I’m surprised at the plastic iPhone, though there is the antenna/signal to consider. Didn’t Apple go aluminum across the line because of recycling? The 50 States with California leading are getting hot on this topic. Apple will have to look at itself as a steward for the raw materials, from manufacture to grave. I would also not doubt there have been major re-designs of the guts for that reason plus others.

Gene,
I want to amend a statement you made about the new iMacs.
” But in that instance, it was a matter of switching the case from plastic to aluminum and sourcing a glossy rather than matte flat panel.”

Although you may not be able to tell by looking at it, this is not correct. My time at the Genius Bar spanned the LCD iMac life cycle including G5 iMac , G5 iMac (isight), Intel iMac, and Intel iMac late 2007 (Aluminum rev 1). I can tell you that each of these products contained major redesigns of the internal workings. The current iMac bears very little resemblance to it’s predecessors when it comes to the gut level working components. Anecdotally, the early field failure rate of the current iMac seemed significantly lower at my store than either of the prior 2 versions. My expectations, just based on how it’s built is that the Aluminum iMac will prove to be more reliable in the long run. In fact, I was so impressed with the changes made to this machine that I had a hard time deciding on it or the Mac Pro. Ultimately I went Pro since I had the 23in Cinema Display and for the type of computing I do the Mac Pro should have an effective useful life of somewhere near a decade for me. Don’t hold me to that.

If any of your readers have aluminum iMacs, I for one, would love to hear how they are holding up. It’s been well over 6 months since I left Apple, and I do miss having my finger on the pulse of the product line, as is the case when you are on the trouble-shooting front lines. After nearly a year of being “out there” the current iMac should be showing it’s stripes.

My point to all of this is really that, yes a year has made a huge difference. However, if you look at just this one product line (and with the exception of the Mini and the AppleTV I feel like you can extend this across all Apple products) you see that this past year is a high point in Apple’s ongoing development. Even if we as consumers have no idea, the designers and technicians in Cupertino simply never quit evaluating, re-evaluating, tweaking, and just plain re-making as needed. The success of the Mac is due to the ongoing strengthening of the Mac line as much as it is to the weaknesses of the competition.

My $.02
Adam