This is really nothing new. Apple has been playing this game for years, ask anyone who shared an adjacent floor with Apple in Foxconn in the last decade.
It's done nothing but good for Apple to be aggressive and as vertical without owning the manufacturer as possible. Some of their processes are _years_ ahead of what anyone else can get their hands on, because they buy all the equipment, lease all the floors, and just throw money around like it's nobody's business. AMD and certainly Qualcomm can't touch em.
> Some of their processes are _years_ ahead of what anyone else can get their hands on
They are about a year ahead on CPUs. But pretty much everything else (screens, camera sensors, battery) has been on a par with, or behind what everyone else is doing.
When they moved away from unibody laptops they did so by introducing friction-stir welding. That was hot tech on Boeing airplanes at the time. Some of those Boeing patents are still active.
I think I’m terms of pure features that most people care about, other manufacturers are on par.
But Apple products tend to have some really interesting manufacturing or technology. Machining steel for the iPhone 4, FSW, putting an Xbox Kinect into the notch, LiDAR, making edge to edge screens without a chin, custom silicon.
Most of this is easily replaced or omitted because it doesn’t really matter much to the end user.
They really add up. Face id was and is pretty "magical". Chins on other phones massively bother me, especially when they are just a tad larger than the side bezels. It's off.
Apple are able to provide unique experiences through their polish and proper concepts. Other manufacturers can even have the features, but they usually don't know what to do with them, make the experience bad and so nobody will care.
That is a 20 minute piece of homework you just assigned. Time offsets please.
The bit I scanned through shows cracking due to dumb placement of holes. And that’s on the lid, not the laptop body.
Drilling holes through the edge of load bearing elements is still a classic failure mode for home construction, so I’m disappointed but not surprised. There’s a lot of bad blood about their hinges, and I’m not gonna fight anybody on that. They wanted the thinnest laptops, they got them, but not without consequences.
But part of that thinness was actually pretty smart, and that’s what we are discussing here. Using billet aluminum and CNC fabrication for complex shapes instead of gluing (gluing takes large contact points which means more material). Switching to airframe construction techniques was cooler and probably faster. Carving them out of solid aluminum was innovative mostly because it sounded so crazy. Stir welding sounded positively sober by comparison, even though it was hot shit at the time.
Eh I can think of many areas where Apple is behind its competitors pretty handily. Samsung has more advanced display tech, for example (OLED, integrated touch, polarizer-free, etc.)
Whether it's unibody aluminum milled frames, bleeding edge injection molding, glass, silicon...
It's done nothing but good for Apple to be aggressive and as vertical without owning the manufacturer as possible. Some of their processes are _years_ ahead of what anyone else can get their hands on, because they buy all the equipment, lease all the floors, and just throw money around like it's nobody's business. AMD and certainly Qualcomm can't touch em.