Design should include product testing.
Sure, you may not immediately realise that a material you're using stains wood, but surely that product's been in testing in some people's homes for at least, say, a year? And using materials that have data sheets and which the engineers are familiar with and have used before, or tested thoroughly.
Apple's "design" for just about everything they do just means "designer" (i.e. we had some arty-farty bloke approve it and slapped $500 on the price). Every product they've ever had that I've come across has design problems... starting with the boxes that this stuff comes in (opened an iPhone 6 box today... same problem as the iPad Mini boxes... no fingerholes, internal vacuum on opening, bare glass-up iPhone floating on a tiny sliver of insert right at the top of the box, the first thing to smash if pressure is put on the large flat surface of the box, the first thing to fall out when you have to do the inevitable hard-pull-which-then-gives or slight-shake-to-coax-bottom-of-the-box-away - even nestled barely inside a rounded-corner depression only half the depth of the phone so it slides out perfectly the second you open the box and onto the floor. And then two inches of NOTHING underneath which could happily cushion the expensive product inside and/or something to hold it in place a bit better) and it continues through their product ranges, their accessories, their website, their OS, their GUI.
Everything I touch that has Apple on it... I have a WTF moment within a minute, tops. "Hey, let's put a flat, flush-fitting, non-textured power button on the rear of a large screen that doesn't rotate, so you can't feel it without knowing precisely where it is, and make it so it's in the most inconvenient place possible to actually TURN ON or OFF the machine when you're sitting in front of it."
The epitome of this - their "design" book, where they show off all their amazing "design". Which has a white spine with white text on it that you can't see from any kind of distance, because the indent is so subtle that it's lost in any kind of normal lighting. (Following another Apple trend, the book is £170, which It works out to 50p per page, by the way, or 37p per photo. I can only imagine they printed it out on the most expensive inkjet printer known to man. I don't even pay that for processing my own photos!)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
