I remember how they introduced the unibody Macbooks around 2009. They milled the entire enclosure from a slab of aluminium - they had to buy thousands of mills for mass-producing. Now 3d printing seems to open up even more design possibilities. But with the time to produce a watch enclosure (20+ hours) it would take days to create a Macbook enclosure.
I think they mean 20 hours for a machine to print a whole batch, which looks to be at least ~80 watches in one of the clips. That's not quite so bad.
It looks like they are probably doing some kind of machining post processing to give a smooth surface finish. Crazy advanced manufacturing capability on show here. China is ahead of the game here compared to the west, the best comparable machine comes from Trumpf and they simple do not have the manufacturing volume to make the number of machines required.
The article seems to imply that the 1/2 reduction is due to the amount scrap material from milling. Isn’t this material just recycled?
Which printers did they use?
Accelerating conspicuous consumption.
Also reducing raw materials consumption, by half. Related: I have bad news about the industries covered by HN.