>> CNC machining at scale
CNC machining is fantastic for prototypes and pretty awesome for high margin parts like hip implants and turbine blades. It is not for consumer devices. Figure out a way to cast your metal parts.
Having a manufacturing back ground, I did extended workbench management early in my career, this is just wrong. Sure, at high volumes casting and injection moulding is unbeatable at per unit costs. At smaller volumes, not so much. Casting and moulding tools cost a fortune, and those upfront NRC are just prohibitive for small volumes. So smart CNC machining it is. Added benefit, there are tons of small CNC machining ships around that are really good at that.
Nothing to add on ejector pin marks, if you see those on the outside of your part, your part design and manufacturing / tool design sucks. No need to be a billionaire genius, just a decent plastics engineer.
But since the target audiamce of this article are start-ups, it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Brcause how many start-up founders have a solid grasp of hardware manufacturing, design, tooling and manufacturing processes? Especially those that want "Apple" without understanding what that means deffinitely don't.
It stood out to me that the author of the post is the COO at a meditation service start-up, not a manufacturing one... Unless Ten Percent Happier is making physical products that I'm unaware of.
I think this guy was just musing about Apple's quality and has watched a lot of AvE and This Old Tony on YouTube and wanted to share his opinions with the world. They're not all entirely correct.
For anyone who wants to go on the whole manufacturing journey, don't miss the Linus Tech Tips video about why their screwdriver took 3 years to bring to market (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K5Gqp1cEcM). And they based their design on a fully functional production-ready screwdriver, they did not start from scratch.
Going from idea to production is really, really hard. Even today, even with CNC and 3D printing and other prototyping tools. Even with all the money LTT has to spend on it (millions of dollars, as I understand it).
> It stood out to me that the author of the post is the COO at a meditation service start-up, not a manufacturing one... Unless Ten Percent Happier is making physical products that I'm unaware of.
The guy started bolt.io. A VC for hardware based startups and got $100 million funding. So I think he knows a thing or two about manufacturing.
To give him the benefit of the doubt, he seems to be writing to people wanting to make small electronic gadgets. You can't sell something for $19.99 retail that requires a lot of hands-on time.
At a quick scan, Bolt.IO includes "Carbon Robotics - Building intelligent robots for agriculture-related applications", "Denizen - Personal prefab offices...", and "Spyce - An original restaurant concept featuring a robotic kitchen that cooks and serves delicious meals". I guarantee those robots, office furniture, and kitchens contain CNCed parts, if not hand-fitted parts.
On the other hand, he also wrote "What happened when Apple wanted to CNC machine a million MacBook bodies a year? They bought 10k CNC machines to do it." If a CNC machine can't make more than one piece every 3.5 days, you're either building aircraft or you're doing it wrong.
>I think this guy was just musing about Apple's quality and has watched a lot of AvE and This Old Tony on YouTube and wanted to share his opinions with the world. They're not all entirely correct.
IDK what the author's qualifications are but the ones you list would make him at least as qualified as whoever's "simple but wrong" take on a problem is thrice guided on Reddit or at the top of HN at any particular minute.
The reality is that if you wanna write "popular" context you gotta cater to a low common denominator, maybe not the lowest but you will have to stare deep into the abyss of ignorance and hubris to find it. A nuanced take that will pass the muster of a subject matter grey beard is going to be too nuanced, too informed by 1st/2nd hand experience and physical reality to resonate with the hordes of casual readers it needs to resonate with in order to gain any traction. Regardless of the qualifications of the author the content MUST be dumbed down to the point of being useless to anyone with the problems discussed therein in order to resonate with the audience it needs to resonate with for it to gain enough traction for us to be talking about it here (and frankly it's a lot easier to write that kind of resonating content from within the abyss than looking in above it).
I'm not really in the mood to write a sufficiently internet-nitpicker-proof wall of text but this sort of content where people opine on things of which their depth of knowledge is only a hair deeper than that of the casual or create content from that perspective despite being smarter than that is highly, highly incentivized by how we have set up the platforms and information flows that control where/how entertainment content (like a blog article or a video) gets dolled out to people seeking to consume such content.
"3 years, and millions of dollars" — is very typical when you keep going from factory, to factory, leaving tooling investment every time they screw up.
Instead, you have to pick at least a sane, and understanding factory owner, and wait for them to improve.
It depends very heavily on the complexity and size of the part.
Earlier in my career I worked in Medical/BioTech product development for a consultancy working with startups. We found the most cost effective route (in the UK) was to have tooling manufactured in China, but then shipped to the UK. We worked with moulding companies who had in house experience building and modifying tools, so they could make alterations to the tools on site.
Tooling for small plastic "clam shell" type products would be in the £20k-£50k region by doing it that way.
Being able to visit your manufacturing partner, as a small startup, is essential when launching a product. Too often physical product startups try to run before they can walk. You can always ship a tool back to China once you are up and running, but realistically at that point you know what v2 should be and retooling is required.
I was OK with the section because includes "at scale", "consumer devices" and it ends with "Figure out a way to cast your metal parts." The advice is not wrong, just not complete. It would be better if it said "Machining might not be the best process, figure out the best way to make your parts -cast metal parts, use plate, sheet metal or simple extrusions, change metal for reinforced plastic, etc."
Based on my meager experience in this area (mostly having been involved in the mechanical keyboard enthusiast scene where there's a lot of small-batch [e.g. 50-5,000 units] manufacturing), the killer for CNC machining is the complexity of the shape being machined and the tolerances desired. A simple flat rounded rect is relatively easy/cheap, but if you go for a more 3D sort of shape with complex curves cost will go through the roof. It's similar with tolerances, with large margins being cheap and low being high.
It’s so easy to turn a cheap part into an expensive part!
The classic example, internal corners: Dimension them with convenient big radius and your feature needs a single pass with a big end-mill. Inadvertantly specify them “sharp” and suddenly it’s off for broaching (if you’re lucky) or maybe a custom EDM sinker tool.
Same experience here. When I needed to manufacture our product I quickly discover that casting at our scale would just ruin us financially. Meanwhile I shopped around and found very decent CNC deals. So CNC it was for me.
The one I would argue against here is the ejector pin marks. If you have ejector pin marks visible of the "outside" of your component then something has gone wrong in the design process.
Injection moulding tools have two sides, a static and a moving side. The static side will contain the "gate" where the molten plastic is injected. You would almost always expect the moving side to be the visible side of the component, it tends to be simpler in features and polished. The static side will have many mechanical features such as ribs for strengthening, or snaps/bosses for securing other components.
When the tool opens the part will stay in the static half, then be ejected by the ejector pins. All these should be hidden on the inner side of the component.
The exception to this is components with no inside/outside, the sort of thing that may be a visible component in a hinge.
What is much more likely to be an issue for someone trying to imitate Apple are visible seams or witness marks on side actions on the tool.
A side action is where you have a part of the tool move at 90deg (or some other angle) to the main opening action. This lets you build in undercuts, or have holes in the side. (There are also collapsible cores, but these tend to be on the inside of a part)
The witness marks where the side actions fit against the rest of the tool are almost impossible to hide, you even sometimes see them on some Apple products. You need very very tight tolerances through the whole stack to ensure they are so small you hardly notice them.
Well designed plastic component are created when the engineer/designer has a thorough understanding of the manufacturing process and are thinking about how the tooling will work while they are designing the part. The issues arise when you design a part, then hand it over to someone else to design the tool with no input into the design process.
Edit:
Another one I used to have customers ask for was to have "no seam" between two plastic parts "like Apple". Fitting two plastic parts together with no seam is basically impossible unless you are Apple. It's why you almost always see a ~1mm uniform gap between the parts, it helps to hide any misalignment and gives you a closing tolerance between the parts.
Fitting two plastic parts together with no seam is basically impossible unless you are Apple.
How's Apple do it? Any tricks aside from very tight tolerances
(eg. Not applicable to all geometries but in 3D printed parts I've leveraged chamfers that bring a mating feature to a "knife" edge to essentially "bite in" to the other surface when I want a tight fit without gaps and without post-processing)
The tolerances shouldn't be a problem with some iterative design of the tools so today the parts fit together perfectly when made from same-age molds.
It's just a lot of effort you can't afford unless you go through a bunch of tools just due to the lifespan the tools have.
I thought I read somewhere that Apple does it by having the Chinese line workers manually try different pairs of parts until they find two that fit precisely.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with someone in the pharmaceutical industry. He lamented that the box was by far the most expensive component for many of their products. Paracetamol is cheap, glossy full-colour printing with embossing is not!
Related: a lot of drug shortages right now are driven by shortages of package inserts. That page of printed instructions, warnings, etc is often sourced from China, so even if the drug is manufactured in America, and the delivery device is manufactured in Europe or Mexico or something, you can't sell it without that folded packet of finely printed paper that basically nobody reads.
That sounds like the easiest thing in the world to source elsewhere on short notice. High-quality printing services exist literally everywhere in the world. What am I missing?
There has actually be a pretty significant general paper shortage over the last two years due to difficulties sourcing the raw materials. Not sure if that's the root cause for the issue mentioned here but I'd bet it contributed to it.
A change like that shouldn't be a big deal. A meeting to decide whether or not it constitutes a Design Change (it doesn't!) and if the new insert needs to be Validated again (likely not) and you're pretty much done from a Compliance standpoint and on to Vendor Qualification.
My guess is that the problem is more likely to be finding a vendor that can print/cut to your specification at the scale you need and, critically, who can produce it on your schedule. Any capable printer is likely already booked solid for months.
Assuming they fit into the existing manufacturing process, sure. But that still doesn't solve the problem of finding a printer to print those millions of pages.
You're assuming that there are high-quality, high-volume print suppliers with slack time / idle machinery. I wouldn't be so sure. And even then, existing literally everywhere in the world now becomes a problem of finding them.
It depends on the medicine! For example, I have a medicine that I take regularly, and to reduce the amount of doctor visits, my doctor just prescribes me several months of medicine in one giant box.
The box contains smaller boxes of the medicine and they all come with the same description paper - all 30 boxes! I have read that paper 100 times already, there is no need for me to read it anymore.
Instructions? Sure. But those inserts also can include lots of information on pharmacokinetics and far more technical details about the drug's method of action.
I need to know when/how to take the drug, for how long, and what side-effects to look out for. Basically the rest is irrelevant to me.
Friend works for a company who does various networking things. They’re losing big long-term contracts because the super-enterprise RJ45 network jacks they sell aren’t available.
It’s obviously ludicrous and I can’t remember the specifics except it seemed very different from my efforts at crimping a cable.
A brief search alerts me to the presence of Cat 6A to Cat 8 shielded pass-through design with triple prong gold plated contacts, supporting POE++. Does your connector have integrated magnetics? Led indicators? Are they ruggedised? No? You’re losing out.
Only if you use it in a manner not prescribed or on the label - 10-15mg/kg body weight every 8 hours with a maximum of four doses within 24 hours. It is available OTC everywhere except maybe the USA. Then again. USA has many things restricted OTC because the pharmacy/medical industry is more interested in milking you for money than helping you. They disguise this behavior as 'safety'.
Paracetamol is incredibly easily available in the US (acetaminophen) and is actually far cheaper at a place like Costco than in European countries in which I've lived or visited pharmacies (CH, DE, or even UK). Like, 50x cheaper per tablet than in CH in my experience if you're willing to buy an obnoxious amount of them, and still typically cheaper if you buy more standard quantities.
> Paracetamol is incredibly easily available in the US (acetaminophen) and is actually far cheaper at a place like Costco than in European countries in which I've lived or visited pharmacies (CH, DE, or even UK).
Nice!! In most EU countries it's not allowed to buy more than 24 (sometimes 48) paracetamol at a time because people sometimes try to suicide on them (which doesn't actually work but permanently damages the liver)
It's a bit of a stupid precaution though because you can just come back and buy another box or go to the next store. It doesn't prevent anything.
It can work but it's a really, really painful and slow way to die. And this kind of prevention can work: a lot of suicide prevention is focused on just putting enough barriers in place that it's harder to do on impulse. In the case of the limitation it's probably mostly so that people don't normally have a huge jar of them at home, which is what you get with buying them from costco. How many lives have actually been saved by this is pretty hard to judge though, but I would bet it's non-zero.
Assuming the numbers in [1] are correct, the answer to "How many lives have actually been saved by this" is, what, somewhere around 4-5000 (~300 a year for 15 years + some extra)?
More interesting is that it took a long time for it to drop after the legislation was introduced in 1998 - presumably people were still working off their stockpiles?
On the other hand it's left me without when I really needed it :( I would love to have a huge jar of this. There's so many ways to commit suicide and we can't stop them all.
I think medications in general are too restricted in the EU. Many medications that are really innocent require a doctor's prescription (which when I lived in Ireland cost me 60 euro just for the visit - at least here in Spain it's free to visit the GP).
Do you have a source for that? It is the default painkiller in the Netherlands, and it's what GPs typically prescribe people that come to them with something that doesn't really need treatment, to the point that it's a meme.
I'd be interested in hearing how they're wrong to that extent, on such scale.
It’s a half right sort of thing. Overdose is acutely toxic to the liver. Dosage guidelines are safe unless you’ have impaired liver function (been drinking?), or you’re taking another drug that also has paracetamol (e.g. combo paracetamol/ibuprofen, painkillers for period cramps, etc). I’ve seen opiates compounded with paracetamol and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s mostly to (try to) limit abuse.
Then again this is in contrast to NSAIDs like ibuprofen that can result in gastric bleeding even at the recommended dose.
I prefer paracetamol/acetaminophen for most uses but I’m pretty careful about how much and what else I’m taking.
I think it is disingenuous to call it toxic. You can even drink toxic doses of water, or ingest toxic doses of salt. Water and salt aren't toxic or dangerous.
If you forgot if you drank the glass of water, no harm. Same with salt.
If you forgot if you took your Paracetamol pill, accidentally taking another one would leave you with permanent liver damage.
It's like looking into the sun: normally, you flinch/blink away and are safe.
But if you stare, and suppress or your reflex isn't working, you'll catch a life-long blind spot burned into your retina.
The therapeutic margin is just insanely small for anything OTC.
Comparing it to water or salt is such a low bar as to be meaningless. Acetaminophen toxicity starts at less than twice the recommended dose, which isn’t hard to achieve if someone doesn’t read the guidelines (we generally expect otc medicines to be safe) or if they’re mixing drugs. And that’s for a healthy liver that’s not further burdened with alcohol or other hepatotoxic medicines.
Interesting. Anecdotally we (myself, friends and family) never get prescribed Paracetamol here in Germany. It's always Ibuprofen. I always felt it was obvious, given the supposedly side effects of it.
If you read paracetamol label, it's funny how it says something along the line "the mechanism of action is unknown" - they literally didn't know how it works for years - I think only recently that mechanism was discovered, but I am not sure.
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That’s kind of a frequent thing though. Why should the exact mechanism be known if they can determine its safety and effectiveness without it? It is kind of a white/black box testing question though.
Except that you can and are encouraged to question!
But if you were to tumble upon a magic pill that cures cancer, and you tested it extensively and indeed does so without any ill effect, would you wait to really understand the molecular mechanism of it before administering it?
It is true that the medically useful/effectful dose is not that much lower than the truly damaging one, so this is one drugs where you absolutely should never surpass the determined safe doze (or course don’t do that with any other one either, but for example frontin/xanax is deliberately made in a way that even taking a whole box of it will just send you to a really deep sleep), but I don’t think that using it from time to time would be any worse than drinking a bit of wine during your date at a restaurant.
A pain medication that didn’t cause organ damage wouldn’t be legal due to the legacy of the War on Drugs. Drug policy isn’t the most logical. Cannabis still isn’t legal in most of the world.
Even if GPs wanted to prescribe a safer painkiller, they are hamstrung by drug policy. So, they choose something that is a short term solution but has long term consequences because there are NO alternatives that aren’t a headache (i.e opioids).
Unfortunately, it causes acute liver failure so getting “high” from it isn’t something you even want to think about doing. I wish the danger of it was better known though.
People wrongly believe that paracetamol needs to be abused long-term to cause damage, but that's not true. In general, 10 grams over the course of a day is enough to cause paracetamol toxicity in adults (or less). And the thing is, death from this isn't quick - it can take over two weeks, with symptoms not starting for a couple of days.
This is why in the US they've reduced the amount in OTC pills - I think the max is now 375mg, and less in some cases. Paracetamol probably can never be made prescription only, but as others have said, it's likely it wouldn't be approved for use today.
Actually suicide by paracetamol is pretty easy, just gobble two boxes of it (150mg/kg may kill you: that's just 9 g for a 60kg person, less than two boxes of 8g each). You may need emergency liver transplantation. Plus it will often be difficult to identify by emergency responders.
I remember reading the warning on the label and thinking "wow, there's no way someone would ignore this warning and have 6-7 of these over a few hours".
And yet, here you stand. Warning us against the obvious overdose that the label warns against as well.
Can you qualify (and quantify) that risk? No medication is totally safe. For example, Aspirin can cause gastrointestinal bleeding but in reality it's safe when taken in most use cases (i.e. not chronically).
Please remove this comment. Giving unfounded medical and pharmaceutical advice on HN, especially when it is clearly devoid of an explanation or context like that, is dangerous and irresponsible.
The title, "You can't..." starts right. The subtitle... "startups can't" takes it off course. It's not about startups, small companies or whatnot. I mean, some things require scale... but this is not really about specific design features. It's about "good enough" vs "really good."
Imagine "AverageCo." It's the 19th largest industrial cleaning product supplier in the world. 2nd largest in west belgium. They have decided to invest in a custom ERP system that will handle all their business problems. Stock. Accounting. Manufacturing. Sales. Everything. You are advising them.
AverageCo needs to aim for adequate. If they aim for excellent, they'll fail. It's not a good idea to demand UIs be slick like netflix, or clever like google. The brutal reality is that designing and project managing a good Salesforce or Oracle implementation is likely a stretch for AverageCo. They are not about to outdo amazon. It does not matter how many consultants they hire. Outside consultants get you to adequate, not excellent.
OTOH, a lean, agile software startup may well outperform amazon in some specific area. The way they will do this is by being clever, tactical, and knowledgeable in little areas. They know what's easy or hard to solve. They'll pick good goals, make clever trade offs and slick compromises. They'll choose a stack that makes the hard parts easy. They'll avoid getting bogged down, changing the plan dynamically to avoid difficulties. Those tactics are only possible when you are close to the process.
If you hire a prototype company, followed by an industrial design consultant, then outsource manufacturing... you are not close enough to the process to be brilliant. You'll need to live with adequate. This isn't because excellence is impossible, it's because you are not excellent at this.
Big companies are famously incapable of admitting they are anything but excellent at anything. Startups can be conceited too. In this case, a lot of startups need to realize that they are suits. You are not the hacker who can write his own JS framework or patch the OS. You are the guy who has no idea how to design the manufacturing process yourself.
Salesforce is CRM, customer relationship management, and not an ERP. Oracle is, as far as I onow, mainly accountong, and not great.
Proper ERPs come from the likes of MS (MS Dynamics, an aquisition), Siebel (or whatever they are called...), INFOR and, obviously, SAP. The implementation is make or break so, regardless of vendor.
A custom ERP can work well for a company that stays mostly the same, however, at the size where you can afford a SWE team to build a custom ERP that is not a reasonable assumption - you will be getting many merger&acquisition events, so if you're not using an industry-standard ERP, then pretty much all the time you'll have ongoing migrations of acquired divisions/overseas branches/etc from "their ERP" to your custom one (as well as having to run these other ERPs for many months in parallel while you manage these migrations, and still need to do consolidated reporting while its happening) as well as this custom ERP causing you to take a discount when spinning off or selling parts of your corporation (or all of it). If you're running the same ERP as almost everyone else in your industry (e.g. SAP) then this compatibility enables much less friction and cost in M&A.
Companies and lines of business aren't eternal, they merge and split, and it's a big question whether the investment for a custom ERP will pay back over its inevitably limited lifetime, including the migration to it and afterwards from it.
> 4-color, double-walled, matte boxes + HD foam inserts [...] the most expensive line item on your BOM [...] And then they get thrown away.
I hate this whenever I buy a consumer product, I look at the box and think, that's a £10er I'm just sticking in the bin.
I like functional brutalist packaging, not only is it cheaper but usually also more durable and reusable due to not being specifically shaped. Whenever I buy a piece of gear that comes in such a box It makes me happy that more of my money went into the actual device, or at least funding the company to invest more in developing the device, rather than a pretty piece of cardboard.
Packaging is like insurance, because it’s usually not needed but it’s required to be used 100% in order to mitigate infrequent events like dropping a package. Most packaging is close to optimized for cost and protection of the contents relative to their value, think Pringles cans. An iPhone or MacBook is a $1000-3000 computer, $10-100 in packaging is normal for that sort of product. If I buy a heavy machine from Europe it’s going to cost 10% of that machine just to crate it and another 10-15% for shipping oversea. I don’t complain about that cost because I know it keeps my investment intact during transit or storage.
While Apple still produces the nicest looking boxes, I think the box my 2020 MacBook Air M1 came in used less cardboard and less plastic than the box my 2004 iPod 3rd Gen came in.
I’d gladly buy all my tech in the ugliest refurbished bare cardboard boxes, but few companies package their goods as efficiently as Apple these days.
Apple has done a lot of work to create packaging that is mostly paper, eliminating most of the plastic and foam. Even the little doohickeys to keep the cables neatly coiled are made of paper now.
They have also shrunk the overall size of the boxes. A 2023 14” MacBook Pro is about the same size as a white plastic iBook G4 from 2005, but the box is about half the volume. This also lowers the per-machine shipping costs because they can fit more of them in the plane.
I had a conversation with Matt Rogers at a tradeshow a long time back. The thing that stuck with me was that despite his experience at Apple, experience building the iPod, iPad and iPhone and direct relationships with the same factories as he'd worked with at Apple, he wasn't able to get the same results at Nest.
Alernate title:
No, you can't manufacture that like Apple does, even if you literally worked with Steve Jobs to build the iPod, iPad and iPhone, hire your best colleagues from Apple and work with the exact same factories as Apple uses
This is a nice article, but like many things, it would have been better if things were sourced instead of written back from memory. For example, the laser-hole macbook light thing, did Apple really buy the company or entered a multi-year exclusivity agreement ?
I meant that this medium article was nice but lacked sources. At least the one I pointed at cited Businessweek, even though we now know how (not) serious Bloomberg can be…
There was a dearth of CNC machines on the market back in 2011-2012 due to Apple buying so many (via Foxconn, https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/21/catcher_hoping_to... ). But they were shared for iPhone production etc. This is the source for the 10 000 machines number.
I however recall that they claimed in a keynote it took 10 hours to machine a single unibody MacBook, which would make the capacity for a single machine about 700 cases a year.
The original quote was it would take thousands of CNC machines do do X and apple saying that’s fine.
2k machines to make 200k laptop bodies for an initial sales rush over a month is 3.3 laptops per day per machine but each laptop uses multiple parts front and backplate for top and bottom. Assuming 4 major components per laptop and 5 different CNC machines per component you might be at say 3.3 * 4 * 5 = 66 parts per CNC machine per day. Which doesn’t sound that far off when they are discarding such a large percentage of the initial blank, though it’s likely some stages are much faster than others.
The equipment would be extremely expensive, but it’s also going to last for a long time.
Dead easy, especially in Southern Germany there are littetally thousands of small, independent CNC shops doing nothing but sub-cobtracting work for everything from cheap, rapid prototyping to serial parts, visible and not, for Premium automotive OEMs. And all of those are happy to get your start-up scale CNC part contracts. Get a good one, and they will even tell how to improve your part design to make it easier and cheaper to manufacture.
Maybe true, but I was doubting the specific numbers of 10K CNC machines for 1M MacBooks. I’m curious how long it takes a single CNC machine to machine a MacBook body.
I didn't see a naked body, but I'd guess max. one hour including polishing of the visible surfaces (and that is on the upper end, because you put more than one body in the jigs).
Edit: The tact time per casing is somewhere around 30 seconds (assuming 24/7 operations). Which is absolutely doable, not just for apple but for everyone with a demand of 1 million units per year for the same part.
I have read 10 hours per Mack book initially split across multiple machines, but I don’t know how accurate that was. Or if that was adjusted for scrap rate and downtime etc.
Presumably they wanted to create rumors to improve peoples perception of quality. On the other hand it’s several fairly large complicated parts and their removing a lot of material from the blanks.
Difficult to tell without having the naked housing parts, or ideally the drawings. 10 hours is more in aerospace territory so, if it really is that, something seems a bit of. But you never know, some designers come up with the strangest ideas.
You’re assuming 0% scrap rate, and discounting setup time, teardown time, general down time.
Also, most likely they don’t run them for a full year. They need 1mm Macbooks in a window of a few months. In which case, 10,000 machines making 100 macbooks each makes sense.
Edit: also, this is assuming every machine is the same machine doing the same thing. Which most likely is not (unless the unibodies are made in one go on a 5-axis mill)
There is also a flip side to this: there is massive contract manufacturing capacity in China due to Apple's investment, and it isn't always used 100%. This means you can book spare machine time to CNC machine your niche aluminum product, like the FormD [0] guys did with the T1. It will not be a high priority for the factory, but if you can wait a little this it is a possibility.
Sometimes it is best for startups to stop pretending that they are operating like FAAMNG companies and rather than racing to burn millions of their VC cash into frivolous projects every month and over hiring, perhaps do more with less to turn a profit to stay afloat.
The appearance of being a "premium" startup was probably necessary for a variety of reasons, including investor confidence, hiring, PR credibility, etc.
It's fine, it works until it doesn't. It's not like they really know what to do with the extra VC money anyway, might as well spruce up the company to appear premium.
"You think I have time to ask a man why he giving me money, where he gets his money from? I'll take any motherfuckers money if he giving it away" - Senator Clay Thompson
VCs gave money away, so we spent it. These companies usually need 1/10th of whatever money they get for the core product (in all sincerity, a lot of them need no money, but that's a whole different story few would cop to). Money spent on everything else is, well, everything else.
Fun and short read, thanks for sharing. I'm not going to be manufacturing hardware any time soon, but I always love random insights into another field.
The iPhone still has the tactile "silent mode" toggle, and CarPlay is definitely designed to be less distracting than Android Auto (despite Android Auto working generally better, imho), so I wouldn't be so sure about that.
They also managed to place the only buttons on the iPhone exactly opposite of another, leading to a situation that there is a 50% chance of me taking a screenshot when I just want to adjust the volume.
> Car play and the iphone more often get into a state where the phone is connected physically but the phone "isn't connected"
I thought this was just me. I used to use Android Auto on the same car I have now, and never had this issue. Got a iPhone some year/s ago and sometimes this happens, maybe once every month or so, but thought the issue was my car or the phone itself. Good to know it happens to others.
> CarPlay is definitely designed to be less distracting than Android Auto
I don't think this is true. CarPlay still covers my entire display (which I use for navigation/GPS normally) when someone calls. How this pass any sort of QA/user testing is beyond me. At least Android Auto displays a little message about it, rather than covering the entire display together with the navigation.
The driving directions in google maps are terrible though. I’ve been using Apple Maps for a while and someone WhatsApped me a map link I didn’t notice it had opened google maps and I was getting annoyed that it wasn’t telling me what lane to go in and it was too late telling what exit to take on roundabouts.
How often do people use their glove box that this an actual annoyance? I only really keep my registration and proof of insurance in there, so I need to access it approximately never.
I've my Tesla since 15/12, and keep my garage remote in the glove box for safety.
I'm probably overthinking it, and should keep it in the center console, though. Especially because I live in a condo, and dozens of other people have access to the garage anyways.
"No ejector pin marks
Unless you’re a billionaire genius, your product will have noticeable ejector pin marks. A good CM knows how to hide these well. Nearly zero CMs hide them as well as Apple does. Embrace it. Most consumers don’t know what the hell an ejector pin mark is anyways."
I would argue that LEGO hides them just as well if not better than Apple.
LEGO is in the same league as Apple for manufacturing (one of the few). Of course their job is simpler because "all" they're good at is injection moulding plastic. But they're really good at it.
Lego bricks are made to 1um tolerance (1 thousandth of a millimeter). The reason they have to be is to make sure that larger models fit together properly.
The "not too loose, not too tight" thing is part of it, but isn't actually the key reason which is "accumulation of tolerance". Imagine two rows of 100 bricks. The difference in length between the two rows is 100 times that 1um tolerance. If the tolerance was less good, things wouldn't fit together well.
Lego model design guidelines actually have a maximum size of a "fully" connected block of bricks because eventually even this precise manufacturing can't cope. Really big models have purposefully designed decoupling between sections.
> The difference in length between the two rows is 100 times that 1um tolerance.
Doesn't tolerance work both ways? One brick is 1um longer than it should, another one is 1um shorter - in the row of 100 bricks those differences will mostly cancel each other out, won't they?
There are a number of different approaches to tolerance analysis. I kept it to simple arithmetic analysis for the explanation, but yes there are other approaches too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolerance_analysis
Not necessarily -- for instance, it could be that the mould for 1x1 bricks is too short and the mould for the 2x1 bricks is too long. Now if someone builds pillars from 1x1 and 2x1s respectively, the differences accumulate.
Also, it's not just about variance between different bricks (1x1 vs 2x1) it's about variance between different parts out of the same tool (the correct term for a mould is a "tool"), and variance between different tools producing the same brick.
Some really subtle effects affect the size of parts if you care down to the level of 1um - all sorts of temperature variation, pressure, humidity, colour mix etc.. Lego's skill is the ability to control or compensate for all of these confounding factors and get consistent results, regardless of age of mould tool, manufacturer of machine, ambient conditions etc.
Until you said that, I thought they meant the pin hole to eject the sim card - which had me confused, so I guess they actually mean injection moulding or something?
Yeah, they are the glossy circles that appear on injection moulded plastic parts. It's caused by the pins that quickly push the cooled part out of the mould.
I thought it will have some information - why/how? Seems just like points from wide internet for a PR powerpoint. There was a talk from Andrew “bunnie” Huang about challenges in manufacturing which is in detail.
The main why/how is: $$$. Sacks and barrels and truckloads of cash. They sell high-margin devices at a huge scale, and they have a deep corporate culture of making things that are "pretty".
I always thought they did this for effect. It gave the white G3 iBooks a really nice crystal look and since. It was very special when they were pristine.
However it also magnified any scratches on the surface (they would leave shadows on the white layer that made them much more noticeable) and I think that's why they dropped it for the G4 range. That just had plain white plastic.
Wouldn't that also be to fake a specific finish as well? Kinda got to admit that a 3-4mm thick glossy finish where you can see the depth kinda looks cool.
It's funny to see that because I just made a product review for a Huawei computer (matebook 14 2021) I bought on ebay, stating it has the overal Apple quality (High res glass screen, metalic case, flawless touchpad...) without Apple limited date for consumption (soldered ssd).
Apple does not in fact manufacture anything at all.
What they do, is work with their contract manufacturers (like Foxconn or TSMC) in an unusually deep and collaborative way to design custom parts and the manufacturing processes to produce them.
Your statement is obviously true, as it is about many pairs of organizations, but this post is at least ostensibly intended for startup product creators interested in imitating Apple's consumer hardware prowess. I doubt most startups are trying to build something comparable to TSMC's output.
This reminds me of the multiple times VC's asked me "but will it scale to Facebook dimensions?"...Well - NO!. Pretty much nothing does. They had to write their own MySQL engine, for fucks sake. Because, apart from Facebook, no one has close to 40% of humankind as userbase.
Conclusion: at a certain scale or level of execution, challenges change from a quantitative to a qualitative nature.
What I find interesting about this is that facebook themselves didn't, as far as it seems, ask that question early on.
They built things just good enough, and just built out from there as they grew, fixing things as required for the usage they had. I think another example is writing their own PHP interpreter (or something like that) to speed up the backend when that became a legit concern at massive scale.
I think this serves as an existence proof that 'will it scale' is often a meaningless question in the early days of a company. It doesn't matter. If it can't, deal with it then in an appropriate manner with all the specific context of how it's being used - regardless it's a good problem to have either way!
Part 1, don't do things that you should know won't survive a year of growth when you could do something that you think will at around the same cost. Sometimes people interpret "don't optimize prematurely" to somehow mean don't do things right the first time; if you can do it right the first time, you'll save some headache down the road.
Part 2, if you build a complex product, it's hard to predict which parts of the product will see the most use, even if you can predict your overall growth rate (which is hard too). The longer you wait to make your product scale, the more information you have on what is actually used, and what you actually need to scale.
Part 3, if you make some reasonable choices, with today's server hardware, you can do an awful lot of work on a single machine. Current generation Epyc is 96 cores per socket, and AMD says 6TB per socket as well, although 3TB per socket might be more realistically achievable. You can do an awful lot of computing with a two-socket, 192 core, 6TB machine, it will be expensive, but writing a check is a lot easier than sharding a relational database. Get a database server, maybe a big one, and horizontally scale the frontend is a sensible basic architecture that gets you pretty far these days.
This! I was helping a friend with a site he was building. He kept wanting to spend loads of money early on to make sure he could scale, but I advised him to stay cheap and lean - and worry about scale when he got there.
He would have spent a lot of money on scale he ultimately would not need.
I go by "build for x2, plan for x10". Unless you're super-super-successful you won't see much more than that. And if you do, well you have a budget now.
I don't think this is entirely true, as a userbase may not grow gradually but with big jumps occasionally. For example, in moments right after the platform gets broad publicity.
Good list! There are a couple in here that I really wish Apple would stop doing, though:
Molded plastic packaging
4-color, double-walled, matte boxes + HD foam inserts
Apple packaging looks pretty but it’s a pain. It’s so tightly packed it can be very hard to open, and all that plastic seems massively wasteful. I’ll admit it is kind of fun peeling off those perfectly-positioned plastic wrappers on absolutely everything, but that again seems very wasteful, and you can’t re-pack it in the same way.
I love products with simple but cleverly-designed cardboard packaging and recyclable or compostable filling. Apple doesn’t do that, but they should.
I'd be interested to know what products you're seeing those on? UK market at least all recent MacBooks, iPads and iPhones I've opened have used paper-based trays instead of the old plastic. Even the screen protector has been a thin paper layer.
Even the cables in the box have a paper rings to hold them in shape, and everything has tabs to allow for easily removing from the boxes.
The exterior brown shipping boxes also have clever mechanisms which "raise" the retail box gently out when opening the flaps.
Good question — I forgot the article is from a few years back and things have changed a little. Their packaging is not as wasteful as before but still not great.
I bought an m2 laptop a few months back, and a Pencil recently.
Both boxes are double-walled and double-nested. I find them very hard to open, and they’re close to indestructible which makes them very annoying to break down for recycling. The boxes are glued rather than folded.
The insert trays do seem to be some kind of paper composite now rather than plastic, that’s good. The Pencil one is glued in place, that’s bad. (I still have the box because it’s so annoying to recycle! I guess it’s small enough that I could just toss it in without breaking it down.)
Absolutely every component has a little individual wrapping. Again, they do seem to be mostly paper now (though with some plastic I think) which is an improvement.
Ya that seemed like an usual, or at least very dated or niche anecdote. I'm not even sure that I remember opening a macbook that had similar packaging, but then I also don't live everywhere or buy any other apple products
I unbox a Mac of some sort every 6 months or so, for work.
It's very roughly 4-5 years since Apple stopped using moulded plastic trays in the cardboard boxes, but they do deserve special criticism for them as they were the only company to tightly glue the tray to the box.
This list is from 2014, Apple have massively scaled back injection moulded packaging and foam inserts. I suspect due to the negative environmental feedback they received.
I've wondered what Apple-level funding and equipment could do in other fields. Like manufacturing those fusion pellets, which requires extreme precision. They're looking at automating some of it using computer vision*. Apple probably has the smartest mechanical engineers in the world because of $$; what would happen if their energies were diverted to traditional industries facing bottlenecks?
Funding and equipment are worthless unless you put them in the right hands (see government projects, for example, which get huge funding and then burn through it without useful results).
Also, Apple does a few other things right besides engineering: Understand which problems are worth solving. Pick problems that they are certain they can solve. Understand the users / customers enough to know what a good solution even looks like.
But then, traditional industries could use a dose of all of that, too.
> see government projects, for example, which get huge funding and then burn through it without useful results
That's because that is precisely their purpose. Non-SpaceX NASA using Russian engines was not a technical decision, it was to keep Russians busy enough to not sell out to NK/Iran. Stuff being sent all over the country and back again in Boeing, ULA, EADS, Airbus et al. is a waste of money but is to get the votes from politicians wanting pork.
Everything is possible if you pay your workers approx. 430-500 USD a month (according to Reuters) https://www.reuters.com/world/china/apple-supplier-foxconn-g...
"A typical Foxconn worker makes between 3,000 to 4,000 yuan a month."
And yes, "everyone else is doing it" is not an answer.
I don't think Apple's ability to use lasers to drill tiny holes specifically depends on the salary range of Foxconn's assembly workers, but I could be wrong.
Hate to break it to you, but laser drilled holes is something anybody can do. After all, basically all Apple manufacturing is done by sub-contractors anyway. And those manufacture for everybody.
It is like saying nobody can ship B2C like Amazon does, while ignoring the fact a very big junk of shipments is handled by the likes of DHL, and ignoring all the 3PLs Amazon is using for warehousing.
Yes anybody can have third parties do it for them, but few are willing to pay for it.
Also, most smaller players cannot afford it because of economies of scale makes the first ten thousand holes way more expensive than the ten millionth.
If... and the result's dependent on the if... the worker saves at a high rate, i.e. dormitory and meals are free, and there really isn't a lot to do in these factory mini cities, and saves for 5 years, they'll have enough after those 5 years to pay outright for a new 40-50m2 ish apartment in many T3 cities, so that'll be by around age 23-25. A couple, double the size place, or a place further out in many T2s. It's not a high wage, but not a terrible wage as long as the benefits are included.
Having a manufacturing back ground, I did extended workbench management early in my career, this is just wrong. Sure, at high volumes casting and injection moulding is unbeatable at per unit costs. At smaller volumes, not so much. Casting and moulding tools cost a fortune, and those upfront NRC are just prohibitive for small volumes. So smart CNC machining it is. Added benefit, there are tons of small CNC machining ships around that are really good at that.
Nothing to add on ejector pin marks, if you see those on the outside of your part, your part design and manufacturing / tool design sucks. No need to be a billionaire genius, just a decent plastics engineer.
But since the target audiamce of this article are start-ups, it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Brcause how many start-up founders have a solid grasp of hardware manufacturing, design, tooling and manufacturing processes? Especially those that want "Apple" without understanding what that means deffinitely don't.