It's interesting to see a number of mid-California culturalisms that creep into Apple products. I find it mostly amusing, and only slightly annoying.
There are probably a dozen, at least. Here are a couple of examples off the top of my head:
For a very long time, when you asked Siri the temperature, if it was above 80°, she would add the word "hot" to the end of it. "It's 81 degrees. Hot." Where I was living at the time, 81 degrees meant a light sweater was in order.
When I lived in Chicago, Apple's headphones were worthless in the winter because they were made of plastic that was perfectly bendy in Silicon Valley's climate, but would turn into the equivalent of unweildly coathangars attached to your ears in actual winter conditions. I don't know if that's still the case, as it's what made me switch to wireless headphones years ago.
Even today, where I live in the desert, it's not unusual for a current model iPhone to go into thermal shutdown (with the appropriate warning on the screen) on a perfectly normal spring or summer day, even though I don't use a case. But I expect (hope) that's about something involving electronics that I don't understand.
Most of what you describe is less a California thing than an inherent challenge in building a consumer product that:
A) has mind-boggling amount of compute available wherever you go in an insanely small form factor
B) no active cooling meaning you need to be able to vent the heat out of the CPU/RAM/GPU into the ambient environment
C) battery thermals are impacted by temperature
D) hit a price point that balances what people with pay vs margins and how much value you’re willing to invest in any given feature of the device.
It’s more useful to view this as engineering trade offs that would be made regardless of where the engineers are located physically. The engineers that need it are supplied with ovens and freezers to test out different physical environments. These are trillion dollar companies. The equipment or having staff experience and access the right environment isn’t a challenge nor a blind spot.
Those who are downvoting this, can you please explain yourself? Everything in this post is factual and exactly how engineers design products. What specific aspects of what's being said here is disputable?
Designing a phone is a million tradeoffs that boggles the best of the minds. It's an insanely difficult problem.
I visited Austin in the summertime and after a day of 100+ humid weather, the evenings go down to the lower 80s/upper 70s. It felt like a jacket or a light windbreaker would’ve been needed.
And this is coming from someone who normally lives in California. I guess the body adjusts to the climate of the region after a couple days.
After a few weeks in a very hot place, your body adapts and you get used to it. If the temperature that day suddenly drops 20 degrees to 81, you might need a sweater.
There are probably a dozen, at least. Here are a couple of examples off the top of my head:
For a very long time, when you asked Siri the temperature, if it was above 80°, she would add the word "hot" to the end of it. "It's 81 degrees. Hot." Where I was living at the time, 81 degrees meant a light sweater was in order.
When I lived in Chicago, Apple's headphones were worthless in the winter because they were made of plastic that was perfectly bendy in Silicon Valley's climate, but would turn into the equivalent of unweildly coathangars attached to your ears in actual winter conditions. I don't know if that's still the case, as it's what made me switch to wireless headphones years ago.
Even today, where I live in the desert, it's not unusual for a current model iPhone to go into thermal shutdown (with the appropriate warning on the screen) on a perfectly normal spring or summer day, even though I don't use a case. But I expect (hope) that's about something involving electronics that I don't understand.