
Startups Can’t Manufacture Like Apple Does (2014) - bootload
https://blog.bolt.io/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-apple-does-93bea02a3bbf
======
bobjordan
This is a good list. Let me add one to it. I manufacture products in China and
I consistently see new designs for injection molded parts where the designer
has unrealistic expectations for the tolerances that can be achieved on molded
parts. While the tolerance we can achieve will change proportionally with the
size of the injection molded part, don't design parts that rely on precisions
of 0.01mm. Hard to do this unless you are Apple.

~~~
louprado
Scott Miller of the Bolt team has a great video on injection molding.

Design for Manufacturing Course 5: Injection Molding - DragonInnovation.com
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx5_gO9LTf8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx5_gO9LTf8)

After watching it I decided to use commodity enclosures with custom milling
and avoid injection molding for now.

~~~
Klinky
Another interesting resource is "Guerrilla guide to CNC machining, mold
making, and resin casting" @
[http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/)

How did you find your commodity enclosures? It seems like there are a lot of
random manufacturers out there making ugly enclosures.

~~~
louprado
I prefer Takachi enclosure. Some of their plastic is translucent so your LEDs
will shine through the enclosure. You can see an example here:
[https://hackaday.io/project/6357/gallery#67d3556e38f0b46c486...](https://hackaday.io/project/6357/gallery#67d3556e38f0b46c486510fcf0848ae5)

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tgb
I remember coming across this some time ago on HN and being really interested
by the white plastic bit. It clicks into place Apple's ability to set itself
apart visually during the white earbuds era of iPod advertisements. PCs were
black and gray and beige, Apple was a shining white.

And no one else could mimic their style, since it was just too difficult.

~~~
bootload
_" And no one else could mimic their style, since it was just too difficult."_

The magic of Apple isn't their design, it's the ability to re-create and
distribute good design cheaper than Braun. [0]

[0]
[https://twitter.com/HannuRytkonen/status/731511690911711232](https://twitter.com/HannuRytkonen/status/731511690911711232)

~~~
coldtea
That's just designer nods to earlier work/aesthetics, and happen all the time
in industrial (and graphic) design.

Especially since we're talking about 20 and 50 year old designs at the time --
it's not like copying this year's hot product to sell a cheap imitation.
Totally different era, totally different functionality, totally different
devices -- but borrowing the old visual style.

The magic of Apple is the functionality and thinking behind their devices.
There are tons of same looking competitor devices that get it wrong.

E.g. the whole idea behind the unibody design is not the seam-less look, it's
the sturdiness and tolerance of the materia. Competitors copy the overall look
and color, but leave out both the seam-lessness AND the sturdiness.

Or take touches like the mag safe port, the touch trackpad, the no-button
trackpad, the first to come out with the hi-dpi display -- plus the thinking
that goes into ensuring good battery life, small weight, and thinness along
with said sturdiness. Competitors often leave out one or more of these --
which are all important for a laptop.

Where Apple fails, OTOH, is their occasional cheapness, still selling
embarrassing starter configurations (memory, disk-size wise). Of course if
they do sell these, and buyers have no problem, kudos to them, but one would
expect more, since that's too is part of the whole experience, even if the
buyer thinks 128 GB SSD is good for them.

~~~
mseebach
My wife got (on my recommendation) the starter config Air, and it's never
occurred to me that there was anything inadequate about it (to be fair, two
years in, she ran out of disk space and had to move a stash of photos to an
external hard drive, and for me, I can't stand the tiny display, but it works
for her, so that's great).

------
sbierwagen
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8335424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8335424)

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dammitcoetzee
I ranted a bit on this as well on Hackaday [http://wp.me/pk3lN-
PBv](http://wp.me/pk3lN-PBv) . Apple and Foxconn just have an unimaginable
amount of capital. However, I don't think hardware designers should despair.
There are many ways to design things, and constraint is the mother of
innovation. As the author mentions, it's entirely possible to make products
just as appealing with a fraction of the cost.

~~~
CamperBob42
Great post. I don't normally read Hackaday because I can't stand white-on-
black text (there's a reason nobody else does that anymore) but your post and
your earlier one from March 7 were well worth it.

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amluto
One particular bit of this makes no sense:

> What happened when Apple wanted to CNC machine a million MacBook bodies a
> year? They bought 10k CNC machines to do it.

CNC milling scales linearly. If you want to make 1k things per year, you can
probably do it with one CNC machine. I know a startup that's using CNC-milled
enclosures and that's probably the single easiest part of their production.

Sure, startups won't buy 10k CNC machines, but they won't need them either.

~~~
Animats
Yes, and here's a CNC machine shop in Germany machining a MacBook body, or
something very close to it: [1]

It's hard to believe that Apple needed one CNC machine for every 100 (was 10,
oops) MacBooks. The MacBook isn't that expensive.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob-
RBntcZc8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob-RBntcZc8)

~~~
codyb
I think you missed a zero, it'd be 100 a year, and then of course they don't
need to buy new ones every year.

I'd imagine they probably use them for more than just MacBooks as well but I'm
just inferencing and don't have any real idea.

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Nokinside
It's not just Apple vs startups. Large customers like Apple or Samsung have
big advantages over smaller phone manufacturers.

Apple can always call Foxconn and tell them that they want even this barely
visible detail fixed. Foxconn comes up with number for changes in the
manufacturing processes ($10 million for better tooling for example) and it's
done. Small manufacturers who have low margins can't justify similar attention
to detail.

~~~
usrusr
Or look at phones vs. other appliances that are made for smaller markets.
Garmin is the dominant incumbent in portable GPS devices and even their
handsets feel like garage-made prototypes compared to even the worst phone,
despite being exactly the same technology except for the backlight diffuser
film.

------
bambax
> _CNC machining is fantastic for prototypes [but] it is not for consumer
> devices. Figure out a way to cast your metal parts._

Why is that?

I'm trying to build a better quick release plate for DSLR cameras, compatible
with Manfrotto tripods but that lets you do a couple of other things (like
attach a hand strap to it directly).

I had prototypes made in China with CNC machining, and they are of a very good
quality (superb, even, it seems to me).

For production, injection molding is of a reasonnable price but the result
would not be the same quality (plastic is a poor choice for this).

Die casting is too expensive for the volume, given it's really a niche
product.

So I was thinking of doing short runs with CNC: what' wrong with that option?

~~~
joshvm
The problem is people build a little widget that would happily fit in a box
from Hammond, but they would rather have it customised at great expense and it
eats into their profit. CNC is pretty time inefficient and expensive when you
get to very large volumes.

The major advantage of CNC though is that if you mess up the first time, you
haven't ruined an entire batch. You just send the new model to the company.
With molding or die casting, fuckups can easily cost tens of thousands.

If your margin can absorb the cost of CNC - and for photography it's probably
a marketing feature - go for it. Plenty of companies sell CNC machined housing
simply because they can say it's CNC'd and people go "ooooh".

~~~
bambax
Oh okay, so it's just a volume thing?

Does it make sense to do metal casting for low volume (under 1k)? It would be
economic nonsense anyway...?

~~~
icegreentea
I'm mostly familiar with plastic molds, but for durable/production ready
molds, you're normally starting off at like 20k per mold. You can usually
bring your part to manufacturers (both CNC and casting shops) and ask for some
quotes.

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sgnelson
Well, the truth is that very few companies can manufacture like Apple does.
Between the obsession with design, details, and having the resources to have
the manufacturers create entire new production processes just for them. And
often, the companies who do the above are usually not consumer facing.

------
fauria
Does anyone know what a "CM" in this context is?:

" _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._ "

~~~
FigBug
contract manufacturer

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_manufacturer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_manufacturer)

------
bane
It's pretty interesting to think that quality can actually go _up_ as volume
increases. This seems to run counter to general perception that small/hand
batches can be of incredibly high quality and once it goes to mass production
quality goes lower.

We've never really seen production at Apple/Samsung's scale before and I
wonder if this quality curve is something that is all that well understood.

~~~
Klinky
This is not surprising. Cobbled together prototypes and first runs are usually
not pretty. It's like the first pancake or waffle, usually not quite right. A
machine will certainly be quicker and more consistent once setup correctly.

Perhaps there are artisan niches where a machine cannot do the work, and a
human slaves over the minute details, but those are usually luxury items.

~~~
roel_v
" It's like the first pancake or waffle, usually not quite right"

Very much OT, but that's because the pan or iron isn't hot enough. Ever since
I started first putting the pan on the fire, then mix my batter while the pan
heats up, my first pancake has been as good as every one after that.

(sorry to contaminate the discussion with this, but I found it much more
satisfying than I would think is normal when I got a process down that stopped
me from looking like an amateur pancake maker, which is why I figured I'd
share :) )

~~~
tluyben2
My first pancakes 'fail' (no-one minds eating them :) not because of that but
because I need to get the feel for the batter spoon in my wrist, get a feel
for the cooking time and get a feel in my wrist for the pan & flipping motion.
I do not bake them that often so that feeling needs to come first. After a few
it's there and then I can bake 100s of the same ones. Which I do at (beer)
festivals.

Also sorry to contaminate the thread.

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sgt
I bought a Hand ground coffee grinder last year. It's a Kickstarter project
and we should actually have received the grinder last year some time, but in
the spirit of Kickstarter I'm patient.

I think the challenges they've had are similar to what is touched upon in this
article.

They've had a ton of clearance and molding issues, and dozens of design
prototypes and mismatching parts. To add to the difficulties, the coffee
grinder has moving parts that take a lot of stress, as opposed to just a box
with a circuit board inside.

* [http://handground.com/](http://handground.com/)

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funkyy
Posts like that are why I come to HN. Even if my field of expertise have
absolutely nothing to do with manufacturing, its nice to read about problems
and solutions of huge industry explained in simple and clean language.

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makenova
What are high margin parts? ...asking for a friend

~~~
amk_
Parts you can sell for much more than they cost to produce

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whyagaindavid
A while ago Andrew 'bunnie' Huang (Remember chumby?) gave a talk on hardware
manufacturing in linuxconf-AU. Could not find a link but it covered a lot -
why you cant do it like apple or samsung. His book is out now!

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ArtDev
Apple outsources its manufacturing.

A small startup can't just get Samsung and Foxconn to build their parts. This
is true.

~~~
blackguardx
Yes, but Apple still has significant say in how its products are made. In many
cases they use their own production engineers to figure out the best way to
make things. In other cases, they set insanely hard specifications and use
their massive buying power to entice their partners to figure it out.

Source: I've worked with ex-Apple engineers at a company that mostly used
Apple's hardware processes.

~~~
itchyouch
There was a long article (maybe Vanity Fair or Esquire?) that pointed out how
Apple put up 1B to Foxconn for building an Apple dedicated factory where the
factory processes would be dictated fully by Apple.

In the lost interview of Steve Jobs, Jobs says this:

I’ll give you an example. When we were building our Apple computers in a
garage, we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the
Apple II days, the accountants had this notion of a standard cost, where you
kind of set a standard cost and at the end of the quarter, you would adjust it
with a variance. I kept asking: why do we do this? The answer was, “That’s
just the way it’s done.”

After about six months of digging into this, I realized that the reason they
did this is that they didn’t have good enough controls to know how much it’s
going to cost. So you guess. And then you fix your guess at the end of the
quarter. And the reason you don’t know how much it costs is because your
information systems aren’t good enough. But nobody said it that way.

So later on, when we designed this automated factory for the Macintosh, we
were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts and know exactly
what something cost.

If you know what exactly something costs during manufacturing, now you can
optimize it.

~~~
ianai
Not to mention, they were making equipment that made it easier to know such
details.

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AceJohnny2
(2014), but still as relevant as ever.

~~~
bootload
noted

