Doesn't have to be, lots of plastic to choose from. You can have it feeling like leather and durable, look at the 2012 Nexus 7.
Virtually no complains about it's ability to last via google seatch.
Does the iPhone 5c feel like shit compared to machined metal?
It doesn't, for once Apple actually lured some good plastic engineers into
the void and dared to use good plastic, clearly an "alloy" mix and not just their old shitty trick - *raw* polycarbonate.
Apple has been historically shit, using plastic.
Original ibook:
Macbook White:
(white ibooks also tended to have silly cracks like this on silly places)
White Unibody Macbooks:
(beginners mistake doing the cutout like that without excess material or extra structure to withstand the extra stress, happens to every of those too, so they clearly just didn't test them)
Iphone 3G/3GS:
(not as frequent to see, those are injection problems+pressure coupled with weak points in the structure/part, though)
All this because of the type of plastic they used, older Cube G4's
also cracked a lot - I've seen it. Comes with how hard and not heat resistant the plastic is, also has to do with how material gets injected and is therefore not uniform.
Seeing how much it happened on the ibook/white macbooks and not anywhere else when it comes to portable computers one can only conclude it's Apple that has been doing it wrong, and rather than resolve it they chose to run with aluminium because their userbase was loving how premium it felt. Plastic has gone wrong for them and no one else on such a steady count.
then they went metal (originally titanium who broke a lot on the hinges), then aluminium - no more cracks and unbelievably people didn't complain of the fact it was done from aluminium, stuff dropped that warped into a different shape was due to misuse, so there was cause and effect even if the damn things (on the ipad and macbook case) were more fragile than they could be otherwise, end user still felt he did that to it, and effectively he did.
But that doesn't change the fact that that piece of object always wanted to be plastic or something that can witstand some shock and go back to it's original form, not aluminium, hell no.
Might I also add that from my experience with Apple wireless keyboards
those pieces of shit always come bent from factory, I went through five of them until I said fuck this and did the "bend test" on reverse and unbended them. I'm paying extra for shit that tilts.
Apple supposedly follows the line of design of Dieter rams:
But
Dieter Rams 10 principles include:
Good Design Is Honest - Nothing honest about using aluminium.
Good Design Is Long-lasting - Apple not so secretly wants their products to last 3 years.
Then it gets worse, apple is minimalist in their design lines, this wasn't invented by Dieter rams, it's cold design (as opposed to hot design, which overdesigns stuff and makes them tiring... like angular sports cars)
Anyway, this line of design has been, since 1900 or so all about "let the object be what it wants to be". A macbook doesn't want to have a glass front, it's no plasma nor tactile so the glass front is just a huge mirror nobody asked for. Aluminium is a similar fuck up.
Dudes are a disgrace to the design language they supposedly represent. Honesty in design is what lead us to Iron being used up front on shit like the eiffel tower or concrete being used on countless buildings not trying to hide it.
Before, one wanted those evidences hidden, metal structures behind rocks or bricks, concrete behind finishes that weren't as long lasting.
And that's silly. But it's what Apple has been stubbornly doing for years now. Painting plastic and feigning it's metal is silly (what the competition did in the late 1990's/early 2000's), using metal is sillier (what apple did).You'd be amazed at the plastic industry these days, they have plastic that is more resistant to fire than metal.
You can make a plastic part look as premium as you want it to be, as durable as it can be too.A Heatsink doesn't justify the whole computer to be aluminium. And they could make just the central part to be aluminium.
Last White macbook did it:
As you can see - not plastic.
More, if they wanted it to function as a heatsink primarily, they would have to design the laptop with more indentations than they currently do. That's the furthest thing from their mind, but that's still the reason they went with a metal base for unibody white macbook, and that's fine, because it's one part - unlikely to bend at that. Corners et all want to be plastic, and they are.
