Molly Anderson explains new Unibody Manufacturing Process, custom alloy for MacBook Neo

[RockRock8]

Molly Anderson details the new industrial design in an interview about the breakthrough MacBook Neo.

The Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple describes a custom process and aluminum alloy that allows them to create a brand new category of Mac at $599 -- one where Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, and Apple have refused to do unless they could make it "not junk"

Using a new forming process using extreme pressure and heat, the team was able to mold the aluminum extrusion (that of which they begin with for ALL Macs) into the approximate rough shape of what the final ID design has to be.

Then, with fine machining through use of CNC mills, they carefully create the final form with precision. Coupled together, it speeds up the time to manufacture, and reduces the material needed.

To accommodate this new process, a new alloy had to be created and tested to accommodate. The result is a soft and round, yet precise and high quality, very colorful notebook utterly unlike anything its in price range.

With years of innovation and expertise in industrial design, with increasing sophistication and knowledge in materials science, coupled with the magic of Apple silicon and a renowned display, Apple has been able to offer not only a notebook that is quintessentially Mac, but a notebook far more capable in performance than any other notebook in its class.

The MacBook Neo is indeed the glitch in the matrix, and users have responded:
the MacBook Neo is sold out in multiple configurations.

If you wish to read the entire interview in full, you can do so here:

"We're certainly not making any compromises" says Apple's head of design

The MacBook Neo was designed without reducing the quality of materials or processes says Apple design head Molly Anderson in this interview.

www.dezeen.com

Steve Jobs quote on a $500 MacBook:

There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.

Steve Jobs on netbooks and low quality computers:

I can tell you what our goal is. Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And we want to do that at the lowest prices we can. But I have to tell you, there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship, that we wouldn’t be proud to recommend to our family and friends. And we can’t do it. We just can’t ship junk.

So there are thresholds that we can’t cross because of who we are. But we want to make the best personal computers in the industry. And we think there’s a very significant slice of the industry that wants that too. And what you’ll find is our products are usually not premium priced. You go and price out our competitors’ products, and you add the features that you have to add to make them useful, and you’ll find in some cases they are more expensive than our products. The difference is we don’t offer stripped-down lousy products. We just don’t offer categories of products like that. But if you move those aside and compare us with our competitors, I think we compare pretty favorably. And a lot of people have been doing that, and saying that now, for the last 18 months.

Steve Jobs would be proud of this product. It was only possible through hard work -- not cost cutting -- to make something as useful and wonderful as this even possible.

Great job to everyone at Apple from industrial design, human interface design, to hardware engineering and software engineering, environmental and privacy teams, and the operations team to not only supply high quality materials at a much reduced price for them to use, but also a high consistent supply of materials, so all people that want one can get one.

I hope you enjoyed reading!