Who is Apple Targeting With Its 3D Printing Messaging?

In covering additive manufacturing (AM) industry news, I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon whereby people in the industry find it to be a matter of routine for manufacturers to publicly disclose the hardware they’re using to produce the goods they sell. In reality, this is quite a weird thing to be happening: throughout all of history, there has been very little to incentivize manufacturers to be transparent about their production processes, in the same way that all other industries are incentivized against sharing trade secrets.

Probably, the practice of manufacturers providing the general public with insight into their production processes has only started to become somewhat commonplace due to the intersection of a commoditized machine tools industry and our contemporary PR-centric society.

That is, the sale of mass-produced machine tools has become integral to the workings of the manufacturing sector at-large. And, from time to time, to sell more machines, the companies selling them need to share curated endorsements by limited numbers of users of those machines.

For people who regularly follow machine tool industry news — including AM industry news — the overall, constant flow of news creates the illusion that we have a great deal of insight into how manufacturers make their products, when in fact we don’t. In other words, in the grand scheme of things, it’s still a relatively rare occasion when companies reveal to the world anything at all about how they manufacture what they sell.

This is a dynamic I think about occasionally, and it jumped to mind again when Apple announced it’s using 3D printed titanium in the latest version of its iPhone, the first version of the iPhone Air (as well as 3D printed titanium parts in the Apple Watch, something that has been circulating for a couple of years now). Specifically, I thought about it in the context of a talking point that I’ve heard people in the AM industry bring up fairly frequently: “Consumers don’t care if products are 3D printed.”

So, if Apple thinks that people care that its products are 3D printed, which the tech megagiant apparently does seem to think, then are we wrong to assume that consumers don’t care if products are 3D printed, or has Apple just lost its flair for marketing? I think the answer to both questions is no, because I don’t think that Apple’s broadcasting of the fact that it’s using AM at scale is really meant for the consumer, at least not primarily.

Here, it’s important to keep in mind Apple’s centrality to the U.S. and global economies, and the imminent changes that manufacturing supply chains are currently facing. In early August, for instance, Apple CEO Tim Cook went to the White House and announced that the company would be investing $600 billion in U.S. manufacturing over the next four years.

In that context, less than a month prior to Apple Day, the company’s Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit officially opened, a partnership with Michigan State University that aims “to help American companies transition to advanced manufacturing by implementing artificial intelligence and smart manufacturing techniques”.

This isn’t the first time that Apple has created such a facility: about two years ago, I posted about Apple’s first-ever Smart Manufacturing Forum, held in South Korea, at the Apple Manufacturing R&D Accelerator, which was opened in 2021 at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). Notably, Apple opened the $55 million facility as part of a fine that the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) leveled against the company.

An interesting connection to Apple’s latest announcement is that, less than three weeks following Apple’s Smart Manufacturing Forum, the first news items broke related to Apple’s use of 3D printed titanium parts in the Apple Watch. So, the pattern is: Apple holds an event related to assimilating small and medium enterprises (SMEs) into its manufacturing processes, followed by a few weeks later, stories about the company’s use of metal AM hitting the news. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but the consensus on the company seems to be that “nothing Apple does is by accident.”

I don’t think Apple is targeting consumers with the disclosures of its metal AM usage: I think it’s targeting manufacturing stakeholders. Specifically, I think the company is very subtly showing its hand when it comes to Trump’s trade war and reshoring. While previous reports suggest that the Chinese brand Xi’an BLT is prominently involved in Apple’s AM ecosystem, the fact that the company is mentioning 3D printing at all carries enough implications that Apple could detach portions of its supply chain and reproduce them elsewhere.

That has already been in the process of happening, with the company having announced that it plans to move the assembly of most of its U.S.-destined iPhones to India, a major move even if most of the components are still manufactured in China. As many observers have noted, it would take years for the company to transform its supply chains in any major fashion. But at this point, Apple seems to be signaling that it is committed to making such a transformation, and crazier things happen on a daily basis.

Along those lines, there is an eerie silence on the news stories that first started emerging a couple of years ago concerning a Chinese government ban on iPhones for state workers that may or may not have actually happened. If you search Google for that information, you’ll only find conflicting reports that haven’t been updated since 2023.

None of this is to suggest that Apple will ever leave China, and as a New York Times article from May asserts, the company probably couldn’t exist without China. But the fact that the question is even being raised illustrates the rapid changes the world’s supply chains have ahead of them, and the risk to Apple and the global economy would be too great for the company not to at least come up with viable contingency plans. And Apple’s footprint is so big that even the implementation of its backup plans could end up substantially reorganizing the world’s manufacturing infrastructure.