Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1189040
52 SMT007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2019 through that dilemma right now. Again, I don't believe there's going to be a vote taken or any- thing like that. But people are making those decisions, and those decisions are that clean- ing is adding value again for a broader cross- section of the market. That's just the phone. Think about all the other things around our homes now that didn't exist a few years ago. The consumer's perceptions of the urgent value that those devices and capabilities bring is changing. And expectations and demands are changing. Whenever reliability expecta- tions increase, cleaning has a role to play. Matties: We see that in automotive too. Obvi- ously, there's a risk and reward there that is catastrophic. Forsythe: This is more of a seismic change, though. Frankly, automotive was the leading adopter of no-clean back in the day. They were the ones that made it work and saw the value. Because if your car stops, it's not like it falls out of the sky or anything; it's just not moving anymore, which is an inconvenience. Mostly, that's not a life-threatening event. Electric cars up the ante a bit, and there are higher voltages, so cleaning is having a bigger play. When you make the jump to autonomous vehicles, how is that different from an airplane? It's not. These are trends. Autonomous vehicles are not here. They are on the roadmap, pardon the pun, but they're not really here. Matties: I think autonomous vehicles are here. We just haven't turned the switch on because society isn't ready to accept them. Forsythe: Lots of things need to be fig- ured out. There's the liability part. Matties: The lawyers are going to go crazy over this. It's a whole new market here. We all saw the video of the person going down the highway at 65 miles an hour in their electric car while sleeping. Forsythe: It comes back to this; once genuinely widely accepted autonomous Matties: Do they use it successfully? Forsythe: They do. It is a good match, but it's changing gradually. Even in the early days, when you were working with medical devices or military or commercial avionics, those peo- ple never stopped cleaning. They always under- stood that their risk-reward profile was clear— all risk, so they never stopped cleaning. The broader consumer product producers mostly don't clean, or maybe they do in spots. But they are also starting to evolve. Look at our phones. Just 20 years ago, we discussed whether they were good phones if you could hear people when you talked. Now, no one ever talks about phone calls. I have kids in col- lege, and my impression is they don't speak to anyone (other than me) on the phone; they prefer other communication techniques. The phone's utility has evolved a great deal, and with that, our perception of how impor- tant it is to us. The reason those avionics were always cleaned was because there was a big risk of peril if something bad happened. More and more, phones are no longer conveniences. In fact, Apple has a new app with an EKG kind of thing. If you're a patient, and you're check- ing your heart rate for your doctor to review, that's not an optional kind of thing; now your life depends on whether your phone's working Matties: You're calling it a phone still, but at that point, it could be considered a medical device. Forsythe: Agreed, which has a different expec- tation of reliability. The industry is sorting