From the initial launch and almost overnight, iPads appeared at cafés and on cross-country flights. Apple executives had predicted several times that the iPad would one day replace the PC, but that switch started happening quicker than anyone expected. In the first year, Apple sold nearly fifteen million iPads. By the fourth quarter of 2011, Apple sold more iPads in just three months than any of its rivals sold PCs. By 2015, tablets (most of them iPads) will have more market share than the entire traditional PC market, according to estimates by the market research firm Interactive Data Corporation. The post-PC era, led by Jony and Apple, is upon us.
CHAPTER 12
Unibody Everywhere
From a design and engineering point of view, Apple is at the absolute pinnacle of creating products that are as close to flawless as can be done.
—DENNIS BOYLE, COFOUNDER, IDEO
In 2008, Jony took the stage at an Apple event to talk about something special: Apple’s new “unibody” manufacturing process. His very appearance was a clear sign from the company of the importance of this design breakthrough.
Jony began by talking about the old MacBook Pro, which was one of the lightest and strongest laptops on the market at the time. Its robust strength resulted from a complex structure of internal frames and strengthening plates screwed and welded together. As Jony spoke, a series of slides played behind him, showing the multiple parts layered, bonded and finally mated with a plastic gasket that ran around the middle.
“For years,” Jony told the audience, “we have been looking for a better way to make a notebook.” He paused and smiled before continuing. “And we think we found it.”1
Jony went on to explain the manufacture of the MacBook Air, Apple’s new razor-thin laptop. Instead of taking multiple sheets of metal and layering them, the new process began with a thick block of metal and, in a reversal of the old process, produced a frame by removing material rather than by adding it. Multiple parts were replaced by just one—hence the name unibody.
Jony’s slides illustrated the various stages. Pronouncing aluminum the British way (aloo-min-ium), he said, while smiling: “One of the fantastic things about aluminum is how recyclable it is. So at each of these distinct stages, we are continually collecting the material, and cleaning it and then recycling it.”2
Although he revealed none of the most essential secrets of the process, he clearly reveled in its fantastic, robot-controlled production. “We started with a solid slab of aluminum, high grade aluminum, that weighed over 2.5 lbs and we end with this remarkably precise part that now only weighs a quarter of a pound. And it’s not only incredibly light, it’s very, very strong.”
The process represented the realization of something else close to Jony’s design soul. By melding great design with state-of-the-art manufacturing technology, Apple had produced something remarkable and new. “That one part,” continued Jony, “just that single part, forms the structure for the MacBook Air. It really is this highly precise aluminum unibody enclosure that made this product possible.”
At that moment, the MacBook Air was the only Apple machine made with the unibody process. However, Apple was about to move almost all of its major products, including the Mac, iPhone and iPad, to unibody.
The change would be a watershed, albeit one that in the excitement surrounding the launch of various products, went largely unacknowledged by the public.
Making the Change
Several months earlier, Jony had laid out all of the parts of a dismantled MacBook Pro on top of one of the big display tables in the design studio at Apple. On the table next to it he had spread out the parts of one of the new unibody MacBooks.
Arranged neatly, the parts of the old MacBook Pro took up almost the entire tabletop. In contrast, the many fewer parts of the unibody machine made for a striking comparison. Jony called his designers over to appreciate the difference.
As part of his characteristic drive to reduce and simplify, Jony wanted to reduce the number of parts and therefore the number of part-to-part joints. Previously, when IDg had done a similar dismantling of an original iPhone, the team counted nearly thirty interfaces where parts meet. After the iPhone underwent a unibody makeover, the number of interfaces shrank to just five.
Jony and his team had initiated the process that led to the unibody much earlier. They’d first explored machining—a manufacturing process that removes raw material to make a part, that may involve drilling, turning, boring and so on—in 2001 with the Power Mac G4 Quicksilver and slowly increased its use with subsequent products like the Cube, Mac mini and various aluminum iPods. But Jony’s team got really serious about machining in 2005 for the iPhone. At that time, they visited various watch manufacturers to see how precise, long-lasting time-keeping products were made.
“We started researching watch companies just to understand machining metals, finishing metals, product assembly,” recalled Satzger.3 What they found was a remarkably high standard of manufacturing. Most importantly, they realized the watch industry used highly machined parts in their high-end products.
While the solution made sense, the Apple investigators also learned that watches are made in relatively small batches. But now the plan gradually evolved to go full bore and use machining as the main manufacturing process for all of Apple’s major products.
• • •
The “unibody process” is a blanket name for a number of machining operations. Machining in general has long been time- and labor-intensive. It relies on big, slow machines like drills and milling machines, but modern CNC machines have greatly sped up and automated the process.
Traditionally, machining has rarely been used in mass production, which is more likely to rely on fast and efficient methods like stamping and molding to turn out products in the millions. Machining is usually associated with one-shot products or small batches. The prototypes made in Jony’s design studio are machined, individually carved using CNC milling machines. In industry, machining has usually been employed only by specialized manufacturers with high standards and deep pockets; think aerospace, defense, high-end watches and designer cars, like the Aston Martin. It is the way to make the best parts possible, the pinnacle of refinement and precision. But it takes time and money.
“Machining enables a level of precision that is just completely unheard of in this industry,” said Jony. “We have been so fanatical in the tolerances of how we machine and build these products, in many ways I think it is more beautiful internally than it is externally. I think that testifies to just our care, to how much we care.”4
Jony saw the unibody process as the key to shrinking the iPhone, iPad and MacBook. In all of these products, a single part forms the back plate and the frame. All the screw bosses are cut into it, for attaching other components, and condensing even more parts into one. Unibody allowed Jony’s team to make the iPhone 5 about three millimeters thinner than the iPhone 4S. That may not sound like much, but it trimmed about 30 percent of the thickness off an already thin product.
For a laptop body, the first part of the process is to create a block of extruded aluminum from a billet (a big round tube) of raw aluminum. The billet is put through a giant hot press that, as if making flat noodles from a ball of dough, creates an extrusion into a sheet of aluminum.
The aluminum sheet then begins a trip through thirteen separate milling operations to get it into its final shape. The metal is cut into rectangular blocks the size of the laptop. It goes into the first CNC machine, where a laser drill creates a series of registration holes that guide the next cutting operation, a rough “hogging out” that removes the majority of the unwanted material.
This step is followed by a series of increasingly precise milling operations that create the finished part. The key caps and input ports are cut out. Screw bosses are cut and internal struts and ribs are shaped.
The next stage is the laser drilling of perforations for indicator lights
. The inside of the case, where the light will be located, is milled thin enough to allow a laser drill to perforate minute holes through the metal. The laser drill is extremely accurate and fast, vaporizing metal with each pulse. The perforations are so tiny, the metal appears to be solid from the outside, but in actuality, they’re big enough to allow the LED behind to shine through. It’s an innovative practice for building magic into the product through precision.
“What is intriguing about that small design detail, is it is a phenomenal piece of design,” said designer Chris Lefteri. “An obvious thing to do there would be to make a hole in the metal, insert an LED, and place a piece of plastic over the top. Although that would do the job adequately, what Apple did instead was machine a series of virtually invisible holes in the body of the computer, so that suddenly lights appeared inside the holes. That is a craftsman-like approach to the industrial production process.”5
The laser drills are also used to make speaker grilles and other small openings, before a blast of fluid clears any debris. Apple uses lasers to etch serial numbers and other technical info onto the case, and may use them to inscribe personal inscriptions on the backs of iPods. Because there’s no physical contact with the aluminum, the “drills” used for this process never dull or wear out, and they are easily configured and reconfigured through the CNC controls.
After laser drilling, the unibody is passed to a CNC grinding machine that smooths burrs, rough patches and any surface imperfections. The cases are then “blast finished”—sprayed with dry particulates such as ceramic, silica, glass or metal under high pressure—to give the surfaces a textured, matte finish. Then the part is anodized, clear coated or polished, depending on the finish.
The entire unibody process is very much a trade secret, so Apple reveals few details. How much of the process is automated is not clear, though at least part of the assembly is done by robots. While most Apple products have been assembled by hand by legions of workers, it appears the unibody process may enable the company to shift toward automated assembly.
“There’s a lot of focus on robotics and robotic control,” said a former mechanical engineer who worked as a liaison among ID, product development and operations, and spent months in the factories. The engineer declined to elaborate, citing confidentiality agreements, but said that many of Apple’s products are now primarily made and finished on CNC machines with robots moving parts between machining cycles.6
“I have literally seen buildings where as far as the eye can see, where you can see machines carving, mostly aluminum, dedicated exclusively for Apple at Foxconn,” said Guatam Baksi, a product design engineer at Apple from 2005 to 2010. “As far as the eye can see.”7
Unibody Today
The unibody process is revolutionizing high-tech manufacturing. At Apple, the move toward robot workflow has, in a sense, revived Steve Jobs’s long-cherished dream once manifested in his 1980s Macintosh factory in the Bay Area with its automated production line. Machining used to be used strictly for prototyping, and no one employed it on an industrial scale until Jony came along. But others have been quick to recognize its importance. Dennis Boyle, one of the cofounders of IDEO, said machining products on an industrial scale is “a dream for product designers.”8
“Companies have always traditionally avoided machining because it costs more than other techniques,” he said, “but Apple has figured out a way. . . . Apple has proved that if a company invests at the highest level and takes Ive and his team’s designs and really sticks to them without compromising on how they look and feel, then it can create products that are so sought after, so beautiful and elegant, that they can make them a success. From a design and engineering point of view, Apple is at the absolute pinnacle of creating products that are as close to flawless as can be done.”
Unibody represents a giant financial gamble by Apple. When it started investing seriously around 2007, Apple contracted with a Japanese manufacturer to buy all the milling machines it could produce for the next three years. By one estimate, that was 20,000 CNC milling machines a year, some costing upward of $250,000 and others $1 million or more. The spending didn’t stop there, as Apple bought up even more, acquiring every CNC milling machine the company could find. “They bought up the entire supply,” said one source. “No one else could get a look in.”9
This spending on tooling ramped up with the iPhone and iPad, which relied more on machining with each generation. According to Horace Dediu of Asymco, an analyst firm, the original iPhone cost $408 million in equipment investment. But by 2012, as the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 (both unibody products) went to production, Apple’s capital expenditures ballooned to even more mind-boggling levels. Apple spent $9.5 billion on capital expenditures, the majority of which was earmarked for product tooling and manufacturing processes. By comparison, the company spent $865 million on retail stores. Thus, Apple spent nearly eleven times as much on its factories as on its stores, most of which are in prime (that is, expensive) real estate locations.10
Another manufacturing innovation made necessary by Jony’s design desires—in this case, to get razor-thin edges on the 2012 iMacs—is friction welding. Given the thin profile of the iMac, traditional welding methods couldn’t be used to join the front and the back. Enter the need for so-called friction stir welding (FSW), a solid-state welding process invented in 1991. It’s actually less of a weld than a recrystallization, as the atoms of the two pieces are joined in a super strong bond when a high-speed bobbin is moved along the edges to be bonded, creating friction and softening the material almost to its melting point. The plasticized materials are then pushed together under enormous force, and the spinning bobbin stirs them together. The result is a seamless and very strong bond.
In the past, FSW required machines costing up to three million dollars apiece, so its use was confined to fabricating rocket and airplane parts. More recent advances allowed CNC milling machines to be retrofitted to perform FSW at a much lower cost. That opened the door for Apple, which has many CNC machines at its disposal.
In addition to its other advantages, FSW produces no toxic fumes and finished pieces that require no extra filler metal for further machining, making the process more environmentally friendly than traditional welding.
Greening the Apple?
The new manufacturing methods are driven partly by Jony’s desire to make Apple greener. Those desires got a kick start in 2005, when Apple got into a public spat with Greenpeace International. The global environmental campaigner slammed Apple for its lack of a recycling program and its use of a host of toxic chemicals in its manufacturing processes. Steve Jobs dismissed the charges at first but, in 2007, announced a total overhaul of Apple’s environmental practices. Since then the company has improved its environmental profile, reducing toxins in manufacturing, including mercury, arsenic, brominated flame retardants and polyvinyl chloride.
In a further attempt to improve its environmental profile, Apple lowered power requirements of many products, earning high Energy Star ratings and gold ratings from the Electronic Product Environment Assessment Tool (EPEAT), which tries to measure products’ environmental impact over their lifetime, taking into account energy use, recyclability and how the products are designed and made. Apple has also reduced the size of its packaging, permitting more packages to be loaded into freight and saving fuel. And the newest MacBooks are touted as 100 percent recyclable, while Apple products in general use aluminum and glass, materials that are easily recycled and reused.
Even so, Apple still doesn’t get the highest marks from Greenpeace because the company is so secretive. In 2012, Greenpeace gave Apple a score of 4.5 out of a possible 10, putting Apple in the middle of the pack of tech companies (an improvement, actually, as it started at the bottom). Overall, Greenpeace credits Apple with increased environment responsibility but points out that “Apple misses out on points for lack of transparency on GHG [greenhouse gas] emission reporting, clean energ
y advocacy, further information on its management of toxic chemicals, and details on post-consumer recycled plastic use.”11
Although Jobs got public credit for the greening of Apple, one source inside the company said a lot of the impetus came from Jony, who was “really stung” by Greenpeace’s initial criticism.
“Jony felt that Apple had very positive stories about its environmental impact,” the source said. Jony’s commitment to not making junk products certainly puts him in a stronger environmental light: His products tend to be used and cherished for years, just the opposite of throwaway products with their more immediate and detrimental environmental impact.
Another criticism cast at Jony and the company concerns the decision to seal many of their products. That means that, in most cases, Apple products aren’t user serviceable, as they require special tools and skills even to change a battery. Environmental activists like Kyle Wiens of iFixit point out a sealed device is more likely to be junked than one that can be more easily repaired by the nonprofessional.
The iPad, Wiens said, is “deeply immoral. It’s glued shut and the battery will be inoperable after five hundred charge-discharge cycles. It is expressly designed to be thrown away. Reparability isn’t a concern and so designers aren’t going to design that in.”12
Apple insiders disagree. They point out Apple’s products are certainly designed to be repaired, though not by their owners. “Apple has a special service process,” Satzger explained. “Not a lot of other companies have the ability to service their own products, so they design them to be serviced by places like Best Buy.”
Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products Page 25