Like most iPhone announcements in recent years, much of Apple’s bravado at the iPhone 6 launch was centered around thinness. (Yes, thinness is actually a word. I  looked it up.) They proudly proclaimed the iPhone 6 to be the thinnest smart phone in the world!  Unfortunately, they made it so thin that they only had room enough for a 6-hour battery. Your mileage may vary, but my iPhone 6 dies daily at about 3 pm, and lots of my friends have the same problem.

The dumbth didn’t stop with making the iPhone 6 too thin. Team iPhone also made the surface of the phone so slippery that you simply must put it in a case or a condom to have any hope of not dropping it every other time you use it. Think about it: have you ever seen a naked (i.e. case-less) iPhone 6 in the wild without a cracked screen? I have not.

What consumer need or desire was Apple hoping to satisfy by making the iPhone 6 so thin and slippery?  Was the iPhone 5 too thick to fit in your pocket?  Was its surface so rough that people had trouble sliding it in and out of their pocket?  No, and no.  Did they want it to bend, like a leather wallet, to adopt the contour of your butt when it’s in your back pocket?  Probably not.

So then, why on earth is it so thin and so slick?  Here’s how I’m guessing this went down.  Apple probably used an all-male design team for the iPhone 6: a bunch of guys with a “size matters” mentality, who pursued thinness at all costs.  I’ll bet that if they had even one female member on the team she could have shed some light on how ridiculous Apple’s continuing form-over-function pursuit of thinness has become.  She could have pointed out how much better the new iPhone would be if they made room for a battery that can run the new energy-gulping iOS 8 all day long.  Even if she couldn’t make a dent in this deep-rooted thinness disease, maybe she would have convinced team iPhone to avoid the slipperiness problem by helping them realize that the uber-slick surface would make it mandatory for iPhone 6 users to add a cover, robbing the device of its coveted thinness.

These two huge gaffes could have been avoided had Apple asked 100 people (Apple insiders and outsiders) to use the iPhone 6 as their primary smart phone for a week or two prior to locking down the feature set. These two problems would have surfaced very quickly.  Maybe Apple’s penchant for secrecy ahead of a product launch prevented them from getting valuable/necessary feedback that would have enabled them to avoid such foolish mistakes.

Here’s a quick message to Tim or anyone at Apple who is willing listen to some constructive feedback from an Apple fan who is losing confidence in the post-Steve Apple.