They are about a year ahead on CPUs. But pretty much everything else (screens, camera sensors, battery) has been on a par with, or behind what everyone else is doing.
When they moved away from unibody laptops they did so by introducing friction-stir welding. That was hot tech on Boeing airplanes at the time. Some of those Boeing patents are still active.
But Apple products tend to have some really interesting manufacturing or technology. Machining steel for the iPhone 4, FSW, putting an Xbox Kinect into the notch, LiDAR, making edge to edge screens without a chin, custom silicon.
Most of this is easily replaced or omitted because it doesn’t really matter much to the end user.
Apple are able to provide unique experiences through their polish and proper concepts. Other manufacturers can even have the features, but they usually don't know what to do with them, make the experience bad and so nobody will care.
Cool! I mean hot.
You mean the "unibody" made of two sheets of aluminum glued together in a way that the heat unsticks the adhesive?
The bit I scanned through shows cracking due to dumb placement of holes. And that’s on the lid, not the laptop body.
Drilling holes through the edge of load bearing elements is still a classic failure mode for home construction, so I’m disappointed but not surprised. There’s a lot of bad blood about their hinges, and I’m not gonna fight anybody on that. They wanted the thinnest laptops, they got them, but not without consequences.
But part of that thinness was actually pretty smart, and that’s what we are discussing here. Using billet aluminum and CNC fabrication for complex shapes instead of gluing (gluing takes large contact points which means more material). Switching to airframe construction techniques was cooler and probably faster. Carving them out of solid aluminum was innovative mostly because it sounded so crazy. Stir welding sounded positively sober by comparison, even though it was hot shit at the time.
No. The unibody was the second gen redesign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#2nd_generation_(Un...
Rossman is handling a first gen MacBook Pro in this video, pre-unibody, and discontinued in 2008.
Not suprised to see Rossman succeeding in mining anti-Apple rage clicks.
Rossman's video is about the pre-unibody, but the first-generation unibody indeed had a heat-unsticks-the-adhesive issue. The EM209 issue (<https://randyzwitch.com/broken-macbook-pro-hinge-fixed-free/>) affected me twice, the second time not covered by Apple (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542522>).
Competitor is using new unproven tech. Apple decided to wait.
Apple can't use new tech due to supply constraint (new tech supplier can't make enough to supply Apple).
Apple decided that new tech doesn't offer enough competitive advantage vs profit made selling old tech (720p camera vs 1080p camera).
Whilst the party lasted for apple it can buy the world. But would it last. We have to see. Hence saying it is a monopoly is totally off.
Whether it's unibody aluminum milled frames, bleeding edge injection molding, glass, silicon...
It's done nothing but good for Apple to be aggressive and as vertical without owning the manufacturer as possible. Some of their processes are _years_ ahead of what anyone else can get their hands on, because they buy all the equipment, lease all the floors, and just throw money around like it's nobody's business. AMD and certainly Qualcomm can't touch em.