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Startups Can’t Manufacture Like Apple Does (2014)
- AceJohnny2 10y ago(2014), but still as relevant as ever.
- bootload 10y agonoted
- sbierwagen 10y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8335424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8335424
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bobjordan 10y agoThis is a good list. Let me add one to it. I manufacture products in China and I consistently see new designs for injection molded parts where the designer has unrealistic expectations for the tolerances that can be achieved on molded parts. While the tolerance we can achieve will change proportionally with the size of the injection molded part, don't design parts that rely on precisions of 0.01mm. Hard to do this unless you are Apple.
- louprado 10y agoScott Miller of the Bolt team has a great video on injection molding. Design for Manufacturing Course 5: Injection Molding - DragonInnovation.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx5_gO9LTf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx5_gO9LTf8 After watching it I decided to use commodity enclosures with custom milling and avoid injection molding for now.
- theroot 10y agoThis video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMjtmsr3CqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMjtmsr3CqA was a series of revelations as to how injection molding works.
- Klinky 10y agoAnother interesting resource is "Guerrilla guide to CNC machining, mold making, and resin casting" @ http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/ http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/ How did you find your commodity enclosures? It seems like there are a lot of random manufacturers out there making ugly enclosures.
- louprado 10y agoI prefer Takachi enclosure. Some of their plastic is translucent so your LEDs will shine through the enclosure. You can see an example here: https://hackaday.io/project/6357/gallery#67d3556e38f0b46c486510fcf0848ae5 https://hackaday.io/project/6357/gallery#67d3556e38f0b46c486...
- Dwolb 10y agoHey - this is a long shot, but hoping to connect over possibly moving PCB fabrication, assembly, and test over to Asia from the US. Let me know if it'd be Ok to chat. If not, that's cool too.
- Klinky 10y agoHis contact info is in his profile. Hopefully you were planning to pay for his consulting services. Moving fabrication and supply chain to another country doesn't sound like something solved with a brief chat.
- Dwolb 10y agoThanks for the heads up on the contact info.
- kweks 10y agoHey - we've been performing PCBA in China for our own commerical project and some open source projects for a few years. Outside of that, have been working in traditional manufacturing in China for many years. Feel free to reach out, I'd be happy to help or point you in a direction. logistics(a)parklink.asia (apologies for the non personal email address, don't want to put my personal on the public forum)
- nameisu 10y agoI am fresh out of college. I work for a very big OEM and make drawings for plastic parts. i have no clue of the tolerances which suppliers are capable of holding. how does one learn that? I usually tolerance based on our objectives and source a supplier who says yes.
- dammitcoetzee 10y agoYou call the supplier, tell them you know nothing, and ask them to help you understand what they're capable of. You should find a mentor, this is the kind of retroactively obvious advice I got from mine.
- afarrell 10y agoWhere does one find a mentor?
- hengheng 10y agoNo more than two doors away.
- dammitcoetzee 10y agoFind the guy whose work you like the most at your company and bother him all the time. Most good technical people love to help, to be asked questions, and ultimately to be valued for the experience they've worked hard to get. In the end mentorship is something that you seek out and get for yourself. It's rare that someone will actually attach the title mentor to a such a relationship.
- 8note 10y agoany time you make something, you find that out from the people that will make it. usually they can also improve your designs to make then cheaper to produce as well. ... I thought that was standard teachings in mechanical engineering?
- ArtDev 10y agoApple outsources its manufacturing. A small startup can't just get Samsung and Foxconn to build their parts. This is true.
- mcphage 10y agoThat's definitely part of it, although that's certainly not all of it.
- blackguardx 10y agoYes, but Apple still has significant say in how its products are made. In many cases they use their own production engineers to figure out the best way to make things. In other cases, they set insanely hard specifications and use their massive buying power to entice their partners to figure it out. Source: I've worked with ex-Apple engineers at a company that mostly used Apple's hardware processes.
- itchyouch 10y agoThere was a long article (maybe Vanity Fair or Esquire?) that pointed out how Apple put up 1B to Foxconn for building an Apple dedicated factory where the factory processes would be dictated fully by Apple. In the lost interview of Steve Jobs, Jobs says this: I’ll give you an example. When we were building our Apple computers in a garage, we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, the accountants had this notion of a standard cost, where you kind of set a standard cost and at the end of the quarter, you would adjust it with a variance. I kept asking: why do we do this? The answer was, “That’s just the way it’s done.” After about six months of digging into this, I realized that the reason they did this is that they didn’t have good enough controls to know how much it’s going to cost. So you guess. And then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you don’t know how much it costs is because your information systems aren’t good enough. But nobody said it that way. So later on, when we designed this automated factory for the Macintosh, we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts and know exactly what something cost. If you know what exactly something costs during manufacturing, now you can optimize it.
- tgb 10y agoI remember coming across this some time ago on HN and being really interested by the white plastic bit. It clicks into place Apple's ability to set itself apart visually during the white earbuds era of iPod advertisements. PCs were black and gray and beige, Apple was a shining white. And no one else could mimic their style, since it was just too difficult.
- kelukelugames 10y agoAny manufacturing experts can help us understand why white plastic is difficult?
- nickff 10y agoWhite plastic highlights defects including contamination with other colors (or materials), burn marks, and shrinkage. It is common for one injection machine to be used for many colors and types of plastic, but since white is such a pure color, it is very easy to see swirls or traces of other colors in the part. Even different batches of white plastic can cause unsightly marks; getting some nylon in your ABS part will certainly ruin it. Burn marks (which are dark) obviously stand out more against white than any other color, and are generally caused by either the mold or plastic being too hot. Shrink marks are caused by uneven cooling of the plastic because of machine settings or part design, and are most visible on white because of uneven reflections and small shadows. Even tiny scratches can ruin the glossy finish of a smooth part. Since Apple has huge volumes, they can dedicate machines to injecting a single mold, and ensure that plastic colorants are matched across batches; the rest of us (with volumes of less than ~100-500k/yr) have to settle for grey. If anyone wants to chat about part design and manufacture, let me know.
- sgnelson 10y agoWell, the truth is that very few companies can manufacture like Apple does. Between the obsession with design, details, and having the resources to have the manufacturers create entire new production processes just for them. And often, the companies who do the above are usually not consumer facing.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- makenova 10y agoWhat are high margin parts? ...asking for a friend
- amk_ 10y agoParts you can sell for much more than they cost to produce
- bane 10y agoIt's pretty interesting to think that quality can actually go up as volume increases. This seems to run counter to general perception that small/hand batches can be of incredibly high quality and once it goes to mass production quality goes lower. We've never really seen production at Apple/Samsung's scale before and I wonder if this quality curve is something that is all that well understood.
- csours 10y agoTake a look at the Toyota Production System. A large part of the reason they won (at least temporarily) was that they forced all their suppliers and factories to produce high quality parts. Then take a look at Six Sigma. Small batches can be made by experts and thoroughly inspected; but it is prohibitively expensive to scale up artisans and inspections, both in complexity and quantity.
- Klinky 10y agoThis is not surprising. Cobbled together prototypes and first runs are usually not pretty. It's like the first pancake or waffle, usually not quite right. A machine will certainly be quicker and more consistent once setup correctly. Perhaps there are artisan niches where a machine cannot do the work, and a human slaves over the minute details, but those are usually luxury items.
- roel_v 10y ago" It's like the first pancake or waffle, usually not quite right" Very much OT, but that's because the pan or iron isn't hot enough. Ever since I started first putting the pan on the fire, then mix my batter while the pan heats up, my first pancake has been as good as every one after that. (sorry to contaminate the discussion with this, but I found it much more satisfying than I would think is normal when I got a process down that stopped me from looking like an amateur pancake maker, which is why I figured I'd share :) )
- tluyben2 10y agoMy first pancakes 'fail' (no-one minds eating them :) not because of that but because I need to get the feel for the batter spoon in my wrist, get a feel for the cooking time and get a feel in my wrist for the pan & flipping motion. I do not bake them that often so that feeling needs to come first. After a few it's there and then I can bake 100s of the same ones. Which I do at (beer) festivals. Also sorry to contaminate the thread.
- dammitcoetzee 10y agoI ranted a bit on this as well on Hackaday http://wp.me/pk3lN-PBv http://wp.me/pk3lN-PBv . Apple and Foxconn just have an unimaginable amount of capital. However, I don't think hardware designers should despair. There are many ways to design things, and constraint is the mother of innovation. As the author mentions, it's entirely possible to make products just as appealing with a fraction of the cost.
- CamperBob42 10y agoGreat post. I don't normally read Hackaday because I can't stand white-on-black text (there's a reason nobody else does that anymore) but your post and your earlier one from March 7 were well worth it.
- bambax 10y ago> CNC machining is fantastic for prototypes [but] it is not for consumer devices. Figure out a way to cast your metal parts. Why is that? I'm trying to build a better quick release plate for DSLR cameras, compatible with Manfrotto tripods but that lets you do a couple of other things (like attach a hand strap to it directly). I had prototypes made in China with CNC machining, and they are of a very good quality (superb, even, it seems to me). For production, injection molding is of a reasonnable price but the result would not be the same quality (plastic is a poor choice for this). Die casting is too expensive for the volume, given it's really a niche product. So I was thinking of doing short runs with CNC: what' wrong with that option?
- joshvm 10y agoThe problem is people build a little widget that would happily fit in a box from Hammond, but they would rather have it customised at great expense and it eats into their profit. CNC is pretty time inefficient and expensive when you get to very large volumes. The major advantage of CNC though is that if you mess up the first time, you haven't ruined an entire batch. You just send the new model to the company. With molding or die casting, fuckups can easily cost tens of thousands. If your margin can absorb the cost of CNC - and for photography it's probably a marketing feature - go for it. Plenty of companies sell CNC machined housing simply because they can say it's CNC'd and people go "ooooh".
- bambax 10y agoOh okay, so it's just a volume thing? Does it make sense to do metal casting for low volume (under 1k)? It would be economic nonsense anyway...?
- icegreentea 10y agoI'm mostly familiar with plastic molds, but for durable/production ready molds, you're normally starting off at like 20k per mold. You can usually bring your part to manufacturers (both CNC and casting shops) and ask for some quotes.
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- Nokinside 10y agoIt's not just Apple vs startups. Large customers like Apple or Samsung have big advantages over smaller phone manufacturers. Apple can always call Foxconn and tell them that they want even this barely visible detail fixed. Foxconn comes up with number for changes in the manufacturing processes ($10 million for better tooling for example) and it's done. Small manufacturers who have low margins can't justify similar attention to detail.
- usrusr 10y agoOr look at phones vs. other appliances that are made for smaller markets. Garmin is the dominant incumbent in portable GPS devices and even their handsets feel like garage-made prototypes compared to even the worst phone, despite being exactly the same technology except for the backlight diffuser film.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- fauria 10y agoDoes anyone know what a "CM" in this context is?: "Unless you’re a billionaire genius, your product will have noticeable ejector pin marks. A good CM knows how to hide these well. Nearly zero CMs hide them as well as Apple does."
- amluto 10y agoOne particular bit of this makes no sense: > What happened when Apple wanted to CNC machine a million MacBook bodies a year? They bought 10k CNC machines to do it. CNC milling scales linearly. If you want to make 1k things per year, you can probably do it with one CNC machine. I know a startup that's using CNC-milled enclosures and that's probably the single easiest part of their production. Sure, startups won't buy 10k CNC machines, but they won't need them either.
- Animats 10y agoYes, and here's a CNC machine shop in Germany machining a MacBook body, or something very close to it: [1] It's hard to believe that Apple needed one CNC machine for every 100 (was 10, oops) MacBooks. The MacBook isn't that expensive. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob-RBntcZc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob-RBntcZc8
- codyb 10y agoI think you missed a zero, it'd be 100 a year, and then of course they don't need to buy new ones every year. I'd imagine they probably use them for more than just MacBooks as well but I'm just inferencing and don't have any real idea.
- whyagaindavid 10y agoA while ago Andrew 'bunnie' Huang (Remember chumby?) gave a talk on hardware manufacturing in linuxconf-AU. Could not find a link but it covered a lot - why you cant do it like apple or samsung. His book is out now!
- sgt 10y agoI bought a Hand ground coffee grinder last year. It's a Kickstarter project and we should actually have received the grinder last year some time, but in the spirit of Kickstarter I'm patient. I think the challenges they've had are similar to what is touched upon in this article. They've had a ton of clearance and molding issues, and dozens of design prototypes and mismatching parts. To add to the difficulties, the coffee grinder has moving parts that take a lot of stress, as opposed to just a box with a circuit board inside. * http://handground.com/ http://handground.com/
- funkyy 10y agoPosts like that are why I come to HN. Even if my field of expertise have absolutely nothing to do with manufacturing, its nice to read about problems and solutions of huge industry explained in simple and clean language.