MacLife

WHAT’S IN YOUR APPLE GEAR

Apple has always been as concerned about the insides of its products as the outsides. Telling his biographer, Walter Isaacson, how his adoptive father taught him woodwork, Steve Jobs recalled that he’d use good timber even on the back of a cabinet: “For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

It would be a stretch to claim this high standard was met by the rushed design of the first Macintosh, although the signatures of its engineers were embossed on the inside of the case — a touch that would have been appreciated only by users who dismantled the first computer made for the kind of users who didn’t dismantle computers.

Today’s Macs, iPhones, and iPads mostly aren’t made to come apart easily, but their functionality would be impossible without the elegant efficiency of their internals. So just what is inside your Apple gear, and where did it come from? Let’s grab a toolbox, an atlas, and a periodic table, and we’ll find out.

It’s been said, not without justification, that the folks in Cupertino can be a little secretive. Even so, there are three good ways to find out about what they

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