Apple drawings

Everyone’s favorite Apple archivist, Stephen Hackett, wrote a short post last week in which he linked to Apple’s page with dimensional drawings of its products. He included this drawing of the iPhone 17 Pro: You can click on it to see a 300 dpi version. The Apple page linked above will give you infinite-resolution PDFs. When I zoomed in on Stephen’s page, I was initially confused, but then I realized what seemed odd to me. You see, I’ve spent an awful lot of the past 40 years looking at engineering drawings, and I can’t think of any that looked like this. That’s because the drawings I’m used to are for making the depicted product, but the drawings Apple’s offering up here aren’t for that.1 These are for others—not Apple and not its suppliers—to use for making cases and other accessories. I figured it was worth a quick post on what makes a drawing like the one above so different from what I’m used to. First off, there are so many dimensions. Drawings of full products are typically…