Devil Is In The Details

By now everybody has read about Apple’s redesign of their signature line of notebooks. It’s a pretty impressive redesign and fits very well within the family of glossy-glass-black-border-screen line of Mac products that started with iMacs earlier this year. If you check out Apple’s site, you’ll find glam closeup shots of these laptops, techniques usually reserved for luxury goods and Porsche’s. It’s no surprise, since Jonathan Ives and Steve Jobs teamed up, this dynamic duo has been able to shock and awe us with Apple’s subsequent product releases.

This time, it’s no different. Today’s announcement is a product design update since the only hardware highlight is the announcement of Nvidia’s graphic card. They spent the last few months rounding out corners, polishing up the screen, and revolutionizing the manufacturing of these laptops.

Even though they put out impressive designs, what’s so unique with today’s announcement has to be their obsession with manufacturing process. During the product release, they kept touting the uni-body enclosure. It’s beautiful and if you understand a little about traditional manufacturing processes and how it compares to Apple’s milling manufacturing processes, you’ll understand why they are so proud. However, it’s not a new technique, a matter of fact it has roots in the 1920’s in the airline industry. The drop in aluminum plus demand for lighter stronger airplanes to handle the stress of high altitudes and more powerful air crafts paved ways for this technique. It was also briefly employed in the auto industry to make cars safer and faster. If you want to read more, Gizmodo wrote a nice brief piece highlighting the advantages and the history of this process.

What I find delightful is their childlike wonder of the process. They highlight it every chance they get and they talked about it at the conference, they made a documentary, Jonathan Ives even said “In many ways, I think, it’s more beautiful internally than it is externally” (we can’t say that about a lot of people). Apple’s commercial documentary is a nice short clip explaining their process , engineering, and they’re fanaticism when it comes to design. It wonderful to see a beautiful and functional product being talked through the eyes of a child.