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
I remember around iPhone 6 or such popular design rumours that were circulating around turned out to be wrong. There were photos of chinese warehouses filled with cases made for the incorrect design.
With iPhone 4 Gizmodo literally acquired the prototype and still large portion of the crowd did not believe them, because the design seemed radically different to what they expected.
Nowadays with the size of the supply line there seem to remain no more hardware secrets before the keynotes.
I always loved designing accessories for Apple products specifically because of these documents. It seemed that at one point Google wanted to do the same thing with their Pixel line, but you had to apply to view the data and I was never allowed to see it. So I never actually got to find out if Google did the same.
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...)
There are probably enough counterfeiters out there who just take these apart and measure them, that the benefit to making it a bit more difficult isn't worth it.
Whereas the benefit of opening it up for people to make accessories, play around with it from a marketing perspective, or even just to marvel at them would be of greater benefit.
Checking the wayback machine, this URL seems to have only shown up a couple months ago with the very latest devices, and has slowly been backfilled with older devices since then. Wonder if it's due to the EU repairability regulations.
I would have also thought they only supplied this stuff to people who signed an MFi contact that stipulates certain rules on implementation.
This kind of thing was available (although more difficult to find) well before the EU started on their Apple quest - e.g. I had the dimensional drawings for whatever phone I had in late 2015 (6 or 6S, I forget) because I was making graphical inserts for my clear case using my Cricut with dimensions from the Apple PDF.
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.
