to UX" and add a physical button and charge a premium for it