akshed

Hi, I'm Anna Shedletsky, the author of the post linked above. I spent six years as a product design engineer at Apple, designing very similar products and making similar design decisions that Samsung engineers needed to make.

Typical smart phone / tablet type products use a stamped metal frame ($) to stiffen the product and support the display. A few phones use die-cast magnesium frames ($$). A CNC'ed pocket ($$$$) is a significant cost adder for this product (larger starting billet, longer cycle time, and thousands of CNC machines required) -- so this choice was clearly made for a reason.

Additionally, the fact that the battery is surrounded on five sides by a machined pocket cuts into battery volume -- most products just rely on an air gap (0.5-1mm) between the battery pouch and the next nearest component that could poke it during assembly and usage. Take a look at some other product teardowns on iFixit, and you'll see this (example from iPhone 7: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/fJI2bhqYXg4CMNPi.h...)

They added significant cost to the product and sacrificed a little battery capacity to have that pocket. I hypothesize that it was for battery safety given the aggressive design.

The images show very tight clearances around the battery (0.1mm is the thickness of a human hair) in plan view (XY). The footnote explains discusses the lack of "ceiling space" for the battery to expand into, which mostly happens in Z (the thickness of the phone). In Z, the design is line-to-line.

dfxMachina | Palo Alto, CA ONSITE | full-time | salary + equity + benefits | cannot sponsor new H1Bs, but can do transfers

Hi -- I'm Anna, the CEO of dfxMachina. I learned how to build millions of things during a six year tenure at Apple that culminated with leading Product Design for Apple Watch. Instead of just making one product thinner/cheaper/better, we are fundamentally changing how all products are designed and built.

We're making artificial intelligence for manufacturing -- enabling assembly lines that can provide actionable insights into how our customers' designs or processes can be improved – with the potential to save billions in scrap and rework costs.

We are dedicated to building a diverse and dynamic team of data-driven engineers who see inefficiencies as opportunities and want to develop a system that not only touches, but improves, millions of things each day. We have revenue and are funded. Today we are just six people -- there's lots of opportunity here to move the needle, influence the product, and grow as an engineer!

We are actively seeking several software engineers to be founding members of our artificial intelligence team. These engineers will architect, develop, and deploy scaleable, non-task specific machine learning, computer vision, and other data extraction/correlation algorithms to generate insights about our customers’ product and manufacturing processes.

Would love to hear from you -- communications at dfxmachina dot com -- it goes directly to my inbox!