Core77

[sketcher23]

A colleague and I were discussing the design of the G5 tower...man that was a nice design!

Does anyone know definitively whether it was extruded and post machined or if it was all just sheet metal and bent to form?

I would almost say to 95% certainty that it was sheet metal but looking at pictures, the tolerances are so tight around the parts it almost has me thinking it was extruded to some degree...



And heres an image I found of it disassembled:

[slippyfish]

I had one. Sold it bc it just took up so much damn space, but it was a great machine. Loved opening up the side panel - the interior layout had the designer's fingerprints all over it, just so orderly and mechanically beautiful. To the best of my knowledge it was bent-up aluminum, with a significant amount of post-processing including (guessing) substantial caustic etching to remove any tooling marks. The housing was sturdy and well finished, but it was the custom perforated grill that is a real design and engineering feat. There is so much material taken away to provide a high percentage of open-area, yet the dots line up well, they were all perfect, and the material was thick as well which one would think makes perf difficult...not for Apple.

The new flagship desktop product is another tour de force but for other reasons.

[Cyberdemon]

Stamped and bent sheet metal. For ~3mm thick aluminum it's easy to get good shape retention. I had a Dell XPS 700 from around that era that was the PC "Aggro" version of the G5 which I loved - would've kept it to this day but it didn't support a standard ATX motherboard without crazy modifications.