8 ms·
Apple's Dimensional Drawings
- easilybanned 2mo ago[flagged]
- MBCook 2mo agoI had no idea they published this to the general public.
- JimTheMan 2mo agoThere are probably enough counterfeiters out there who just take these apart and measure them, that the benefit to making it a bit more difficult isn't worth it. Whereas the benefit of opening it up for people to make accessories, play around with it from a marketing perspective, or even just to marvel at them would be of greater benefit.
- nish__ 2mo agoIt's so we can make cases.
- darknavi 2mo agoA huge ecosystem of third party accessories, cases, skins, etc. The openness is easily worth it.
- MBCook 2mo agoThat’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.
- p0ckets 2mo agoCommoditize 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.
- gertlex 2mo agoI 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...)
- tonyedgecombe 2mo agoI've heard that they are busy bribing people in Apple's manufacturers for dimensions before products are released.
- eloisius 2mo agoI 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
- SoftTalker 2mo agoCommoditize your complements. Wide choice and availability of accessories benefits hardware sales.
- userbinator 2mo agoThey 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.
- Maxion 2mo agoThe big manufactureres pay or just simple acquire the leaks.
- yreg 2mo agoI 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.
- enoch2090 2mo agoFor accessory manufacturers?
- duskwuff 2mo agoYes. 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-Guidelines.pdf https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-Gui...
- nujabe 2mo agoWouldn’t surprise me if EU forced them to.
- bigyabai 2mo agoNo, this is to attract accessory manufacturers, and then corner them into buying an MFi/connector license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFi_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFi_Program
- zimpenfish 2mo agoThis 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- plorg 2mo agoIt'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.
- kalleboo 2mo agoChecking 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.
- mrcwinn 2mo agoEven the drawing of the Vision Pro feels heavy.
- adolph 2mo agoLove 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.
- barbacoa 2mo agoWhat's ironic is that Apple does all their mechanical CAD work for their products in Siemens NX running in Windows VMs.
- leohonexus 2mo agoI 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.
- zarzavat 2mo agoMore sensible, yes... but less ideologically pure.
- bayindirh 2mo agoConsidering 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.
- boredatoms 2mo agoIm curious which OS they run on these https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-chips-leaked/ https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-...
- SSLy 2mo agoisn't it very stripped down iOS?
- somat 2mo agoSo 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.
- thechao 2mo agoI 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.
- weinzierl 2mo agoElectronics 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 https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/GenericSearch.cfm or https://fccid.io 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.
- thechao 2mo agoIf 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.
- elyall 2mo agohttps://www.carsized.com/en-us/ https://www.carsized.com/en-us/
- sysguest 2mo agoidk maybe apple can release fbx or blender files? I mean these seem nice for print-decorations...
- LiamPowell 2mo agoNo 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.
- spockz 2mo agoI’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.
- LiamPowell 2mo agoMBD 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.
- ggm 2mo agoRoll your own?
- alfirous 2mo agoSomeone 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.
- JeremyHerrman 2mo agoSeems 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.apple.com/accessories/dimensional-drawings/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260512182718/https://developer...
- jdougan 2mo agoI'd love to see them go back all the way to the Apple I eventually.
- layer8 2mo agoIt 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-Guidelines.pdf https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-Gui... https://archive.org/details/accessory-design-guidelines-for-apple-devices_release-r15 https://archive.org/details/accessory-design-guidelines-for-...
- djfergus 2mo agoCurious why the Macbook Neo is the only Macbook included?
- twoodfin 2mo agoJust 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.
- layer8 2mo agoThese 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.
- Dig1t 2mo agoWhat font is used in the technical drawing part? It's very cool.
- tobyjsullivan 2mo agoISOCP, maybe? Edit: close, but not quite
- Geee 2mo agoIt'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.
- fnord77 2mo ago[flagged]
- amelius 2mo ago[flagged]
- tippa123 2mo agoOh 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.
- lefra 2mo agoMost 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".
- szemy2 2mo agoWhy are the rounded edges for eg.: on MacBook Neo defined as small distance specs instead of a radius?
- fainpul 2mo agoBecause 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/ 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.
- whywhywhywhy 2mo agoisn't the correct term Superellipse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superellipse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superellipse
- zimpenfish 2mo agoAccording 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 https://squircle.js.org/blog/math-behind-squircles
- birdboat00 2mo agoI can only guess, but I guess it IS because those are not circles but squircles maybe?
- wartywhoa23 2mo agoMac > MacBook Neo ... and nothing else. I guess other MBs and MBPs are top secret.
- ndr42 2mo agoAbout 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.
- layer8 2mo agoThis 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%20guidelines https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Accessory%20design%20guideline...
- m3kw9 2mo agoyou can brag to your friends "Hey i got all of apples schemetics!" just don't send them to the website.
- maxglute 2mo agoSomething very no appealing when decimal points don't snap to a grid.
- MotiBanana 2mo ago[dead]
- MotiBanana 2mo agoIt's crazy how good Astra is at designing these from just a PDF: https://mute-violet-3e94.cloudflare-y3fod.workers.dev https://mute-violet-3e94.cloudflare-y3fod.workers.dev
- alexfringes 2mo agoI’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.)
- ncr100 2mo agoClaude Sonnet 5 'High', first attempt, is functional and quite basic: - https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/4598e48b-8b19-473a-88c4-9e73c753ad40 https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/4598e48b-8b19-473a-88c4-9...