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by epaga·5y ago·view on hn ↗
A few years ago, my iPad suddenly developed a crack in the glass all on its own. It was just sitting there on the table, I heard a quiet "crack" sound, and there it was: a small crack all across one corner of the display.

I can only assume it was some kind of temperature, pressure issue of some kind? I brought it to the Apple Store, told my story, got the weird looks, but they determined it wasn't fall damage nor me dropping something onto the iPad, so they shrugged their shoulders and replaced it.

After that, I would not be so fast to accuse these people of closing their cases on Doritos.

3 comments
You were looking at it wrong. ;)

I've been enjoying X1 Carbons for nine years now. In fact I've still got my first one, from 2012, which works great as my personal one - even though I've gotten two new ones from works since.

I love the matte displays. They're not as shiny, but in the real world reflections from lights are simply diffused. Oh and they'll likely not shatter either.

Milspec ratings may be marketing speech but they've really been tested for dust and water integression - keyboard actually has a design to channel water spills away from the most fragile bits.

I've never tested it, fortunately, but it's still good to know _some_ manufacturers design for other things than getting their customers to replace their products ASAP as the warranty runs out, also (on top of the worst possible motherboard layouts) by making it as hard as humanly possible to repair third party.

Rossman did a pretty good video on how Apple put the 52v LCD powerline just next to the 1.8v CPU one; that's next level genius right there. Story link https://www.rossmanngroup.com/how-do-i-fix-a-black-screen-on...

X1 Carbon still has pretty terrible battery life compared to say an M-1 Mac. I used to be a thinkpad fan having had T450s personally and then a X1-Carbon/X1-Extreme for work. While the T450s experience was mostly good the latter experience convinced me to not get another thinkpad as my next laptop because:

1. The X-1 Carbon light as it was had terrible battery life of a few hours. 2. The X-1 Extreme fans are like jet engines and often on even when I'm not actively doing anything and my account is locked.

Got the cheapest base M-1 Mac and it is dead silent, has great battery life and amazing performance. Plus the price is killer too.

I'll grant that the battery life isn't terrific on the Carbon. Also the M1 CPU was a masterstroke of engineering by Apple.

(Having said that my new Nano is working a lot better than the previous Gen6 - seeing 7 hours remaining on 50%, with very light use, and definitely a whole lot better than the OG which has a 6 year old battery - got a refreshed after 3y, it was never great, and now says thank you after an hour or so).

I really don't like the Mac OS, but that's just a personal preference - and can appreciate the above points separately. I know thousands of Mac users feel the same way about Windows; I'm just set in my Win10/WSL2 patterns now. :)

Glass is weird. Improperly annealed glass can spontaneously break due to little more than atmospheric oxygen and water. Its breaking stress is a function of time, but on a human timescale: seconds to days!

Check out the lower figure on page 9: https://glassproperties.com/references/MechPropHandouts.pdf

A sliding glass door in the foyer of an office I worked in once just spontaneously turned itself into a pile of glass granules one day. I'm led to believe it's not a particularly infrequent occurrence.
I'll never get a glass top table after a friend's coffee table did the same. Yeah it was likely chipped or damaged or abused by years of coasters and glasses and controllers and books dropped on it, but one day we were minding our own business in the kitchen when we heard an unholy crash, come to find the tabletop in shards on the living room floor.
there's a YouTube video of someone making uranium glass that had this exact issue come up. Very interesting to see in practice
I think it was mostly during the cooling when the internal stresses are relaxing. NileRed - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGw6fXprV9U
Heat a long, half filled milk glass in the microwave. Take it out and then pourfrozen-cold milk from the freezer. Watch your glass slicing near cleanly in half by itself and making a mess in the kitchen table and the floor.