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HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So you mean to tell me the BILLIONS they have in cash right now isn't enough to do all of the above? HAHAHAHAHA
Agree. They act like apple is magically going to do something different now that they saved a few bucks on each device. The chips in the watch have been pretty meh lately and battery life still isn't great (especially compared to other high-end fitness devices).
 
Great marketing, this is what they gonna tell you. Apple's hardware and production teams have developed and intensively worked together to recreate the way how we make our products and we call it Vision Printing (aka 3D Printing) it enables us to virtually make anything in any shape with premium materials and very high tolerance, even higher than we do with our incredible iPhones, Macbook Pros and Vision Pro. We enter the new age of picometers even surpassing our Apple chips like the A-Chips in iPhone and iPad and M-Chips in our powerful unrivalled Macbook Pros.

(And you feel it in your wallet).
"It took so much courage for us to switch to this new process, but we think you are going to love it"- Apple at the unveiling of the first 3d printed device.
 
Apple Watch Ultra 2040:

Apple just sends you the watch plans and your print out your watch on your 3D printer that is next to your Kurieg 9000
That's actually where industry seems to be heading, long-term. Given the current finicky state of home 3D printing, I suspect that will be a long ways off. But given Apple's obsession with controlling the whole enchilada, I can't envision them going that route.
 
Some questions I'm very curious about:

1) I believe the standard Ti alloy used in watches is Ti 6Al-4V. Would they use the same alloy for 3D printing small watch parts?

2) Assuming they're using the same alloy: What are the differences in relevant physical properties (tensile strength, Young's modulus, hardness, brittleness, isotropicity) between machined and 3D printed Ti? And to the extent there are differences, what causes them? E.g., are there specific differences in crystal structure or grain boundaries that would explain them, and what would be the mechanism by which 3D printing yields such differences?

I'm particularly curious about how the physical properties of 3D printed Ti change at the layer boundaries. E.g., is the metal more subject to shearing at these boundaries than it is within the layers?

3) The usual advantage of 3D printing over machining is that the former enables the creation of much more complex shapes. But that doesn't seem to apply here, since watch crowns, etc. should be easy to machine. Does that mean 3D printing of Ti 6Al-4V has reached the point where it's more economical for small parts?

[Without knowing anything about the economics of either process, it does seem plausible that the smaller the part is, the more the economics would favor printing over machining, and that this would be particularly true for sub - 1mm parts, i.e., those that would otherwise need micromachining—at least down to comfortable working limit of 3D printing.]
Unfortunately I'm no chemist or material scientist, so I don't have a clear answer for you. But my understanding was by tweaking your composition, each layer would polymerize in a way. You'd have metal matrix composites, suppose >95% of an aluminum alloy with 5% of ceramics or carbons added. This would exhibit some better, some worse properties than that aluminum alloy on its own. There's something about the chemistry of materials being in a melt pool state which you don't achieve in traditional machining.
The watch body my former company had printed was in tantalum, which averaged $3k/kg. You could certainly print in Ti64, we printed quite a few things with it. On your point 3, printing smaller parts can be difficult, average layer resolution was 30-40 micron. When it comes to the Apple Watch Ultra specifically, I think Apple would mainly print the body and nothing else inside. If you look at a teardown of it you'll see it's not as economic to print the metal components inside. I can send some photos of different things if anyone DMs me, or if it seems appropriate in a comment here.
 
That's actually where industry seems to be heading, long-term. Given the current finicky state of home 3D printing, I suspect that will be a long ways off. But given Apple's obsession with controlling the whole enchilada, I can't envision them going that route.

Did you ever read the book Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson?

In the book, everyone had access to "the feed" basic 3D printing that printed out food and basic items, but of course, if you had money and wealth, the quality of what was printed out was much better and you could print out nicer stuff.

Been a while since I read it, but it's a fascinating book.
 


The second-generation Apple Watch Ultra will launch later this year and feature 3D-printed mechanical parts, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

apple-watch-ultra-sandy.jpg

In a post published on Medium earlier today, Kuo said that his latest survey of Apple's supply chain indicates that "Apple is actively adopting 3D printing technology." Specifically, "some of the titanium mechanical parts of the 2H23 new Apple Watch Ultra will be made by 3D printing."

The components could include the Digital Crown, Side Button, and Action Button, as these are the only mechanical parts of the Apple Watch Ultra. These titanium parts are currently CNC machined.

The change has the potential to improve production time and reduce costs. If shipments from suppliers go well, Kuo believes more Apple products will adopt 3D printing technology in the future.

Until now, only Bloomberg's Mark Gurman had said that Apple would release a second-generation Apple Watch Ultra alongside the Apple Watch Series 9 models later this year. Thus, Kuo's latest report seems to add further credibility to the belief that the Apple Watch Ultra will follow the same annual update cycle as the standard Apple Watch series.

Article Link: Kuo: New Apple Watch Ultra to Launch This Year With 3D-Printed Parts
In other words, made of plastic 😏
 
This would only be cool, from a consumer perspective, if Apple releases templates users could use to print their own replacement parts. That would also align well with the market segment they are targeting the Ultra watch to. One where you are pushing it to its limits and might need to replace a part or two as a result.

That's never going to happen, and not at all the reason they would adopt 3D printing. The Ultra is the watch in their lineup least suited for having anything user replaceable - it's marketed as a diving watch. You can't have a rugged watch that is supposed to be used as a dive computer have user replaceable 3D printed parts.

Otherwise, it might make the watch feel cheap. But I’m sure it will be “3D printing” at a commercial scale that doesn’t align with what consumers have access too. They can 3D print whole buildings now and they are using obviously different materials than plastic like a consumer 3D printer.

You will not be able to tell it is 3D printed.
 
That's basically correct. One shaves a block down to the end product the other builds the product up using basically metal dust 3D printed to make the part. The cool thing with 3D printing is you can make parts that are impossible to make with CNC. 3D printed titanium is also stronger in tensile strength. Not to mention the wasted material CNC has. I'm surprised Apple hasn't done this sooner honestly.
Interestingly, I just watched a documentary yesterday about a manufacturer that found 3d printed metal was inferior quality and introduced imperfections that weekend the end product. I forget what it was about but it was subs or aircraft where imperfections could be catastrophic, I think it was Boeing. They had to stop using the process for important parts and only use 3d printing for non essential components.
 
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Did you ever read the book Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson?

In the book, everyone had access to "the feed" basic 3D printing that printed out food and basic items, but of course, if you had money and wealth, the quality of what was printed out was much better and you could print out nicer stuff.

Been a while since I read it, but it's a fascinating book.
Can’t wait until I can print me out some Bill Gates chicken tumor nuggets. 😋
 
2040: Apple will sell us an Apple Watch Ultra made out of plastic and paper, and charges us $10000.
Regardless of what cost saving measures Apple is going on, brace another price increase because investors want 900% return of their investment.
 
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I found a couple of articles comparing 3D-printed Ti6Al4V with conventionally-produced Ti6Al4V. One looked at tensile strength, yield point, elongation, and necking, and found the 3D-printed material had ~20% higher strength and yield point, and was much more resistant to elongation (Karolina Karolewska, Bogdan Ligaj; Comparison analysis of titanium alloy Ti6Al4V produced by metallurgical and 3D printing method. AIP Conference Proceedings 21 February 2019; 2077 (1): 020025. ); and the other looked at Young's modulus and found the conventional material was ~5% stiffer (Alkentar, R., File, M., & Mankovits, T. (2023). Use of compression test to determine the Young's modulus of the titanium alloy Ti6Al4V manufactured via direct metal laser sintering, International Review of Applied Sciences and Engineering, 14(2), 256-262.)

So it can go either way. But note that the 3D-printed objects tested in these papers are one-off laboratory samples that were likely prepared with great care and expertise. The properties of commercial 3D-printed parts could be significantly different (i.e., worse), depending on how much quality control is needed to obtain consistently good results.
 
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If MAHLE can 3D print a piston for Porsche I am sure a 3D printed watch part will be fine.

What I don't understand is:

1. It takes them 12 hours to make a piston. Obviously watch parts will take less time, but depositing all of those layers is going to be time consuming.

2. With the pistons they're talking about almost 1 off parts. How do you make millions of watch parts? That many large printing machines seems like they would fill the factory ...
 
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