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RUMOR: Apple’s ‘Brick’ a MacBook carved out of solid aluminum

Monday, October 6, 2008 · 9:37 am · 44 Comments

“The MacBook Brick is a block of high-quality, aircraft grade aluminum,” Seth Weintraub reports for 9 to 5 Mac.

“It is the beginning of the new Apple manufacturing process to make MacBooks,” Weintraub reports.

“It is totally revolutionary, a game changer,” Weintraub reports. “One of the biggest Apple innovations in a decade.”

“The MacBook manufacturing process up to this point has been outsourced to Chinese or Taiwanese manufacturers like Foxconn. Now Apple is in charge,” Weintraub reports. “The company has spent the last few years building an entirely new manufacturing process that uses lasers and jets of water to carve the MacBooks out of a brick of aluminum.”

Weintraub reports, “As [Apple CFO] Peter Oppenheimer said at the recent earnings call, this innovation is something ‘Apple’s competitors won’t be able to match’ for some time to come.”

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44 Comments

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Derek in Milan

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 10:35 am · Reply

If there had been structural strength issues with Macbooks – there hasnt.

If it was cheaper to mill a billet than stamp press – it isnt.

If Apple had built their own manufacturing unit – they havent.

This MIGHT work with some weird niche product – but Apple dont make weird niche products, they make mass-produced and big selling products.

Verdict – complete bollocks.
st1

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 10:39 am · Reply

they just say that to raise the stock price….
thethirdshoe

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 10:40 am · Reply

This IS a rumor.

If true, I’m sure it’s patented out the wazoo…
Q4

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 10:45 am · Reply

Mr. ‘Excited and confused’:

1. Wait. This is a -rumor- and not fact.
2. Ignore the utterly ignorant comments posted on MDN.
jbella

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 10:51 am · Reply

This sounds interesting, and I could imagine that it could provide some nice advanteages for apple since their products are often shapes that are hard to stamp out / manufacture.

That being said… if this where true, I would expect that we would have heard of Apple buying a facility where they can manufacture things, right? If they were going to do this in the US, I’m sure they would want to take advantage of all tax breaks they could get if they let it out that they were looking for a manufacturing location.
Tony

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 10:58 am · Reply

9 to 5 Mac has a pretty amazing track record. If they’re saying it with this much confidence, I believe them 100%.
@Q4

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 11:00 am · Reply

This rumor originated on some small-time blog and just kind of spread to other sites, including MacRumors. MDN is just another one picking up on it, and a bit late, I might add.

That said, I call BS on this whole thing. We’ll know more in a week.
nonarKitten

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 11:01 am · Reply

The cost of a MacBook [Pro] has little to do with the case, which is sturdy enough and is probably a fraction of the cost (a new case, retail, is about $50 — I’d imagine Apple pays much less). The MBP is probably a lot more (retail is close to $500 for the case), but still, bigger cost savings could be had by finding a better battery technology, using OLED vs LCD (which would also reduce power consumption), integrating more chips (e.g., NVIDIA’s new chipset), finding cheaper ways to make flash, etc.

Considering they just bought PA Semi, I think that this factors into this somehow, since whatever they’re using PA for, they can integrate that technology at cost. CPU’s still from Intel, but perhaps they’re making their own North and South bridges. Perhaps they’re solving one of the biggest performance problems since moving away from the PowerPC – hard drive.

The particular chip PA had made, while based on the Power architecture, was for embedded applications – and included PCI-e, 10GbE ethernet, storage with integrated iSCSI and RAID, etc. This could serve many roles then, accelerating and offloading network and storage to this processor. This would work well for Apple, since they have a huge repertoire of PowerPC code to work with that will seamlessly integrate with OS-X.

The whole chip, including two 2GHz processor cores and all supporting I/O consumed at most 13W of power. The GM965+82801HM chipset take about 16W with the newer 1333MT/s chips taking a few more watts. This seems like a winning proposition to me.

“The first PWRficient chip-the PA6T-1682M-which dissipates just 5-13 watts, depending upon the application, is a dual-core implementation running at 2GHz with two DDR2 memory controllers, 2MB of L2 cache, and a flexible I/O subsystem that supports eight PCI Express controllers, two 10 Gigabit Ethernet XAUI controllers, and four Gigabit Ethernet SGMII controllers sharing 24 serdes lanes. Single-core and quad-core versions are due in early and late 2007, respectively, with an eight-core version planned for 2008.” — http://web.archive.org/web/20061016142012/www.pasemi.com/processors/index.html

The “brick” motif is thus sound – they’re building their own building blocks for their computers.
nonarKitten

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 11:14 am · Reply

As an after thought – this would also have the side effect of rendering future versions of OS-X largely incompatible with generic PC components.

It also fits in nicely with OpenCL and Rosetta, being able to supplement the first and replace the second. For OpenCL, you would now have two-eight x86 cores @ ~4GHz, two-eight PowerPC cores @ ~2GHz, as well as the GPGPU – probably a Mobility HD 4600 with 512MB GDDR3 (about 500 GFLOPS).

AMD has plans for a mobility 4850 X2 as well, granting laptop users two GPGPUs and about 2 TFLOPS. Makes sense with something like OpenCL — even if the game only uses on core via OpenGL, the second one can be used for AI, physics, etc.

Wouldn’t it be nice? A real supercomputer for your lap.

Now that would be hard to beat.
iDon't

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 11:27 am · Reply

I think the Brick will be made of industrial strength concrete.
Al

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 12:28 pm · Reply

This is not a rumor, it’s a fairy tale.

Not that there’s anything wrong with fairies.
Gay Guy

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 12:32 pm · Reply

I love fairy tails.
Lilochris

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 12:54 pm · Reply

Nice to hear it’s possible for a new notebook design, but I was hoping on a redesigned Mac Mini as well.

One reason why I’ve yet haven’t upgraded my Ol’ Reliable 12-inch iBook G4 1.2 Hz is because it just looks too similar to the current White MacBook. I know the MacBook is widescreen, & thinner but overall it looks too similar.

I like the Black MacBook but I don’t like you have to pay $300 more to get it. They should of made a Black option with base model specs. Oh well, I hope it’s an across the lineup Aluminum casing to match the iMac.
Jeff the Trader

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 1:19 pm · Reply

And what is the big benefit as an end-user? Why should I care for such ‘revolutionary’ enclosure?
AA Attendee

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 1:47 pm · Reply

IF TRUE, SIGN ME UP FOR ONE!
KingMel

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 2:06 pm · Reply

Milling billet aluminum to carve out a laptop chassis does not sound feasible from a time/cost standpoint. As has been pointed out, stamping is much quicker/cheaper. But stamping has some disadvantages, too, such as dimensional tolerances and ability to form fine/complex details.

Casting seems like a more viable alternative than pure milling. Near net casting with a final machining pass to clean things up and add details, threading, etc. is a possibility. I seem to recall coming across a magnesium electronics chassis manufactured using this type of process. But I would think that the cost would be prohibitive, particularly for a consumer-level laptop. Perhaps this is why Apple’s gross margin will take a hit? Sounds unlikely to me…

The potential benefits are reduced parts count and improved rigidity thermal dissipation.
jtc

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 2:23 pm · Reply

@Jane Chingo

Have you not seen how apple makes things… and then people try to copy it? I’d think that would mean they are innovative designing their own cool things and everyone else playing catchup. ex. samsung, blackberry, new sony “imac” desktop along with their keyboard too, etc. The list goes on.
nobodi

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 3:54 pm · Reply

Typical production facilities using stamping processes that incur initial costs in creating new dies for each new model. This type of manufacturing also has the additional burden of dealing with tool and die maintenance and the staff required.

I have a bit of familiarity with this because my father worked tool and die repair at a GM plant. He was one of only three who did that kind of work. One man for each shift because they there mostly for “insurance” as the only time they actually worked was when a line stopped for a die repair. They made really good money and most of the time they played cards with the guards and janitorial staff.

Milling billets would completely remove those costs.

Whether or not that would be cheaper remains to be seen. New milling processes using new technology could make it so.
Media XYZ

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 4:10 pm · Reply

milling a computer case out of a solid block of material would be the most wastful, energy intensive, slowest, environmentally irresponsible, and expensive way to go about it. It would be like milling a car body out of a single piece of steel – you could, but you wouldn’t.

From a structural viewpoint, a cast or milled case would be weaker than one made out of pressed sheet (which has been rolled), because of the difference in grain structure in the metal.
aka Christian

Monday, October 6, 2008 - 5:19 pm · Reply

“Throw a little hot rod red in there.”
Iron MacBook.