I wish overhead (cut away to passenger layout) and side scale drawings of all cars existed. That way you could directly compare the vehicles. You'd think such information would be needed (in the U.S.) by the NTSB; and, thus, be freely available.
Seems like this URL has only been live (at least first archived [0]) around May 2026, originally with only 13 products. Great to see them add more since then, now close to 90.
I understand the need for it to be in Siemens NX, but do they really run it in Windows VMs? As far as I know NX isn't certified to run in VMs without Nvidia GPU passthrough (aka Macs). It seems more sensible to maintain a fleet of Windows desktops specifically for CAD and industrial control.
Professional 3D CAD software is pretty much Windows only. Especially with a company like Apple where you have complex models with many designers working on it you aren't going to risk using anything other than the likes of NX, Catia, Creo, or SolidWorks (though I shudder at how frustrating SolidWorks would be in that use case).
I guess not for this use case. There are many industrial use cases for which there are no macOS versions. In fact, Siemens NX was once available on macOS AFAIK, but isn't anymore.
I always imagined shops in China got out the calipers and made measurements from scratch every time a new iPhone was released. Never knew Apple made it this easy to manufacture Minion iPhone cases
That’s obviously the people who are really using it, but I assumed you had to pay Apple to get it.
So either you made your own measurements or if you were doing Made For iPhone and they would give it to you as part of that program which surely you must have to pay for.
I assume there's NDAs in place with some vendors pre-release, since my understanding is some accessory vendors get the needed info before new models are released, so they can spin up their lines and have accessories ready to go when the new model hits the market.
(but I could be wrong; NDAs w/China? no idea what the time between announced/released/shipped is typically; I last bought Apple product in 2009...)
It's nice but lots of companies do this if their equipment is meant to be used with other equipment from third parties. Frankly I'm surprised they only provide it in 2D PDFs.
No decent engineering firm is going to want to work with FBX or Blender files. In fact they probably wouldn't even know what to do with them. Even proper model formats such as STEP files don't give you the details that are on a drawing that you actually need to do anything useful with these.
I’ve only dabbled with cad for 3d modelling in Onshape. It seems that there all kinds of ways to add measurements in the render files. Not sure about blender.
MBD is a thing, however that doesn't really matter here, for making accessories you can more or less just assume all dimensions are perfect since you need some compliance for the accessory to be installable. What I'm talking about that can't be encoded in a model easily are things like the keepout area for the camera.
The reason you don't want Blender files at all in any sort of engineering is because it's a mesh. You can't pull any useful information, even something simple like a radius, from a mesh.
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20260512182718/https://developer...
MacOS versions are more commonly found in the low end of the market, e.g. Fusion 360.
There are some open source options but those aren’t taught at school afaik.
The openness is easily worth it.
As others have mentioned, these are more useful for when they don't, i.e. before the actual release.
So either you made your own measurements or if you were doing Made For iPhone and they would give it to you as part of that program which surely you must have to pay for.
(but I could be wrong; NDAs w/China? no idea what the time between announced/released/shipped is typically; I last bought Apple product in 2009...)
You might want to pay for the Made For iPhone certification for some things, but I doubt most cases have it.
https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-Gui...
I mean these seem nice for print-decorations...
The reason you don't want Blender files at all in any sort of engineering is because it's a mesh. You can't pull any useful information, even something simple like a radius, from a mesh.