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I had no idea they published this to the general public.
It's so we can make cases.
A huge ecosystem of third party accessories, cases, skins, etc.
The openness is easily worth it.
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.
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.
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...)
I've heard that they are busy bribing people in Apple's manufacturers for dimensions before products are released.
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
Commoditize your complements. Wide choice and availability of accessories benefits hardware sales.
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.
The big manufactureres pay or just simple acquire the leaks.
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.
For accessory manufacturers?
Yes. These drawings are a companion to Apple's accessory design guidelines, which include a lot of other interesting design considerations:
https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-Gui...
Wouldn’t surprise me if EU forced them to.
No, this is to attract accessory manufacturers, and then corner them into buying an MFi/connector license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFi_Program
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.
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.
Checking the wayback machine, this URL seems to have only shown up a couple months ago with the very latest devices, and has slowly been backfilled with older devices since then. Wonder if it's due to the EU repairability regulations.
I would have also thought they only supplied this stuff to people who signed an MFi contact that stipulates certain rules on implementation.
Even the drawing of the Vision Pro feels heavy.
Love how the inserts' "MAGNET POLARITY FOR EACH MAGNET" calls out polarity for top side and bottom side in separate columns as if each one could be a wee horseshoe magnet with the poles pointed in the same direction.
I momentarily confused about how how bar magnets in a ring could be oriented to top and bottom until I reviewed page 2 which stipulates "top" means the part of the insert facing the person and "bottom" into the device.
What's ironic is that Apple does all their mechanical CAD work for their products in Siemens NX running in Windows VMs.
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.
More sensible, yes... but less ideologically pure.
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.
Im curious which OS they run on these https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-...
isn't it very stripped down iOS?
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.
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.
It could be VDIs, i.e. VMs running on another system, potentially x86 with GPU
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)
You don't need VMs for that. You can reset to a known good state on your bare metal disk drive just as well.
Yeah, a couple years ago (sorry, no citation handy) I wasn't too surprised to learn that a Windows desktop can run faster in a VM on Intel Mac hardware than directly on a similarly-priced PC.
That was my experience during the Intel Mac era, when I did a lot of Windows development inside of a Mac VM.
IMO, the reason is all of the 3rd party fluff and poorly-written drivers that come with Windows PCs: Apple takes driver stability very seriously, and the drivers on a Windows VM are as vanilla (no fluff or features) as possible.
This is insane. Is there no great first party CAD solution on Mac?
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.
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.
Which is kind of insane when you think about it considering what a cluster fuck the win32 API is
Still the most stable API on Linux
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.
Dynamic linking by default has turned into a premature optimization over time
Just a quirk of the times. GNU made the most optimal solutions of their time, but in the end we still have some tech debt. I think it was inevitable that this would happen with GNU or for that matter any project, since it's not a centralized project like linux and was never going to be since it's not just one piece of software.
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.
Accumulated cruft is the CF cost for an API.
Where's the cruft? Win32 is pretty simple.
What?! Win32 is one of the best API ever designed. It’s pretty much the best part of windows
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.
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
Most software written in win32 days still work today on Win 10/11. You really can't say the same for X11/Wayland.
Nothing that CAD and engineering students would be familiar with.
There are some open source options but those aren’t taught at school afaik.
Not that it's necessarily suited for Apple's use case, but Autodesk's Fusion runs natively on Mac.
I think it’s just an electron wrapper over a browser version. Impressively sluggish, clunky, and unresponsive for a so-called native app
Autodesk Fusion GUI uses the C++ Qt library, not Electron. Link to my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24252787
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.
Most CAD programs take little advantage of multicore or GPU, if any. It's all about single threaded CPU performance.
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).
It used to be UNIX as well, but Apple choose to give up on UNIX workstation market.
Yes, but for no reason, I do have Creo 9 now working under wine and the performance is basically the same as windows with a few minor bugs
Vectorworks. Popular with smaller architecture firms but not the biggest ones.
Archicad as well!
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
There is no meaningful decline of Windows on corporate desktops.
In the hardware engineering space, I don't know if I have ever seen a mac. Linux pops up a bit because of the rise of micros, but it's still 99% windows.
Rhino runs natively on Mac
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.
Autodesk AutoCAD is available for Mac. Autodesk Fusion is also available for Mac.
I for one would love to see Autodesk add more Mac and Linux support across their lineup. Especially Inventor and its associated add-ons.
CAD software (and other high-end professional software) can easily cost 5-10x as much as the computer itself. You buy the computer for the software, not the other way around.
CAD is not just drawing. CAD packages are often integrated with other software that does things like stress analysis, BOM, thermal simulation, and so on.
Its an entire ecosystem that streamlines a lot of things, so it makes sense to invest in it.
The reason for Windowsis because a lot of the CAD software utilizes gfx drivers heavily for rendering. You can do things like raytracing to simulate how the product will look.
You would think this is a great opportunity for Apple to fill a gap in the market (and dogfood their solution too). Guess not...
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.
Even more so, having retired themselves from server and workstation market.
Are there more powerful workstations than a maxed out Mac Studio?
First of all, not all workstations are alike.
A maxed out Mac Studio does very little for audio processing, and the custom audio cards that get used in the field.
Second to do the same as many users do with graphics cards configurations, one gets into gimmicks like external eGPU adaptors.
Third, Metal has not much adoption among visualisation software.
Finally, a Mac Studio can only be maxed out once during its lifetime.
Granted, I feel this is true re my non-Mac computers. You think you can max it out at first, but then there's new interfaces, RAM standards, etc
This is apologia. There is a mile between being stuck with 16GB of ram vs on DDR5 or even DDR5. The analogy is absurd.
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
I think the only thing that would make some sense would be for them to buy a big player and then tell them to make a Mac port or migrate to Mac only.
That’s what happened with Logic Pro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Pro#Logic) and (sort-of) Final Cut Pro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Cut_Pro#Creation)
I suspect they’d need a portfolio of applications in the CAD space to make that work, though.
Shapr is probably a decent candidate for this, though maybe in a few years. It feels like they are the Pixelmator to Autodesk's Photoshop (Fusion). Though I don't like that I have to "Contact Sales" to be able to save my models on-prem, give me a goddamn break.
That says more about the dire state of the industry than Apple’s own engineering preferences and their brand optics.
All of their mechanical CAD? No- some of that is handled in Shapr (https://www.shapr3d.com/). Given the state of the industry and the discussion in many sibling comments, it wouldn’t surprise me if this share is growing. A little birdie tells me they work closely with the Shapr team on certain feature developments in the app, and from my own personal experience I can tell you that I much prefer the Mac-native modeling experience than any of its gargantuan antiquated peers.
Shapr3d is a rather light duty stuff, it's really doubtful a company with unlimited R&D budget and megascale manufacturing would use it very much.
It is no secret that Apple work closely with various well-known app developers, and in the case of Shapr they are even featured on the Apple developer site[1].
And it sounds like the collaborative efforts are paying off given your statement "I much prefer the Mac-native modeling experience". :)
[1] https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=i6qdbzn9
Apple Retail ran off Windows-based Motorola MC-50s for a while in the mid-00s before moving to their own software on iPod touch and iPhone. Apple doesn't compete in the CAD space, so why not use the best tools available even if it means they run on Windows?
That helps with dogfooding the VM experience, I suppose.
I used to work with several Apple MEs, and one EE, when they moved to the startup I was at.
They were all very skilled and pragmatic engineers. While there is some tribal knowledge benefits to getting really fluent with a given CAD suite, foundationally they are just tools, so when our startup migrated from one CAD suite to another, there was pretty minimal churn. You only have to go through one project management software changeover to realize that good operators, engineers or PMs or whatever, aren't permanently affected by the particular choice of software (but they are affected by constant change in that choice). The fundamentals don't change, even if the selector switch moves from one side to the other.
At the same startup, in the early days, I had a System76 laptop running their flavor of Ubuntu, and I used KiCad (but that was prior to their big UX overhaul so it was pretty painful) so I could design the few PCBs we needed. When we adopted Altium, I dual-booted the laptop. Later, I used a MacBook Pro and I ran Altium in a VM, and I've never had a more mind-bending computing experience than when I had Windows (running Altium) on one screen, OSX (with all of my firmware dev tools) on the other screen, and my keyboard shortcuts (down to cmd vs ctrl as the modifier) would change based on which screen my mouse cursor was on.
It might have more to do with legacy files than that being the best setup they could find.
They probably have tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? of 3D files at this point, organizing, reusing, composing all those parts is necessary unless they want to manufacture everything from scratch every time. Migrating all that over to a new system wont be done until it is insanely painful to use the older system.
Not really most of those companies are stagnant Old-line, on the construction side Autodesk for example can barely get Autocad working on the Mac. I had to use a Dell PC laptop to run Autocad, Revit, and Navis Manage when a M1 Powerbook would blows it away on the road, at job site, and at coordination meetings away from the office as well at least Morpholio Trace, Vectorworks, and Archicad work.
It's to bad the next Powerbooks will be even more powerful and frugal unplugged from the wall at job sites and at conference rooms on the road in coordination meetings.
In Mechanical CAD the companies are even more stagnant (not willing to work on multiple platforms) ie like Blender or Blackmagic, note: there are even fewer companies out there today that in the past.
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.
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.
If the NTSB claims the car is safe on its interior in terms of certain kinds of crashes, you'd think that geometry & layout of the interior would be part of that claimed specification. That would prevent an A/B problem: the NTSB tests a car with 18" of padding, and the car manufacturer delivers a car with 18mm of padding. Or... whatever. Basically accountability & reproducibility.
Pretty sure you’re thinking of the NHTSA.
https://www.carsized.com/en-us/
That's not the same thing as those are photos with perspective distortion.
Presumably they scale the photo to the actual measured dimension though, so at worst it will make the car look a bit weird.
Interesting point. They need to photograph them with slit-scan photography.
haha, I see you recognized me from my line scan photography work. But unfortunately that only gets rid of perspective in one axis but not the other.
Probably just taking photos with a really long telephoto lens would be good.
In theory, you'd use a telecentric lens [1], but then the lens would need to be bigger than the subject, which is not super feasible for a car-sized subject. I guess for line scan, the telecentric lens just needs to cover a small vertical strip of the car so it just needs to be really tall.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecentric_lens
Haha, I didn't recognize your username, but now I look at your blog it was your work I was thinking of :)
Well, that screws my idea then. Best to just 3D scan the cars and model them in 3D with no perspective then!
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
For years, I've felt my dream application for my iPad would be a wireframe view of my vehicle that allowed me to explore the mechanical functionality as it moved. See the clutch interact with the transmission, see the 4-wheel drive engage, all while in motion.
idk maybe apple can release fbx or blender files?
I mean these seem nice for print-decorations...
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.
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.
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.
Roll your own?
Someone in the community will, or already do it. 3D model of Apple product is easier to find than other brands.
Actually, I've been looking this kind of official drawing for practice product modeling and rendering.
Seems like this URL has only been live (at least first archived [0]) around May 2026, originally with only 13 products. Great to see them add more since then, now close to 90.
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20260512182718/https://developer...
I'd love to see them go back all the way to the Apple I eventually.
It was previously part of the single-PDF Accessory Design Guidelines [0], which had become quite unwieldy in recent years.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-Gui...
https://archive.org/details/accessory-design-guidelines-for-...
Curious why the Macbook Neo is the only Macbook included?
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.
These drawings were previously part of Apple’s Accessory Design Guidelines for the purpose of designing cases and such, which largely wasn’t applicable to MacBooks. Apparently they decided to include MacBooks now that the dimensional drawings have been separated out of the guidelines PDF, but they probably don’t have the drawings for older models in a format prepared for publication.
What font is used in the technical drawing part? It's very cool.
ISOCP, maybe?
Edit: close, but not quite
It's a stroke font / SHX font produced by the CAD software, but difficult to know which one. They aren't actual fonts, but just single-stroke vector shapes. Claude thinks it's from PTC Creo Parametric, but I couldn't find any clear examples to confirm or deny.
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.
Most dimensions here look like a designer draw curves that looked good, and the person creating the drawing told their CAD software "put a reference point every 0.5mm of this curve".
The mold manufacturer will ignore this part of the drawing, and tell their machine "follow the curve that's in the production file, with tool X at speed Y etc".
Why are the rounded edges for eg.: on MacBook Neo defined as small distance specs instead of a radius?
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.
isn't the correct term Superellipse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superellipse
According to [0], for icons at least, "no, not quite", because "Apple's exact icon outline is not a pure superellipse — it is built from carefully tuned Bézier curves that closely approximate one."
[0] https://squircle.js.org/blog/math-behind-squircles
I can only guess, but I guess it IS because those are not circles but squircles maybe?
Mac > MacBook Neo
... and nothing else.
I guess other MBs and MBPs are top secret.
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.
This info, including magnet placement (and even magnet strength), has been publicly available as part of Apple’s Accessory Design Guidelines for many years.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Accessory%20design%20guideline...
you can brag to your friends "Hey i got all of apples schemetics!" just don't send them to the website.
Something very no appealing when decimal points don't snap to a grid.
It's crazy how good Astra is at designing these from just a PDF: https://mute-violet-3e94.cloudflare-y3fod.workers.dev
I’m sorry, but how is this output “crazy good” regarding its accuracy? For example, Apple Watch Ultra is barely recognizable as such. (And UI chrome appearance of the tool is the typical new Astra-ish look I find hard to steer it away from.)
Claude Sonnet 5 'High', first attempt, is functional and quite basic:
- https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/4598e48b-8b19-473a-88c4-9...