This 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.
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.
I 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.
So 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.
Yeah, a couple years ago (sorry, no citation handy) I wasn't too surprised to learn that a Windows desktop can run faster in a VM on Intel Mac hardware than directly on a similarly-priced PC.
That was my experience during the Intel Mac era, when I did a lot of Windows development inside of a Mac VM.
IMO, the reason is all of the 3rd party fluff and poorly-written drivers that come with Windows PCs: Apple takes driver stability very seriously, and the drivers on a Windows VM are as vanilla (no fluff or features) as possible.
I guess not for this use case. There are many industrial use cases for which there are no macOS versions. In fact, Siemens NX was once available on macOS AFAIK, but isn't anymore.
Why is it a cluster fuck? When it's been virtually unchanged and stable for the past 30 or so years, which is how Winamp 2.95 can run on WIndows 11 today and how Wine can so easily run Windows games. Way better than Linux and Mac have historically provided for compatibility.
Not all parts of Win32 were designed equally well. File IO, process management and most of the threading primitivs have aged really well. Thread management hasn't. The GUI parts are a sometimes hacky mess because behavioral changes created mismatches between what functions were specified to do and what that gets actually translated to. Permissions are a pain in the butt with complex ACLs, transparent file access redirects and how process elevation works.
Yes, for sure. And with hindsight a lot of things would be done differently. I’m still really impressed by most of win32 given it was designed at a time where the software and hardware landscape looked so different from what we have today. Looks complex and messy at first but I learned a ton about what makes for good design by digging into win32 and NT
Okay that’s even more pathetic. Is it using only CPU bound software rendering? I do 3d programming on MacOS. I can assure you that it’s not slow because it’s just super-duper complex. No, it just sucks.
Professional 3D CAD software is pretty much Windows only. Especially with a company like Apple where you have complex models with many designers working on it you aren't going to risk using anything other than the likes of NX, Catia, Creo, or SolidWorks (though I shudder at how frustrating SolidWorks would be in that use case).
In the hardware engineering space, I don't know if I have ever seen a mac. Linux pops up a bit because of the rise of micros, but it's still 99% windows.
This is the typical thinking of the toolmaker. It is not useful in markets. Apple is not in the business of engineering software, their in the business of consumer hardware.
Only if the marketplace makes sense. They can't just roll their own CAD system to use internally - mostly because it's a huge space and it requires working with external stakeholders/vendors
All of their mechanical CAD? No- some of that is handled in Shapr (https://www.shapr3d.com/). Given the state of the industry and the discussion in many sibling comments, it wouldn’t surprise me if this share is growing. A little birdie tells me they work closely with the Shapr team on certain feature developments in the app, and from my own personal experience I can tell you that I much prefer the Mac-native modeling experience than any of its gargantuan antiquated peers.
Apple Retail ran off Windows-based Motorola MC-50s for a while in the mid-00s before moving to their own software on iPod touch and iPhone. Apple doesn't compete in the CAD space, so why not use the best tools available even if it means they run on Windows?
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.
If 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.
Same, I recently upgraded to a similar car but slightly different segment, same brand. I couldn't find any data about it, I asked llms and they all told me given the available data the cabin size should be basically the same in term of passenger comfort. Completely wrong, there is much more space for both front and back passengers
For years, I've felt my dream application for my iPad would be a wireframe view of my vehicle that allowed me to explore the mechanical functionality as it moved. See the clutch interact with the transmission, see the 4-wheel drive engage, all while in motion.
No 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.
I’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.
MBD 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
According 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."
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.
This info, including magnet placement (and even magnet sttength), has been publicly available as part of Apple’s Accessory Design Guidelines for many years.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 74.5 ms ] threadI'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.
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.
Not sure about the backplane architecture. I’m pretty sure they are custom datacenter rack units.
I don't see why. Build a VM issue in the more sensible OS and work from there
Don't worry about IT support, just burn the VM and replace whenever something gets weird
They probably can solve every video driver they find or just find a way to use an nVidia card on a beefy Intel Mac
You don't need VMs for that. You can reset to a known good state on your bare metal disk drive just as well.
IMO, the reason is all of the 3rd party fluff and poorly-written drivers that come with Windows PCs: Apple takes driver stability very seriously, and the drivers on a Windows VM are as vanilla (no fluff or features) as possible.
MacOS versions are more commonly found in the low end of the market, e.g. Fusion 360.
There are some open source options but those aren’t taught at school afaik.
Very hard for Apple, or Linux to do much about that - especially when Nvidia considered it's drivers key IP.
Couple that with a relatively small market - and it's hard to justify supporting multiple platforms.
I for one would love to see Autodesk add more Mac and Linux support across their lineup. Especially Inventor and its associated add-ons.
That’s what happened with Logic Pro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Pro#Logic) and (sort-of) Final Cut Pro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Cut_Pro#Creation)
I suspect they’d need a portfolio of applications in the CAD space to make that work, though.
I mean these seem nice for print-decorations...
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.
Actually, I've been looking this kind of official drawing for practice product modeling and rendering.
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20260512182718/https://developer...
[0] https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-Gui...
https://archive.org/details/accessory-design-guidelines-for-...
Under this theory, the Neo is present because it was designed like an iOS device rather than like a Mac.
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.
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".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superellipse
[0] https://squircle.js.org/blog/math-behind-squircles
... and nothing else.
I guess other MBs and MBPs are top secret.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Accessory%20design%20guideline...