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Dyson Launches New 'Supersonic' Hair Dryer To Revolutionize Hair Care (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Dyson has a launched a hair dryer with a design language similar to that of its bladeless fans. The $399 hair dryer is four years in the making, involving 103 engineers, over 1,000 miles of test hair, and a $71 million investment -- the Dyson Supersonic is being touted as "the hairdryer rethought" by its inventor Sir James Dyson. "We realized that hair dryers can cause extreme heat damage to hair," said Dyson in a press release. "So I challenged Dyson engineers to really understand the science of hair and develop our version of a hair dryer, which we think solves these problems." The hair dryer can be reserved online and will be sold exclusively at Sephora for $399 this fall.
People with short hair (i.e. most guys) tend to discount the utility of a hair dryer, but if you or your significant other has long hair, you know it's not really optional. Long hair takes an annoyingly long time to dry on its own, even after using a towel. That being said, the $15 model seemed to work just fine for its intended purpose.
Also, what is this "sun" you speak of? I live in Seattle, you insensitive clod.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
And how do you need 103 engineers for a hair dryer? I've done medium large projects for satellites with a dozen or so people and lots of computers and machines with blinky lights.
Two questions, how different from your satellite are other, previous satellites? And second question, how many are you making?
The the last number is "fucktons" or the metric equivalent (fucktonnes?), then that can eat up a lot of engineers. As I've revcently discovered design for manufacture is *HARD*, harder IME than weight shaving. Once you've got your basic design up and running and working, you then need to go over it again and again and again ad nauseum so that it (a) looks cool, (b) is as cheap as possible to manufacture as possible and (c) lasts long enough.
Those can eat up aprbitarily large amounts of time.
Also you're trying to volume source the cheapest servicable stuff you can find for motors and things, whereas I assume for a satellite, you're using small volumes of high quality stuff from onlt the mose reputable manufacturers. Dealing with that can also add lots of time and manpower requirements because it frankly often doesn't meet the specs (if it even has any beyond some estimated guesses of the simplest performance parameters), and can require a lot of iteration to get right.
Just because consumer products are cheap to make and often quite simple, don't dismiss them as easy to design. Getting them to be that cheap and simple is actually rather hard.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I have short hair but use my hair dryer to dry my body after a shower. Towels are damp, obviously.