The user ergonomic testing argument doesn’t really make sense. Usually if a product fails a test, then they redesign it until it passes, not go ahead and sell it and assume customers will buy something else to compensate for the failure. Because then what was the point of the test? It didn’t matter if it passed or failed if they sell it anyway.
Yes, I believe it makes sense. It is not intended to use these phones without a case. Nobody I know does that.
Apple can't and won't offer a wide range of cases, that's for other players in the market to do.
For example, Mercedes also doesn't make the tires for their cars. They're not intended to be driven without tires. They only put tires on so that it can be shipped to the customer. But often the customer has to buy other tires right away to drive it off from the dealer in a safe and legal way. Just like apple puts a cardbox box around their phones.
These unergonomic phones are being sold because the market overwhelmingly demands big non-one-handed phones made of smooth premium materials.
These are not premium materials. Aluminium is a soft, cheap metal. The glass for the front is also not scratch resitant, e.g. compared with the glass you find on a premium automatic watch.
When demand is this strong, and people are willing to pay these prices, companies will zip their mouths and sell it to them. Of course they know it’s not ergonomic and they know people are going to use cases. But acknowledgement is not the same as intention.
Currently we have a duopoly, that lacks a proper market. Smartphones lack innovation and the customers buy them not because they really want them, but because they fit at least some of their needs. It is up to the customer to fix the shortcomings of the manufacturer, often with the help of third parties. That ranges from cases to cloud storage solutions, as both icloud and gdrive have a plethora of bugs and are inferior to solutions like owncloud/nextcloud.
Compared to the purchasing power, smartphones are now cheaper than the PDA + internet phones from over 20 years ago.
In fact, they only stand to profit from repairs and sales of replacement phones. I’m imagining this from a company’s perspective.
But that adds to the TCO, hence people will buy cases or phones like the fairphone with are cheap and easy to fix.
If you're product is unneccessarily expensive because it tends to break under normal use, then people will go for the alternative.
Two, from a human perspective, most designers who are proud of their work don’t typically like to have their creations covered up by cheap plastic, so it doesn’t seem like something they would intend.
Smartphones nowadays all look the same. There is no design involved.
We are not in the 90ies, where you could distinguish a Siemens from a Nokia from a Bosch with a simple glance.
Wouldn’t less premium be more ideal then? Wouldn’t it be better to just have a phone made out of the same material as the case?
Ideally, it would be made out of rubber or a similar material with a protective screen over the screen. Just look at other premium handheld devices where money plays little role, often targeted at industrial users that use it the whole day, not consumers that let it sit around for most of the time.
However, the case gets replace more often than the phone. But if it's shipped firmly attached to the phone, it's harder to customize it for various use(r) cases. And when the case needs replacement, it wouldn't be as easy as just peeling it off and attaching the next one from Aliexpress. Well, perhaps for the fairphone, but probably not for the iphone.
