Yes, an old original iPhone car charger and…what’s this? The iPhone 3Gs cannot take the same charging accessories as the iPhone original!? So..basically the introduction of something new forces something old to be tossed out? Maybe there’s something that can be done with the old charger, but, I mean…really? Is this “Good Design” or adhering to those Green sensibilities that Apple is so often associated?
Think not.
Epic Fail. Epic, epic fail. I’m slack jawed. Shocking.
Why do I blog this? Something is always wrong. The whole smash barely works, seriously. It’s not uncommon to get Apple fetishists asking me why Nokia does not do things as cool. There are all kinds of good and bad reasons. But, one of the good ones that makes the most sense to me is that Nokia has to design compatibility (which it does not always do well, to be honest) across hundreds of its factories’ products, and with so much stuff out in the world that, every year if you put them all end-to-end? They’d wrap around the world more than once. But, if you make three or so phones and you can’t get them all to use the same charging specifications? That’s just really bad. Imagine, every upgrade has someone tossing some entirely opaque hunk of plastic and electronics into a bin.
(Oh yeah. Rem Koolhaus’ wonderful Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
tossing plastic is fun, or you can try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freecycle_Network, or ebay, craiglist, etc.
i agree with the critique here.
i’m wondering why APPLE would shift to a new charger port? let us assume, for a moment, that they shifted to a new charger port that was both more energy efficient and, for argument’s sake, of superior design (so that we can shrug and say “ok, well, at least it’s because of a better design and not just because they are lazy and needed more space for the microphone, or something like that…”), one would still be inclined to think that APPLE might have been savvy enough to have included some form of adapter.
who makes these kinds of decisions?
Thing of it is, the port fits physically. It snaps in place and all that. There’s some other innards that are so incompatible that, like…the phone’s brain knows enough about the incompatibility to alert the user. So, you gotta figure that the incompatibility was known ahead of time. Like..someone knew — okay, that old stuff? Ain’t gonna work with the new. And no one said, well…dunno if that’s such a good thing for people and their concerns about throwing out things designed to be obsolescent. That might not be good design. But, you know..*shrug*…they did it anyway.
I’m sure there’s an engineering-y rationale here. Perhaps the new guy needs more charging current than the old guy because they replaced the sealed rechargeable battery cell with some new one with a different chemistry or specifications or whatever. But, these are just rationales for decision criteria and that sort of thing.
I’m still dumbfounded about this design.
Apple are starting to piss me off. Actually, they started a while ago.
It appears that the EU is frustrated by the same thing, on a much larger scale. And they may have done something to help
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/agreement-on-cell-phone-chargers-in-eu/