With those new iPhone 5c cases, clearly someone at Apple fell asleep at the wheel

“I was enjoying the iPhone 5c web page where you can experiment with the phone/case color combos,” Ken Segall writes for Observatory. “It’s very nicely done.”

“Suddenly I was aghast — a chunk of the word ‘iPhone’ can be seen through one of the holes in the case,” Segall writes. “While some will say “big deal,” those who love Apple’s taste and values will feel like they got punched in the stomach. Clearly someone fell asleep at the wheel. It not only looks like a mistake — it looks ugly. And ugly has no place in Apple’s world. ”

Segall writes, “You can either write it off as a momentary lapse, or you can take it as terrible warning sign. Or maybe this just proves that while Jony Ive is in charge of hardware design and software interface, he doesn’t get invited to the accessory meetings.”

Much more about the positives and negatives from Apple’s September 10th event in the full article here.

John Brownlee writes for FastCompany, “Apple is known for its rigorous, iterative testing process. For every product Apple releases, it likes to brag a hundred products get thrown into the bin because some small, niggling detail was wrong. How, then, could the iPhone 5C get manufactured in bulk without anyone at Apple ever actually putting one on an iPhone 5C to see how it looked? Because that’s the only explanation that makes sense to me considering what the iPhone 5C case looks like when used with an actual iPhone 5C.”

Brownlee writes, “Here’s my specific complaint. On the back of every iPhone, Apple prints some text… If the iPhone 5C case merely hid this text, I’d have no problem with the design. Nor would I have much of an issue if a little window had been left open for it, or at least the word “iPhone.” They could even have moved the polkadot grid to the top of the case instead of the bottom and I’d be fine. What is mystifying to me is the way the polkadot grid of the iPhone 5C case half-obscures, half-exposes all of this text. It looks terrible, like a Playskool fishnet stocking that has been sloppily pulled over a sign.”

“So when you put on an iPhone 5C case, your iPhone doesn’t say iPhone on the back. The ‘iP’ and ‘e’ are obscured, as is the very top of the ‘h.’ So instead of ‘iPhone,’ it says ‘non,'” Brownlee writes. “Which is exactly what some token Frenchman working within Apple should have said when he saw this thing actually pulled onto an iPhone 5C for the first time.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Jobs would have caught this one, too.

Apple’s fanatical attention to detail needs work and vigilance lest it be lost forever.

Attention to even the most minute detail is why Apple stands apart. Lose that and you’ve lost it all.

It’s a slippery slope, Apple. Pay attention!

Here’s a 5-minute quick and dirty revision we whipped up. Compare it to Apple’s half-assery:

 
(Of course, there is additional text and FCC info on the bottom of real iPhones that would need to be addressed, but we’re not getting paid to fix Apple’s mistakes and you get the idea anyway. If we spent another whole 5 minutes on it, it would be better than Apple’s case currently.)