Apple has finally shared a closer look at how it 3D-prints the titanium cases for the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and Series 11, and the scale of the process is genuinely wild.
From the outside, the Ultra 3 looks almost identical to the Ultra 2, but behind the scenes, Apple has completely reinvented how the casing is made.
Instead of carving the body out of a solid block of titanium, Apple now uses 100% recycled titanium powder and blasts it with lasers to build each case layer by layer. Over 900 layers, each just 60 microns thick, go into making a single watch housing.
To put that into perspective, a single micron is one-thousandth of a millimetre; this thing is being built almost grain by grain.
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The titanium powder itself has to be carefully engineered before any printing even starts. Apple says the material needs its oxygen content reduced so it doesn’t literally explode when exposed to the high heat of the laser.
Once printed, the raw case is then heat-treated, milled, polished and finished like a traditional Apple Watch part, which is why the Ultra 3 doesn’t look like a 3D-printed gadget at all.
But the environmental impact is the real motivation. By switching the Watch to additive manufacturing, Apple estimates it has saved around 400 metric tons of raw titanium this year alone. The process cuts material usage for each case by half — a sizeable improvement for a product Apple ships in the millions.
The same laser-printed titanium technique is already being used for smaller components, like the USB-C port on the iPhone Air, and Apple hints this is only the beginning.
As Sarah Chandler, Apple’s VP of environment and supply chain innovation, puts it: “We’re never doing something just to do it once – we’re doing it so it becomes the way the whole system then works.”
Apple isn’t 3D-printing full iPhone bodies yet, but given how quickly this manufacturing shift is scaling, that future suddenly feels a lot less sci-fi.
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