Flutterby™! : The mystery of crap interiors

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The mystery of crap interiors

2013-08-26 16:09:41.838054+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

Two stolen from Violet Impudence:

The Truth About Cars: Inside GM: Mystery of Crap Interiors Solved:

Our agent says that all the vehicles the execs drove were “ringers.” More specifically, the engineers would tweak the test vehicles to remove any hint of imperfection. “They use a rolling radius machine to choose the best tires, fix the headliner, tighten panel and interior gaps, remove shakes and rattles, repair bodywork—everything and anything.”

Did the execs know this? “Nope. And nobody was going to tell them . . . As far as they knew, the cars were exactly as they would be coming off the line. That’s why Bob Lutz thinks GM’s products are world-class. The ones he’s driven are.”

Which is referenced from Benedict Evans: Nexus phones are ringers. This article tries to draw the analogy that the stock Android experience, running straight Android rather than crapware infested vendor tweaked Android, is the same experience as those tweaked and polished cars. I'm not sure the comparison totally holds up, but in my experience with this Samsung Galaxy S4 vs my older HTC MyTouch Slide, there's a lot of cruft and fail that's been added on that needs to be removed to make the user experience better.

It's amazing how much testing isn't being done on these modern billion dollar products, how many little rough edges still exist.

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comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2013-08-28 18:10:30.949012+00 by: ebradway

I think the problem is Google's marketing of the Nexus 4. It's a device on par with the iPhone 5 but was half the price unlocked. Google just cut the price on the Nexus 4 to $199. And that's for an unlocked device! I have the 16GB version but rarely need the extra storage. I use T-Mobile's $30/month plan (5GB at 4G, 100 minutes talk). Over two years, that works out to less than $1000 for a damn good phone.