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.
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
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.
NX supported macos and Linux until 2019. The situation is kinda sad/ironic considering that many big CAD packages have their roots in classic UNIX workstations, and afaik that was one of the major usecases for RedHat desktop. With the general decline of MS and Windows I imagine CAD companies must be reconsidering their platform choices. But of course big ships turn slowly so who knows when anything concrete might happen
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.
I still think that it’s one of the great ironies of our time.
Linux itself bends over backwards to avoid breaking userland, to the point where there is a substantial amount of cruft when interacting directly with the kernel.
Only for GNU to say “fuck that” and create a widely mockable situation, one of the worst targets of modern programs for stability… to the point where people start using alternative libc’s specifically to statically link them.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
Electronics 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.
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.
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.
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.
I 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
I 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.
That’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.
I 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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's ironic is that Apple does all their mechanical CAD work for their products in Siemens NX running in Windows VMs.
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.
> It seems more sensible to maintain a fleet of Windows desktops specifically for CAD and industrial control.
I don't see why. Build a VM image 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 issue they find or just find a way to use an nVidia card on a beefy Intel Mac
(or do the same on Linux - also possible)
> Don't worry about IT support, just burn the VM and replace whenever something gets weird
You don't need VMs for that. You can reset to a known good state on your bare metal disk drive just as well.
It could be VDIs, i.e. VMs running on another system, potentially x86 with GPU
More sensible, yes... but less ideologically pure.
Considering 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.
Im curious which OS they run on these https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-...
isn't it very stripped down iOS?
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.
They definitely have their own servers. There was a post about that, some time ago. There’s a sibling post to yours, about them.
Not sure about the backplane architecture. I’m pretty sure they are custom datacenter rack units.
You would think this is a great opportunity for Apple to fill a gap in the market (and dogfood their solution too). Guess not...
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
I think the only thing that would make some sense would be for them to buy a big player and then tell them to make a Mac port or migrate to Mac only.
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.
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.
Even more so, having retired themselves from server and workstation market.
This is insane. Is there no great first party CAD solution on Mac?
NX supported macos and Linux until 2019. The situation is kinda sad/ironic considering that many big CAD packages have their roots in classic UNIX workstations, and afaik that was one of the major usecases for RedHat desktop. With the general decline of MS and Windows I imagine CAD companies must be reconsidering their platform choices. But of course big ships turn slowly so who knows when anything concrete might happen
There is no meaningful decline of Windows on corporate desktops.
Tons of industrial software is Windows only, whether it's design, operations, or configuration & control apps for industrial hardware.
MacOS versions are more commonly found in the low end of the market, e.g. Fusion 360.
Which is kind of insane when you think about it considering what a cluster fuck the win32 API is
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.
Still the most stable API on Linux
I still think that it’s one of the great ironies of our time.
Linux itself bends over backwards to avoid breaking userland, to the point where there is a substantial amount of cruft when interacting directly with the kernel.
Only for GNU to say “fuck that” and create a widely mockable situation, one of the worst targets of modern programs for stability… to the point where people start using alternative libc’s specifically to statically link them.
What a monumental failure.
Dynamic linking by default has turned into a premature optimization over time
What?! Win32 is one of the best API ever designed. It’s pretty much the best part of windows
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
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).
It used to be UNIX as well, but Apple choose to give up on UNIX workstation market.
For quite a long time, graphics card driver quality and performance has been much better on the PC driven by the larger PC gaming market.
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 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.
Nothing that CAD and engineering students would be familiar with.
There are some open source options but those aren’t taught at school afaik.
Not that it's necessarily suited for Apple's use case, but Autodesk's Fusion runs natively on Mac.
I think it’s just an electron wrapper over a browser version. Impressively sluggish, clunky, and unresponsive for a so-called native app
Autodesk Fusion GUI uses the C++ Qt library, not Electron. Link to my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24252787
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.
Rhino runs natively on Mac
Vectorworks. Popular with smaller architecture firms but not the biggest ones.
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.
https://www.carsized.com/en-us/
That's not the same thing as those are photos with perspective distortion.
Presumably they scale the photo to the actual measured dimension though, so at worst it will make the car look a bit weird.
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
Electronics 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
or
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had no idea they published this to the general public.
A huge ecosystem of third party accessories, cases, skins, etc.
The openness is easily worth it.
I 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
They 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.
Commoditize your complements. Wide choice and availability of accessories benefits hardware sales.
The big manufactureres pay or just simple acquire the leaks.
I 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.
That’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.
I 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...)
I've heard that they are busy bribing people in Apple's manufacturers for dimensions before products are released.
Commoditize 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.
For accessory manufacturers?
Yes. 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-Gui...
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.
It's so we can make cases.
Wouldn’t surprise me if EU forced them to.
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.
No, this is to attract accessory manufacturers, and then corner them into buying an MFi/connector license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFi_Program
Why are the rounded edges for eg.: on MacBook Neo defined as small distance specs instead of a radius?
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.
I can only guess, but I guess it IS because those are not circles but squircles maybe?
What font is used in the technical drawing part? It's very cool.
ISOCP, maybe?
Edit: close, but not quite
Curious why the Macbook Neo is the only Macbook included?
Mac > MacBook Neo
... and nothing else.
I guess other MBs and MBPs are top secret.
Even the drawing of the Vision Pro feels heavy.
idk maybe apple can release fbx or blender files?
I mean these seem nice for print-decorations...
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.
Roll your own?