I was curious, so I looked at the Prusa design. The Apple design has enough additional cleverness that it's quite a stretch to call them the same.
The main difference is that it doesn't require 3D printing which is obviously a deal-breaker for the quantity needed. By incorporating the clear plastic as a structural element, they eliminated a piece from the design. The bottom piece is also eliminated.
Altogether more elegant and more useful than the Prusa design.
I wish media would stop tooting how amazing "3D Printing" is. It is just one of the ways of manufacturing. IMO, it is a poor way to do anything besides home hobby projects (there are a few medical exceptions). It takes 12+ hours to print anything useful. Yet media loves talking about 3D printing.
For anyone who has worked in product design and manufacturing, it is one thing to be able to make a few prototypes (which is where 3D printing shines), and another challenge to make 5 million of those prototypes per week. It is monumentally difficult to produce anything in high volume.
I wish the media would talk about many other amazing manufacturing technologies - injection molding (20 seconds a part!), die cast aluminium, water jet cutting, laser cutting, metal stamping, and machining. These are equally amazing technologies that make the world tick...yet 3D printing gets disproportionately amount of attention. Mold making alone is a topic of insane complexity and engineering challenges.
> It takes 12+ hours to print anything useful. Yet media loves talking about 3D printing.
Face shields are useful and can be printed in under 3 hours (for the Prusa design). Some people have knocked the time down to about one hour.
For something that costs cents and can be made at home, that's pretty useful.
> it is a poor way to do anything besides home hobby projects
Tell that to SpaceX.
"3D Printing" encompasses a whole lot of technologies which all fall under the additive manufacturing umbrella. FDM is the most common, but it's not the only one. Multi jet fusion, laser sintering and others are "3d printing" just the same. Not all of them will take hours to build a part.
> injection molding (20 seconds a part!), die cast aluminium, water jet cutting, laser cutting, metal stamping, and machining.
And none of this, except for laser cutting, can be done outside dedicated manufacturing facilities. All these technologies have been around for decades now. Why would they get any attention? But they actually do... "company X builds a new factory at Y location". Boom. Attention. They won't care about the specific technologies... because why would they?
Take injection molding. It may take 20 seconds, but that's _ after the manufacturing facilities and the mold are setup _ . This is unlike essentially pressing a print button, which is where we want to go.
> and another challenge to make 5 million of those prototypes per week
5 million units a week... these are not prototypes. Call them production samples or what have you, but this is an assembly line.
The only reason we are even talking about 3D printing is because we are having shortages. All those tried and proven technologies are unable to keep up with the demand. So people are trying to supplement them with other, less time-efficient, technologies.
Having worked in manufacturing for over 10 years, most of your claims are either A) Factually false B) Twisting my original points and cherry picking. No one is questioning the unique aspects that 3D printing brings to the table, it is just the wrong type of solution for this situation.
> Face shields are useful and can be printed in under 3 hours (for the Prusa design). Some people have knocked the time down to about one hour. For something that costs cents and can be made at home, that's pretty useful.
3 hours is still too long and that's not the central point I am arguing about. It is mostly about media coverage. If you have a 3D printer, by all means use it.
> Tell that to SpaceX.
I've worked on 3D printers before it was cool. Way back in 2005, I designed and built turbine blade prototypes on Stratasys 3D printers that cost upwards of $250k. Can we get past this narrative of 3D printing usefulness to its narrow application? It is not going to revolutionize manufacturing anytime soon. Tell that to GE, Lockheed Martin, Apple, Intel, Boeing, etc. Every company has invested in 3D printing primarily for prototyping and occasionally for medium-volume production. You're not going to see 3D printed Nike soles on $40 shoe anytime soon.
If you look at the amount of manufacturing that takes place on 3D printers vs. other technologies, you would not even see the slice of the pie that is for "3D printing".
Additive manufacturing has niche applications.
> All these technologies have been around for decades now. Why would they get any attention?
Because in the time of war, when the nation is mobilizing to making millions of something, you want the press to talk about things that work?
> Take injection molding. It may take 20 seconds, but that's _ after the manufacturing facilities and the mold are setup _ . This is unlike essentially pressing a print button, which is where we want to go.
No shit, you need mold that takes time to make and validate. Usually 3-4 weeks, sometimes 8 weeks. But when there is a national emergency, you can turn it around within 48 hours. That's including the entire NRE process, design, validation and tooling. After 48 hours, you would have printed a few dozen parts in your beloved 3D printers. I would be churning out a part every 20 seconds after the initial 48 hours. Even if it is 100+ hours, it is still worth it when the quantity you want to make is 5 million.
> 5 million units a week... these are not prototypes. Call them production samples or what have you, but this is an assembly line.
Hey! why would you point that out? Isn't that obvious that by definition you cannot make 5 million prototypes? "These prototypes" - I was referring to the aforementioned reference to the prototypes in the previous sentence. Jeez.
> IMO, it is a poor way to do anything besides home hobby projects (there are a few medical exceptions).
It's good for various sorts of low-volume production, particularly prototyping. But yes, the hype about 3d printing putting factories out of business is very silly.
It's cool but I am cynical that media loves talking about 3D printing because it generates more viewership; no one wants to read an article "Decades old technology of injection molding is still the best way to make high volume parts during this pandemic".
I saw an interesting demonstration by a local research center where they have shown a reconfigurable manufacturing line that included robotic manipulators, CNC machines and a 3D printer. The idea is that you order it to build something and it atumatically assigns jobs to the machines and assembles the end result (in this case a pen stand with your name on it, with a pen inside assembled & delivered to you by the multi machine assembly line with the wheeled robot shufling parts betwen machines.
Their longer term planes are much more grandiose, with a system that connect multiple factories with many machines each. You woul upload your project files and the system will assign manufacturing to the most suitable machines in the factories and handle all the part transfer between the factories and assembling, with the resulting product arriving to you all complete and packaged.
In this structure a 3D rpinter makes a lot of sense, you can use it to print parts for smaller orders & for bigger orders let the machine build a mold for injection molding. Also, you can use 3D printers to print parts to enhance the machines you already have to make fulfilling the order more efficient, like some special packaging tools or assembly jigs.
So 3D printing is not likely to replace factory mass production, but has the potential to enahnce it signifficantly & make it much more flexible.
Some of those listed by the other commenter are not as accessible... but theres a lot of accessible hobby manufacturing techniques that have existed for a long time but don't get the same attention because they're not as new and don't come with the nomenclature that implies that it's as easy as clicking "print".
The main difference is that it doesn't require 3D printing which is obviously a deal-breaker for the quantity needed. By incorporating the clear plastic as a structural element, they eliminated a piece from the design. The bottom piece is also eliminated.
Altogether more elegant and more useful than the Prusa design.