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- Hacker News
- you can brag to your friends "Hey i got all of apples schemetics!" just don't send them to the website.by m3kw9
- Something very no appealing when decimal points don't snap to a grid.by maxglute
- Curious why the Macbook Neo is the only Macbook included?by djfergus
- 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.
by twoodfin - 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.by layer8
- 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.by ndr42
- 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...
by layer8 - It's crazy how good Astra is at designing these from just a PDF: https://mute-violet-3e94.cloudflare-y3fod.workers.devby MotiBanana
- 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.)by alexfringes
- Claude Sonnet 5 'High', first attempt, is functional and quite basic:
- https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/4598e48b-8b19-473a-88c4-9...
by ncr100 - What font is used in the technical drawing part? It's very cool.by Dig1t
- 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.by Geee
- Why are the rounded edges for eg.: on MacBook Neo defined as small distance specs instead of a radius?by szemy2
- I can only guess, but I guess it IS because those are not circles but squircles maybe?by birdboat00
- 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.
by fainpul - I had no idea they published this to the general public.by MBCook
- 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.by plorg
- It's so we can make cases.by nish__
- Wouldn’t surprise me if EU forced them to.by nujabe
- For accessory manufacturers?by enoch2090
- 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.
by kalleboo - There 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.
by JimTheMan - A huge ecosystem of third party accessories, cases, skins, etc.
The openness is easily worth it.
by darknavi - 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.
by tippa123 - 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".
by lefra - 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.by jdougan
- 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-...
by layer8 - 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.by thechao