John Gruber, writing about the iPhone Duo via Transformers:

It always bothered me that, as toys, Transformers were clearly compromised in both states. Folded up, they weren’t good cars / trucks / fighter jets. They had obvious seams and folds. In the cartoons — and the subsequent live action films decades later — the Transformers’ disguised states are seamless. In real life with the actual toys, the disguised states were about as convincing as a pair of Groucho glasses. A regular toy car looked like a real car, and stayed together no matter how hard you played with it. A Transformer car never quite looked like a real car and would come apart when played with. Unfolded, they looked like robots, yes, but they had obvious compromises. And it was kind of a pain folding them back into vehicles. My recollection is that we played with them a lot more as unfolded robots than as folded vehicles.

I was all smiles and nods reading this. I too grew up with Transformers, and while we all liked them, they weren’t as fun as other toys with playing with friends. As Gruber pointed out, they were inferior as action figures to toys like GI Joe and other figures around the 3.75” range. And as vehicles, they didn’t look as cool as Matchboxes or Hot Wheels (or Stompers). And contrary to the spirit of cooperative play, transforming a Transformers could take a few seconds to a few minutes. (In fact, challenging conversions can be a selling point.) But you don’t want to sit around and watch your ten-year-old friends fumble from robot to truck and back again in the middle of a plot.

When we had kids, though, they both got into the Transformers of the day, starting with figures from around 2005 and up. One thing I immediately noticed with their Transformers were the degree of articulation in their robot modes. They were, generally speaking, robot humanoids that moved like action figures.