mmmm… milling metal…
Is it just me or have these type of videos become a parody of themselves? Sure it’s interesting to see how something is made, but the dialogue tends to be almost comical and very much like a routine that was forced upon the designers. I guess most designers make as bad actors as I would myself… 
Still, I’ve seen worse than this one, it’s more of a general remark on the “genre”.
jada: I agree.
What seems pretty amazing about this if you’ve seen the phone & watch the video (plus look at some of the images on their site) it seems like they are CNCing the first part which actually becomes the “tool”, they then injection mold the plastic, and then machine away the rest of the part which lets them get the perfectly seamless construction with no shutoffs or reveals.
It’s pretty amazing - worth reading the Ifixit teardown too if that type of stuff interests you.
Also, the best feature about this phone is the built in IR transmitter. It lets you control TV’s when you’re out at the bar which is great if you want to screw with people during sporting events
Interesting, you think a big TV maker like Samsung would have done that.
… it’s interesting to see how something is made, but the dialogue tends to be almost comical and very much like a routine that was forced upon the designers.
Which “designers”? Them, or us???
This seems to help…
Mike, throw up some links to their site, and those images, if you would.
I think the videos aren’t really for us. Likely made more fore retail buyers and salesforce training and made public. I think anything that highlights the people behind the scenes and puts design into the conversation is a good thing. Of course these things tend to highly edited, but a large company has to be careful.
Is the black tee & horn-rimmed glasses timeless or a parody?
I’m with you and vote for the latter. I hope that fellow is aware.
It just hit me but I wonder if the HTC One name is a reference to One & Co.
Never thought of that, perhaps.
HTC bought One & Co. in 2008, so why not?
I looked up what HTC One would cost, and it appears they have ONE, ONE X, ONE X+, ONE S, ONE SV, ONE V etc etc and they all look like different phones (ONE V is 3 times cheaper than ONE). It 's was the same with HTC Desire and Samsung all of which products seem to be named Galaxy. It is even more confusing than TV model names (KDXASDF2349086), or microwave ovens or washing machines.
You’d think that with a name like this there would only be one phone, THE one. This, I think, is one of the things many people like with Apple, they don’t give you much choice. A limitation that some find very liberating. Back when I bought my current Macbook pro you had the choice of 2 Macbooks and 3 Macbook pros, plus also the 17" MBP and the Air which at that time was a joke. Admittedly things are a bit more complex now, but for the iPhone it is even simpler: small, medium or large?. I think many customers see this choice as being “how much do I want to spend (they all look pretty much the same anyway)” (the number of customers who end up going through agonising discussion with themselves whether 0.2 GHz extra is needed/can be justified are probably few).
Youtube has thousands of impressive machining videos, this isn’t one of them. To us the cognoscenti it’s actually laughable HTC would show a CNC mill proto setup with ultra slow feedrate, basically college kids playing around. Not disparaging HTC, fine phones and all . This is an impressive machining video, starts out similar to the HTC
However, in my experience, executive level types at these big companies love, love, love these videos: simple short snippets of direct manufacturing technology. I’ve had some executive levels show similar video sequences in various settings, conferences, seminars, as if they are a completely new discovery and paradigmal of their level of investment and committment.
While you may not be impressed by the video, the actual process for constructing that bottom housing is very impressive. It is not a purely CNC’ed part, it’s a combination of tool making, injection molding, and CNCing all in one. I was trying to find the original process images I saw and can’t for the life of me track them down on Google anymore.
The fact that they’ve seamlessly integrated the metal, plastic, and antennas into one part is very impressive - and if you’ve seen the part in person it’s even more impressive than the iPhone 5 at a hardware level.
Hearing this description, I need to have a closer look at the tear down of this phone. Everything you’re saying is the stuff that in 99.9% of companies building something new, the engineers would say “can’t be done”.
Lazy engineers
If anyone has any better luck finding those process images (I thought they were on HTC’s site but theres so many criss-crossed links on the blogosphere I can’t find it anymore) they give some pretty interesting hints.
I’m guessing it’s an extremely expensive part, but since it forms the entire housing and they can recover the aluminum scrap, it works out. Plus making a million of them a month probably doesn’t hurt.
It isn’t about lazy, it is about a difference in thought process. The reality being that it was the engineers that made the enclosure repeatable millions of times. Innovative thinking like this is quite often shot down before it can be proven/disproven…now, to your point…it can be anyone who is risk averse that stymies this kind progress.