Why You Can't Manufacture Like Apple

HughPickens.com writes Medium reports that although many startups want to design something that mimics the fit and finish of an Apple product, it's a good way to go out of business. "What happened when Apple wanted to CNC machine a million MacBook bodies a year? They bought 10k CNC machines to do it. How about when they wanted to laser drill holes in MacBook Pros for the sleep light but only one company made a machine that could drill those 20 m holes in aluminum? It bought the company that made the machines and took all the inventory. And that time when they needed batteries to fit into a tiny machined housing but no manufacturer was willing to make batteries so thin? Apple made their own battery cells. From scratch." Other things that Apple often does that can cause problems for a startup include white plastic (which is the most difficult color to mold), CNC machining at scale (too expensive), Laser drilled holes (far more difficult than it may seem), molded plastic packaging (recycled cardboard is your friend), and 4-color, double-walled, matte boxes + HD foam inserts (It's not unusual for them to cost upwards of $12/unit at scale. And then they get thrown away.). "If you see a feature on an Apple device you want to copy, try to find it on another company's product. If you do, it's probably okay to design into your product. Otherwise, lower your expectations. I assure you it'll be better for your startup."

Comments

Re:Me too.

[theshowmecanuck]

Apple's design choices inspire people

FTFY: Apple's design choices inspire hipsters

Personally, I think all the previous versions of the iPhone (before 6) are butt fucking ugly, clunky looking things. And funny enough, their new phones look more like Samsung phones than their old POS designs. The only people who like (or are ooh and aah "inspired" by) the designs are hipsters who buy Apple for their hipster chic-ness and anyone else they can convince it's hipster chic. I also think this stupid idea would be so common if media types didn't give Apple such prominent media placement on TV and film all the time; they wouldn't be so cool. (At one time they had an advantage over Windows when they used Motorola chips in the 90s with monolithic memory as opposed to segmented memory when using media software in the pre pentium days... but now they have no advantage.)

I've used both extensively and haven't seen much difference except that the OSX 'Finder' app is the worst piece of shit file manager ever built and I keep feeling cheated that I have to pay for every little thing, nickle and dimed on Apple whenever I need to find something that works reasonably like a better file manager. Other than being Unix based it's got nothing over Windows (and I hate Windows 8, but given I can add 'classic shell' it's no worse than OSX). And fuck you if you say Windows isn't stable. I have no issues with Windows stablility since XP, and I have had OSX lock up so hard you could use it to cut glass. And retina displays? I don't care of the resolution is high, if you make the screen so fucking small I can't read it anyway, I don't care. People don't just buy 24 inch monitors for resolution. So in summary, fuck right off about 'inspiring people'.

Fuck, nothing better to throw me into a rant on the topic of computers than telling me that Apple design can 'inspire' me. Fuck right off.