If you compare the Apple Watch Ultra 3 to the Ultra 2, you probably won’t be able to tell that they were made with significantly different manufacturing processes. The titanium Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3 are not only made from 100 percent recycled titanium powder, but also 3D-printed, a process that’s pretty impressive on Apple’s scale. 3D printing reduces waste, in this case halving the use of raw materials for watch cases, but brings new challenges like balancing speed and accuracy.
Apple has released more details about its process, which involves blasting away titanium dust with a laser. More than 900 layers of material, each 60 microns thick, go into a single watch case (for reference, one micron is equal to 0.001 millimeter). The titanium powder used for the cases has to be cured itself to reduce the oxygen content so that it does not explode when exposed to high heat.
Instead of using inferior manufacturing, printing watch cases has allowed Apple to save an estimated 400 metric tons of raw titanium this year. Apple also applied the same 3D printing process to the iPhone Air’s USB-C port. Although they aren’t 3D printing the entire iPhone chassis yet, it looks like it’s not out of the question. As Sarah Chandler, Apple’s vice president of environmental and supply chain innovation, noted in the press release, “We’re never doing something just for the sake of doing it once – we’re doing it so that it becomes the way the entire system works.”