Posted on 10/29/2015 1:29:13 PM PDT by Swordmaker
CUPERTINO, California — In retrospect, it was easy to miss — a bit of combined technology never really seen before in a laptop. Everyone missed it, even those who tore down the ultra-portable MacBook, even those who looked right at it.
The little strip of black along the two back edges of the MacBook’s twin speakers could easily have been mistaken for a bit of shielding or a vibration dampener. Except, that's not what it is.
Some like to call it the "Speaktenna." The black strip along the back edge of the MacBook speakers is a never-before-tried combination of speakers and antennas for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It's a fairly ingenious bit of space-saving technology that teardown artists ignored.
But that's not really the story. It's about what "speaktenna" represents: the Apple way of conceiving, designing and building its products.
Phil Schiller, Apple's longtime senior vice president of worldwide marketing, is waiting for me when I arrive at Building 3 at the company's Infinite Loop headquarters in Cupertino, California on an unusually warm fall day. He's wearing his trademark gray button-down shirt and, incongruously, a pair of glasses that he quickly removes.
Schiller doesn't give a lot of interviews. A quick Google search tends to bring up quotes from keynotes and one lengthy chat with Daring Fireball's John Gruber.
Schiller is, for most people, a cipher: A highly knowledgeable Apple spokesperson who can speak as passionately about its products as his late boss, Steve Jobs. In fact, to listen to Schiller speak is to hear echoes of the visionary leader who died in 2011. It occurs to me more than once that, perhaps, many of turns of phrase we often attributed to Jobs may have actually started with Schiller.
This is an excerpt, read the entire article here:
"Why can't Apple consistently share where it gets its parts?
In part, it's because Apple doesn't always source parts from a single supplier, Schiller said. He added that those partnerships can change, meaning the parts change.
There is a larger reason, though.
. . .
"The most common scenario is simply that what we got from a supplier basically has been created so uniquely for Apple that implying it's an off-the-shelf part like others may get would be really misleading," Schiller said. "So it's best not to even talk about the source because that implies things that aren't true."
Ternus said it was, for the MacBook, a pattern repeated again and again. The full-sized keyboard that essentially defined the overall size of the MacBook could not simply be sourced from a company adept at building laptop keyboard modules. Apple found a keyboard supplier, and then redesigned the keyboard, including the mechanisms under each key, from the ground up. (Emphasis mine — Swordmaker)
As I have been trying to get through to the people who keep trying to claim that Apple computers are the same as XYZ that they can buy for hundreds of dollars less. . . Apple does NOT make their computers out of off-the-shelf parts, ordered from Joe Blow's Discount Parts R Us. Almost everything in an Apple product is custom made for Apple. This interview goes into some of that and how it happens.
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
“Almost everything in an Apple product is custom made for Apple.”
Which is why supply chain management genius Tim Cook is running the company. Jonny Ive designs the hardware, Tim makes sure all of it gets made (in minute detail) and all parts are made & flow together without problems regardless of what goes wrong (gee, our artificial sapphire manufacturer imploded? ok).
"Oh, Okay."
The quality of the Apple products that I own is phenomenal. My original iPod from 2003....just won’t die. I use it to store Christmas music and soon I will plug it into my audio system for another Christmas season.
I have a five year old MacBook Air that has been with me on travels to the Himalayas and is still running perfectly, even with El Capitan beta loaded. Truly amazing.
Those FReepers who bad-mouth everything Apple (including FReepers who use them) definitely should take that "scroll".
I guarantee they will see excellence in design, integration, execution, manufacturing technology and structure that will be almost incomprehensible to them and to those who design and build their "stick bits & pieces together" products of choice. Example: what competing product has anything even remotely approaching the sophistication and quality of that aluminum MacBook chassis? And that's just the "low-tech" part...
It will be interesting to watch Apple in the near-future and see them expand into other product arenas. Can you imagine if they built spacecraft? They'd give Elon Musk some real competition (maybe real soon in the area of electric cars).
But, their luxury of having "infinitely deep pockets" may have left them "'way behind the learning curve" (inside joke there for those skilled in the art) on the equally- powerful discipline of "Design To Cost"...
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