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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

3d printed titanium USB-C port, in a mass produced device??

3D printing is really unsuitable for mass production due to being so slow and therefore expensive.

I wonder what properties this port has that apple didn't feel they could achieve any other way?

The Apple Watch Ultra 3 also has a fully 3D printed body casing. So they’re definitely quite confident in being able to build in quantity and have stability.

Apple is kinda famous for scaling processes that are not supposed to be viable at scale.

They may be just buying out all of the worldwide (China-wide) available capacity. Perks of sitting on an impossibly large pile of cash I guess. Still, impressive.

Thinness, I would presume. Titanium is hard for tooling.

Yeah 3D printing may be bad for volume production, but CNCing a metal part is an order of magnitude worse, as you can't even batch runs together.

What. Who says you can't batch CNC?

I was thinking 5 axis, I suppose you could batch simple parts on a 3 axis mill, but that limits you a lot in terms of what you can make?

this would be metal sand laser sintering, these machines have fairly large print volumes, they can probably produce 1000 pieces at a time if not more (to be fair, it's also surprising to me, I haven't seen these machines used this way, just speculating it wouldn't be bad for such a tiny piece)

The dot pattern suggests to me it's more likely some inkjet printing a resin binder onto a metal powder.

But do you have industry experience for the suggestion to mean anything?

titanium is notoriously annoying to work with so for a tiny part, it might just be easier and cheaper to print.

Specifically, the tool heads need to be harder than titanium (expensive), and titanium is prone to catching fire during machining (so the work piece usually needs to be submerged during).

Nearly all tools used professionally now are harder than hard Ti alloys. HSS has been niche for decades now.

> and titanium is prone to catching fire during machining (so the work piece usually needs to be submerged during)

Using spray or mist coolant is common in machining anyway for hard materials. Also titanium fires can't be put out with water. That said Ti is not magnesium and does not burn readily: you have to be both unlucky and incompetent.

What makes tiny parts harder for titanium compared to larger ones?

It's not that tiny parts are harder for conventional, but that for 3d printing metal, the smaller it is, the faster.

FDM print is slow because it scales with number of parts. While SLA printer has constant printing time regardless of number of parts.

Not sure which method Apple uses (must be really advance one), but 3d printing can be fast if you want.

Might (also) be a good way to expand testing and process development, similar to why they - presumably - started with the SIM ejector tool when they incorporated Liquid Metal in their processes.

For what it's worth, the Apple Watch since Series 7 has had 60GHz wireless USB communications for diagnostics, recovery, etc -- we're a few more steps closer to "portless" phones with everything they do.

3D printed mass produced shoes like Adidas 4D. There's also tons of 3D printed toys on the market like https://www.amazon.com/s?k=amazon+3d+printed+dragon

Does it reach the scale of iphone ?

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