Dan Riccio, Apple’s vice president of hardware engineering:
Relative to the issue you referenced regarding the new iPad Pro, its unibody design meets or exceeds all of Apple’s high quality standards of design and precision manufacturing. We’ve carefully engineered it and every part of the manufacturing process is precisely measured and controlled.
This iPad Pro bend is a real head scratcher for me. Apple is so diligent and precise in every aspect of manufacturing that it seems impossible that this could happen, but yet it has. I haven’t seen this with my iPad Pro and we don’t know how prevalent it is beyond the few pictures we’ve seen online.
It can easily meet and exceed company quality standards if none of the standards reflects “is the damned thing straight?”.
Ok so four sheets of paper is the acceptable amount of variance. I decided to give some old devices the not so scientific paper test to see if my old devices were bent.
Apple iPad 2 – no bend
Apple iPad Mini (2nd gen I think) – no bend
Google Nexus 7 (Asus) – Bent! I could slide the paper under about an inch on either end. However, this is a plastic device, so I wouldn’t expect it to be as perfect as an aluminum one.
MS Surface Pro 2 – Bent! I could slide the paper in about 3 inches on either side.
Honestly, all of these devices looked perfectly straight to the naked eye, and barely gave when sitting them on a flat surface and pressing on the ends. I used them for years and I always considered them “flat”. So if that’s all the iPad is off… then I’d say that’s probably acceptable to most people.
However, I’m still curious to see how many people are noticing bent devices and how much they are bent. There’s always the possibiilty that people are mistaken about how they got bent or are just lying.
OTOH, 400microns is pretty minor. 9to5Mac and macrumors are using pictures of severely warped iPads, and everybody is acting like that’s what Apple is talking about. That seems dishonest.
Yup. Every photo I’ve seen so far of a significant bend looks very much like someone’s intentionally bent it.
Let me just say, as someone who is a contract manufacturer in metal fab for aerospace companies, a flatness tolerance of +/- .5mm for a machined enclosure does not really sound up to par with what I’ve known about Apple having crazy tight tolerances (approaching or exceeding aerospace tolerances). .5mm works out to about .02″, which sounds awfully lenient for a machined enclosure.
With sheetmetal parts, where you typically will struggle more with flatness, aerospace companies give about +/- .005-.010 inch flatness tolerances. I find it hard to believe that Apples tolerances for flatness would be 2-4x what aerospace companies ask for. There are methods for controlling flatness during any heating/cooling processes, such as fixturing, that I would be shocked to hear Apple doesn’t utilize. You don’t leave metal in a free state during these processes.
I’m not saying Apple is lying, but i’m a little surprised to hear that. Especially on a machined enclosure.
Btw I’m a very happy new iPad Pro customer with a unit that looks/feels as close to flat as you could expect.
Mr. Riccio’s statement is not about iPad Pros, it’s a statement explaining how Apple views high quality standards of design and precision manufacturing in 2018.
every product has defects that get released. It’s not a big deal as it’s likely very rare, and they will of course take a defective product back. yawn.
Is it’s just me or do others express their doubts that the VP of engineering would respond to a random MacRumours reader?