“For a product like the new Square Reader – a sleek update to the familiar credit card-swiping dongle that’s nearly twice as thin as its predecessor – most of the design work is out of sight. It exists in the meticulous selection and arrangement of the components inside–the delicate stacking of circuitry and silicon that make our gadgets go,” Kyle Vanhemert reports for Wired. “In this unseen world, every millimeter shaved is a victory. And in terms of getting tiny things even tinier, the new Square Reader makes for an excellent case study.”
“Jesse Dorogusker is used to working tiny. Before becoming Square’s VP of Hardware, he spent eight years leading the accessories division at Apple, heading the development of the works-both-ways Lightning connector,” Vanhemert reports. “With the new Reader, he had the chance to take a crack at a flagship product. Sitting in a booth in Square’s immaculate new offices, huddled over a piece of paper with a dozen half-assembled Readers taped to it like bugs pinned to a science museum display, he detailed the challenge for Wired.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
“…twice as thin as its predecessor…”
This butchery of relative valuations has to cease! There is no such thing as “twice as thin.” The proper nomenclature is “half as thick.” This is only one of a wide range of meaningless statements that is assigned meaning by the ignorant.
Thin used as a negative value of width makes sense..
Marketing and English rarely see eye to eye.
Ah ,finally singing the praise of miniaturization…
Maybe the pseudo writers can now appreciate Apple’s iPhone size being the epitome of miniaturization vs. the can’t fit in any pocket oversized clumsy POS that Samscom makes.
Does anyone think Apple should just buy out Square and create Apple-branded card readers and various other types card reading devices for retail deployment?
Emphatically NO!
Because reading the magnetic stripe instead of the chip on a credit card are so much unsafer against fraud that it is no longer accepted as payment method by issuing banks in most part of the world except the USA.
For example, the credit card reader at Apple Store’s in Europe can only read the chip, not the magnetic stripe, if it wasn’t the Apple would have to take full economic responsibility for the transaction, the bank zero.
It rained all day that night…