You’re right. Sorry for getting my post-7pm arithmetic skills on you. However, my point still stands. ‘Close’ is not ‘conforming’ to the standard.

I didn’t know Euro and Farad were related :O

I don’t know of any modern paste that is electrically conductive

I wasn’t trying to imply that. When I said “frying the chip” I meant through bad thermal coupling.

contrary to the old belief, you can’t use too much.

You’re the first person to suggest that, and frankly, I find that counterintuitive. Everything isolates if it’s thick enough. However I’ll also look into that someday and see if there’s something to it. Thanks again.

I’m using my old Nokia to this day. And why? Because “suddenly being stopped even after a few feet” wasn’t “difficult to mitigate” for Nokia. In the last 15 years this thing must have survived more than 100 drops, sometimes down a staircase. When I pick up the back cover, the battery and the SIM card, it’s as good as new.

You transport the dishes, sure, but do you eat from them while standing? I was specifically referring to handheld devices.

Uh, not really what planned obsolescence is.

You’re right, but I couldn’t think of a short term for this. I found ‘bad’ design too broad, and it’s not ‘hostile’ design either.

I’m German. If the pages are a comfortable size, why does no publisher ever use A5 or A4 paper? To quote an answer I gave to another comment here:

Let’s check. I grabbed four random German books from my bookshelf. If you’re right, the pages should either be roughly 30cm×21cm (A4) or 15cm×10.5cm [Edit: 21cm × 15cm] (A5).

Book 1: 18cm × 11.5; book 2: 19cm×12.5cm; book 3: 20.5cm × 12.5cm; book 4: 24cm × 17cm. None of those conform to the standard.

Another hint that the paper format is weird is that scientific papers on A4 are always either printed in two columns or use the ninths rule for margins, i.e. 1/9 of margin on the inner and upper edges and 2/9 of margin on the outer and bottom edges, essentially throwing away almost half of the page (I’ll admit there are more economic recommendations of 1/11 or 1/13). This is to make the columns narrower to get closer to the target of 60–80 characters per line. Note also that this makes the ‘usable’ area approximately 20cm long, which is much closer to the American’s ‘Legal’ format (216mm).

almost all consumer printers are for a4.

I never said A4 wasn’t the standard. I said it’s not a good one.

books in a4 size actually consist of a3 sheets bound together in the middle. (same with other sized books)

Let’s check. I grabbed four random German books from my bookshelf. If you’re right, the pages should either be roughly 30cm×21cm (A4) or 15cm×10.5cm [Edit: 21cm × 15cm] (A5).

Book 1: 18cm × 11.5; book 2: 19cm×12.5cm; book 3: 20.5cm × 12.5cm; book 4: 24cm × 17cm. None of those conform to the standard.

To be fair, A4 yields unwieldy pages that are too long to comfortably read. And when do you ever need the feature to fold an A4 sheet into A5?

Thank you very much for your kind words, my dear sir.