Apple's Dimensional Drawings

213 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by herbertl
(developer.apple.com)

82 Comments

barbacoa

8 hours ago

What's ironic is that Apple does all their mechanical CAD work for their products in Siemens NX running in Windows VMs.

leohonexus

7 hours ago

I understand the need for it to be in Siemens NX, but do they really run it in Windows VMs? As far as I know NX isn't certified to run in VMs without Nvidia GPU passthrough (aka Macs). It seems more sensible to maintain a fleet of Windows desktops specifically for CAD and industrial control.

raverbashing

an hour ago

> It seems more sensible to maintain a fleet of Windows desktops specifically for CAD and industrial control.

I don't see why. Build a VM image in the more sensible OS and work from there

Don't worry about IT support, just burn the VM and replace whenever something gets weird

They probably can solve every video driver issue they find or just find a way to use an nVidia card on a beefy Intel Mac

(or do the same on Linux - also possible)

eru

13 minutes ago

> Don't worry about IT support, just burn the VM and replace whenever something gets weird

You don't need VMs for that. You can reset to a known good state on your bare metal disk drive just as well.

steve1977

6 hours ago

It could be VDIs, i.e. VMs running on another system, potentially x86 with GPU

zarzavat

6 hours ago

More sensible, yes... but less ideologically pure.

bayindirh

3 hours ago

Considering their backend (iCloud, etc.) runs on Linux fleets, I believe they are more pragmatic than idealists.

I'd love to see a full fleet of Mac servers (XServe was a handsome piece of kit), but I believe one shall choose their battles.

somat

2 hours ago

So this is all pure speculation, but seeing as they are a hardware company I wonder if they have some sort of internal only server chassis to house apple motherboards for their backend, tolerate asahi linux for this? No real external market for apple servers so they don't develop it past "Ok for internal use"

The more I think about it the more I doubt it, even if you make your own hardware it is hard to compete with a commodity server, but it is an interesting thought.

Update: or perhaps they do, a sibling comment had a picture of such.

ChrisMarshallNY

2 hours ago

They definitely have their own servers. There was a post about that, some time ago. There’s a sibling post to yours, about them.

Not sure about the backplane architecture. I’m pretty sure they are custom datacenter rack units.

zdc1

4 hours ago

You would think this is a great opportunity for Apple to fill a gap in the market (and dogfood their solution too). Guess not...

AdamN

2 hours ago

Only if the marketplace makes sense. They can't just roll their own CAD system to use internally - mostly because it's a huge space and it requires working with external stakeholders/vendors

asdfsa32

3 hours ago

This is the typical thinking of the toolmaker. It is not useful in markets. Apple is not in the business of engineering software, their in the business of consumer hardware.

pjmlp

2 hours ago

Even more so, having retired themselves from server and workstation market.

brcmthrowaway

7 hours ago

This is insane. Is there no great first party CAD solution on Mac?

zokier

4 hours ago

NX supported macos and Linux until 2019. The situation is kinda sad/ironic considering that many big CAD packages have their roots in classic UNIX workstations, and afaik that was one of the major usecases for RedHat desktop. With the general decline of MS and Windows I imagine CAD companies must be reconsidering their platform choices. But of course big ships turn slowly so who knows when anything concrete might happen

gmueckl

2 hours ago

There is no meaningful decline of Windows on corporate desktops.

nikitaga

6 hours ago

Tons of industrial software is Windows only, whether it's design, operations, or configuration & control apps for industrial hardware.

MacOS versions are more commonly found in the low end of the market, e.g. Fusion 360.

anon291

5 hours ago

Which is kind of insane when you think about it considering what a cluster fuck the win32 API is

PorciiVorbesc

3 hours ago

Why is it a cluster fuck? When it's been virtually unchanged and stable for the past 30 or so years, which is how Winamp 2.95 can run on WIndows 11 today and how Wine can so easily run Windows games. Way better than Linux and Mac have historically provided for compatibility.

zwirbl

4 hours ago

Still the most stable API on Linux

dijit

4 hours ago

I still think that it’s one of the great ironies of our time.

Linux itself bends over backwards to avoid breaking userland, to the point where there is a substantial amount of cruft when interacting directly with the kernel.

Only for GNU to say “fuck that” and create a widely mockable situation, one of the worst targets of modern programs for stability… to the point where people start using alternative libc’s specifically to statically link them.

What a monumental failure.

boredatoms

2 hours ago

Dynamic linking by default has turned into a premature optimization over time

dgellow

3 hours ago

What?! Win32 is one of the best API ever designed. It’s pretty much the best part of windows

gmueckl

2 hours ago

Not all parts of Win32 were designed equally well. File IO, process management and most of the threading primitivs have aged really well. Thread management hasn't. The GUI parts are a sometimes hacky mess because behavioral changes created mismatches between what functions were specified to do and what that gets actually translated to. Permissions are a pain in the butt with complex ACLs, transparent file access redirects and how process elevation works.

dgellow

an hour ago

Yes, for sure. And with hindsight a lot of things would be done differently. I’m still really impressed by most of win32 given it was designed at a time where the software and hardware landscape looked so different from what we have today. Looks complex and messy at first but I learned a ton about what makes for good design by digging into win32 and NT

starky

5 hours ago

Professional 3D CAD software is pretty much Windows only. Especially with a company like Apple where you have complex models with many designers working on it you aren't going to risk using anything other than the likes of NX, Catia, Creo, or SolidWorks (though I shudder at how frustrating SolidWorks would be in that use case).

pjmlp

2 hours ago

It used to be UNIX as well, but Apple choose to give up on UNIX workstation market.

DrScientist

2 hours ago

For quite a long time, graphics card driver quality and performance has been much better on the PC driven by the larger PC gaming market.

Very hard for Apple, or Linux to do much about that - especially when Nvidia considered it's drivers key IP.

Couple that with a relatively small market - and it's hard to justify supporting multiple platforms.

steve1977

6 hours ago

I guess not for this use case. There are many industrial use cases for which there are no macOS versions. In fact, Siemens NX was once available on macOS AFAIK, but isn't anymore.

left-struck

5 hours ago

Nothing that CAD and engineering students would be familiar with.

There are some open source options but those aren’t taught at school afaik.

culturestate

5 hours ago

Not that it's necessarily suited for Apple's use case, but Autodesk's Fusion runs natively on Mac.

fingerlocks

3 hours ago

I think it’s just an electron wrapper over a browser version. Impressively sluggish, clunky, and unresponsive for a so-called native app

jasode

2 hours ago

Autodesk Fusion GUI uses the C++ Qt library, not Electron. Link to my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24252787

fingerlocks

an hour ago

Okay that’s even more pathetic. Is it using only CPU bound software rendering? I do 3d programming on MacOS. I can assure you that it’s not slow because it’s just super-duper complex. No, it just sucks.

Jarmsy

3 hours ago

Rhino runs natively on Mac

jbl0ndie

5 hours ago

Vectorworks. Popular with smaller architecture firms but not the biggest ones.

thechao

7 hours ago

I wish overhead (cut away to passenger layout) and side scale drawings of all cars existed. That way you could directly compare the vehicles. You'd think such information would be needed (in the U.S.) by the NTSB; and, thus, be freely available.

elyall

5 hours ago

https://www.carsized.com/en-us/

dllu

4 hours ago

That's not the same thing as those are photos with perspective distortion.

IshKebab

3 hours ago

Presumably they scale the photo to the actual measured dimension though, so at worst it will make the car look a bit weird.

toasty228

3 hours ago

Same, I recently upgraded to a similar car but slightly different segment, same brand. I couldn't find any data about it, I asked llms and they all told me given the available data the cabin size should be basically the same in term of passenger comfort. Completely wrong, there is much more space for both front and back passengers

weinzierl

5 hours ago

Electronics has this, more or less. Every device with a radio needs FCC certification, and the filings are public: internal photos (PCB shots good enough to read chip markings), external photos, test reports, manuals. Look up the FCC ID from the device label.

https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/GenericSearch.cfm

or

https://fccid.io

for a better frontend.

Nobody set out to build a teardown archive, it just falls out of the certification process. I wish cars had the equivalent.

tippa123

4 hours ago

Oh my word, have a look at the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and the level of detail.

Now imagine you’re the manufacturer and this is the spec you have to meet. Of course, they will have tolerances but still this is incredible. I wonder what the accepted rejection rate is?

I'm also curious how Apple handles surface roughness? The dimensions only give you part of the picture.

ndr42

an hour ago

About a year ago I was designing a 3d-printed case for my iPad and found nothing online. I tried to locate the magnets with a magnetic flux detector but the results were very inaccurate. Great that this info is now available.

MBCook

8 hours ago

I had no idea they published this to the general public.

darknavi

8 hours ago

A huge ecosystem of third party accessories, cases, skins, etc.

The openness is easily worth it.

eloisius

7 hours ago

I always imagined shops in China got out the calipers and made measurements from scratch every time a new iPhone was released. Never knew Apple made it this easy to manufacture Minion iPhone cases

userbinator

5 hours ago

They probably still do, if they have the device, because you definitely want to make sure before creating the not-cheap-even-in-China tooling.

As others have mentioned, these are more useful for when they don't, i.e. before the actual release.

SoftTalker

7 hours ago

Commoditize your complements. Wide choice and availability of accessories benefits hardware sales.

Maxion

5 hours ago

The big manufactureres pay or just simple acquire the leaks.

yreg

an hour ago

I remember around iPhone 6 or such popular design rumours that were circulating around turned out to be wrong. There were photos of chinese warehouses filled with cases made for the incorrect design.

With iPhone 4 Gizmodo literally acquired the prototype and still large portion of the crowd did not believe them, because the design seemed radically different to what they expected.

Nowadays with the size of the supply line there seem to remain no more hardware secrets before the keynotes.

MBCook

7 hours ago

That’s obviously the people who are really using it, but I assumed you had to pay Apple to get it.

So either you made your own measurements or if you were doing Made For iPhone and they would give it to you as part of that program which surely you must have to pay for.

gertlex

7 hours ago

I assume there's NDAs in place with some vendors pre-release, since my understanding is some accessory vendors get the needed info before new models are released, so they can spin up their lines and have accessories ready to go when the new model hits the market.

(but I could be wrong; NDAs w/China? no idea what the time between announced/released/shipped is typically; I last bought Apple product in 2009...)

tonyedgecombe

5 hours ago

I've heard that they are busy bribing people in Apple's manufacturers for dimensions before products are released.

p0ckets

7 hours ago

Commoditize Your Complement - Apple wants accessories to be cheap.

You might want to pay for the Made For iPhone certification for some things, but I doubt most cases have it.

plorg

5 hours ago

It's nice but lots of companies do this if their equipment is meant to be used with other equipment from third parties. Frankly I'm surprised they only provide it in 2D PDFs.

nish__

8 hours ago

It's so we can make cases.

nujabe

6 hours ago

Wouldn’t surprise me if EU forced them to.

zimpenfish

2 hours ago

This kind of thing was available (although more difficult to find) well before the EU started on their Apple quest - e.g. I had the dimensional drawings for whatever phone I had in late 2015 (6 or 6S, I forget) because I was making graphical inserts for my clear case using my Cricut with dimensions from the Apple PDF.

szemy2

2 hours ago

Why are the rounded edges for eg.: on MacBook Neo defined as small distance specs instead of a radius?

fainpul

2 hours ago

Because they're not circular arcs with a constant radius. They're "squircles". Apple uses those all over the place.

https://arun.is/blog/apple-rounded-corners/

In my opinion it only makes sense for reflective surfaces (e.g. cars) to have nicely flowing reflections, while most of Apple's products have a matte finish. In 2D UI elements it most definitely makes no sense. But some designer must have been a big fan of this and somehow they now use it everywhere.

birdboat00

2 hours ago

I can only guess, but I guess it IS because those are not circles but squircles maybe?

Dig1t

5 hours ago

What font is used in the technical drawing part? It's very cool.

djfergus

6 hours ago

Curious why the Macbook Neo is the only Macbook included?

twoodfin

4 minutes ago

Just a guess: Because the product line is so much older, the Mac design tooling is different and not as readily amenable to publishing this data.

Under this theory, the Neo is present because it was designed like an iOS device rather than like a Mac.

wartywhoa23

2 hours ago

Mac > MacBook Neo

... and nothing else.

I guess other MBs and MBPs are top secret.

mrcwinn

8 hours ago

Even the drawing of the Vision Pro feels heavy.

sysguest

7 hours ago

idk maybe apple can release fbx or blender files?

I mean these seem nice for print-decorations...

LiamPowell

6 hours ago

No decent engineering firm is going to want to work with FBX or Blender files. In fact they probably wouldn't even know what to do with them. Even proper model formats such as STEP files don't give you the details that are on a drawing that you actually need to do anything useful with these.

spockz

5 hours ago

I’ve only dabbled with cad for 3d modelling in Onshape. It seems that there all kinds of ways to add measurements in the render files. Not sure about blender.

LiamPowell

5 hours ago

MBD is a thing, however that doesn't really matter here, for making accessories you can more or less just assume all dimensions are perfect since you need some compliance for the accessory to be installable. What I'm talking about that can't be encoded in a model easily are things like the keepout area for the camera.

The reason you don't want Blender files at all in any sort of engineering is because it's a mesh. You can't pull any useful information, even something simple like a radius, from a mesh.

ggm

5 hours ago

Roll your own?