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!

 

[swk9]

The build quality is just amazing for its price range. Looking at the online discourse so many people just downright discount any notion of a device feeling *nice* to use and sturdy. Instead they would rather go by benchmarks, and now even benchmarks are being ignored because Macs tend to well there so it's down to RAM and storage for money. The display quality is often not even in discussion because it's usually so terrible.

Speaking of benchmark, it's just unfathomable how technology enthusiasts push Cinebench as the "relevant" benchmark while criticizing Geenbench just because Apple processors tend to do so well in the latter. It's just comical to see so many seriously argue the Cinebench is anyway relevant for the majority of laptop users more so than Geekbench workloads.

 

[dada_dave]

The build quality is just amazing for its price range. Looking at the online discourse so many people just downright discount any notion of a device feeling *nice* to use and sturdy. Instead they would rather go by benchmarks, and now even benchmarks are being ignored because Macs tend to well there so it's down to RAM and storage for money. The display quality is often not even in discussion because it's usually so terrible.

Speaking of benchmark, it's just unfathomable how technology enthusiasts push Cinebench as the "relevant" benchmark while criticizing Geenbench just because Apple processors tend to do so well in the latter. It's just comical to see so many seriously argue the Cinebench is anyway relevant for the majority of laptop users more so than Geekbench workloads.

To the type of commenter you are referring to thinks Cinebench is just as much Apple propaganda as Geekbench is.

Here's a quote from one I ran across just recently:

Same nonsense posted each year with each new release. How about doing actual benchmarks with actual applications instead of running the same 2 [Geekbench and Cinebench] benchmarks that are literally the most best case scenario for apple, that are the most optimized for apple?
How about being realistic with the workloads so that people can stop parroting pure propaganda by utilizing software that doesn't at all represent real world scenarios?

And I see the same for SPEC in comments under the few popular reviewers who run it. Like I have no idea which benchmarks this particular individual considers real world, but I should state that those who design CPUs rarely if ever use these kinds of benchmarks to assess their designs - Srouiji has stated the Apple has its own suite of internal benchmarks and @Cmaier has stated numerous times when he was designing at AMD that they again had their own way of assessing performance while designing the CPUs. Obviously it's different when it comes time to market the chips, but I'm talking specifically about the engineers designing the chips.