- How long does it take to design and deploy a new design?
- When did Apple start the process?
There are three main phases to designing a new computer and getting it ready for sale.
- Manufacturing Setup
The Design phase is the big variable between various projects. This is usually setup as a sort of competition where you have multiple teams concurrently working on their own vision of what the product should do or look like. At Gateway, these teams would ask for input from someone in manufacturing finance on the labor costs involved with their particular design. Any design presentation to executive management would include data on the cost to manufacture and expected gross margins.
The paper design phase is the Wild West where anything goes. I remember seeing proposals for computers that were built into desk lamps or disguised as a piece of art. The various paper designs are presented to executive management and only a few will be chosen to proceed on to the prototype phase. These big reviews seem to average about once per quarter.
The prototype phase is where purchasing is brought into the loop to procure parts that don’t exist. That means that every single component needs to have a detailed schematic drawn up that an outside vendor can use to produce parts. After these schematics are done, they get sent out and the vendors can get their dies and molds created. About two months to actually get parts seems to be about average for items that don’t exist anywhere in the world.
However, the guys in Apple’s design lab have a distinct advantage when it comes to getting parts that they need. From what I’ve seen in the press, they actually have in-house resources to create their parts without going to outside vendors. This would speed up that whole procurement process. However, it could also slow them down if the designers are getting really involved with manufacturing their own parts. They could become like cooks who have to go out and butcher their own meat as opposed to just getting it delivered to the restaurant. The guys at Gateway sent out the specs and they shifted their focus to other projects while they waited for their parts to arrive.
Once the prototypes were ready they’d go to another set of engineers for testing. These guys would stress test the hardware and look for software conflicts. This would take at least a couple of weeks.
Once all the prototypes were finished there would be another big review. A round of cuts would be made and a single design would be crowned the new model. The baton gets handed over to the purchasing and manufacturing groups to get the new model manufactured.
While the purchasing group works with vendors to get shipments of components scheduled the manufacturing group is designing their new manufacturing cell and hiring new people to staff it. How long this takes really depends on how large the volume is. The bigger the volume the longer it takes.
If everything is operating smoothly, I’d expect that a new design could proceed from concept to ready for sale within 9-12 months. This is my prior experience which has nothing to do with the way Apple does things.