D’oh! Samsung S7’s industrial design is as lazy as ever

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doh-samsung-s7s-industrial-design-is-as-lazy-as-ever-image-cultofandroidcomwp-contentuploads201602Samsung-Galaxy-S7-gold-png
Galaxy S7 in gold.
Photo: Samsung
Galaxy S7 in gold. Photo: Samsung
Galaxy S7 in gold. Photo: Samsung

Samsung may have “borrowed” Apple’s Upgrade Program for its new Galaxy S7 handset, but one thing it seemingly can’t copy is Apple’s perfectionist approach to design.

New photos popping up online highlight how Samsung just can’t seem to afford the ruler it would require to get all of its Galaxy S7 ports, microphones, speakers and jacks to properly line up with one another.

Check out the photos below.

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gs7vip6s-alignment-lines

While the exact placement of these components isn’t exactly going to make or break the success of Samsung’s new smartphones, as iMore‘s Rene Ritchie points out, it does speak to a bigger issue at Samsung: the degree of care that’s put into its handsets.

Ritchie writes: “For me, as a customer, knowing that Apple had the consideration and took the time and effort to align their hardware speaks to the overall quality of their work. It reassures me that the same consideration and effort were likely spent making sure not a millimeter nor milliamp of battery space was wasted, not a nanometer of die, not a gap left around the screen, or a dead zone in the capacitive sensor.”

In this way, it’s a bit like the old “M&M clause” in Van Halen’s music tour contract, with one stipulation reading: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” As has been revealed in the years since, the item was not just designed to be a pain in the ass, but to make sure that venues were paying attention to all of the notes in the band’s rider — including far more important technical specifications.

As Dan and Chip Heath write in the book Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work:

“David Lee Roth was no diva; he was an operations master. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention—whether they’d read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. He needed a way, in other words, to snap out of “mental autopilot” and realize that a decision had to be made. In Van Halen’s world, a brown M&M was a tripwire.”

The same could be argued for proper port placement on a handset.

Source: iMore

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