Apple: Unibody Laptops

Yesterday, October 14th, 2008, Apple announced new MacBooks, MacBook Pros, a new 24″ LCD display and an upgrade to the MacBook Air. While these new products were impressive, what I found most interesting was another announcement.

Apple announced a new manufacturing process that creates a “unibody” chassis from a solid brick of aluminum reducing the number of parts and material needed to created the body by up to 50 percent, allowed a thinner and lighter body while improving rigidity and reliability. It’s reported that this process uses a combination of lasers and high pressure water jets and all excess aluminum removed from “the brick” is recycled making for a “greener” product with less environmental impact.

Apple is hands-on in some serious engineering design work and also proudly mentioned during the presentation that they had designed the motherboards featured in their new laptops.