Apple’s new titanium Watches are 3D-printed, and it’s a big deal

For the first time ever, the entire production of Apple’s new Watch Ultra 3 and Watch Series 11 titanium cases has shifted to a 3D-printed process. 
Thanks to the new approach, the company can use half the raw materials in comparison to traditional CNC machining, which for titanium, a particularly hard metal, was also an energy intensive process. Apple says that, thanks to the new methods, it already saved more than 400 metric tons of titanium in 2025 alone. 

At the same time, 3D-printing removed some of the design constraints of tradition subtractive milling, showing that there is a sweet spot to be found where innovation in design and manufacturing can meet sustainability, with benefits both for the final quality of the product and the environment.

“We are relentlessly in pursuit of this goal we call Apple 2030, our goal to be carbon neutral across our entire footprint by the end of this decade,” says Sarah Chandler, Apple’s VP of Environment and Supply Chain Innovation, in an interview with Domus. “At this point in our journey we are solving some of the hardest problems, which means we need to take some very big swings.”  To her, this year’s Apple Watch cases qualify as one of these radical changes toward the company’s sustainability goals. 
“For the first time the entire production of both Apple Watch Ultra 3 cases and titanium Apple Watch Series 11 cases are made using an innovative 3D-printing process that uses half of the raw material compared to previous generations. It also uses less energy in manufacturing and it allows us to use one hundred percent recycled titanium in the enclosure at scale.”

Sarah Chandler, Apple’s VP of Environment and Supply Chain Innovation

3D-printing titanium is not a novel concept, and the technique Apple employs, generally referenced as Laser Powder Bed Fusion, is not new. Until now, though, this method was limited to high-margin, low-volume applications, such as printing custom-made aerospace parts. Scaling titanium 3D-printing to apply it to millions of units is a remarkable feat, one that Apple had to start approaching from a completely novel perspective, especially considering one of the main goals was to employ only recycled metal.

The first challenge the company had to solve was therefore finding recycled titanium powder that could be suitable for laser powder based additive manufacturing. Apple had to qualify the powder, test its oxygen content, refine its behavior under heat, and verify that it could meet the strict mechanical requirements of a watch housing, which must be waterproof and functional in extreme conditions such as mountaineering or diving (in the case of the Ultra 3). “We were not going to accept a compromise here in terms of recycled content, nor could we accept it in terms of durability of the final product” Chandler says. “Our metallurgists and sourcing experts in our hardware and operations teams really did an incredible amount of work to source the titanium powder that was needed for 3D-printing and that was not yet supplied in recycled form.”

Unlike CNC mills, which remove large chunks of material from a starting billet, 3D-printing adds materials in subsequent layers. The hardware team, led by Apple’s VP of Hardware Engineering Kate Bergeron, went to work on replacing their previous experience of machining titanium with the new additive approach.  “For previous Apple Watch Ultra we started out with a process called forging. We take solid chunks of metal, manipulate them, and then remove material with CNC machining and finishing, starting with a blank and remove more than half of the material to get the final shape,” Bergeron explains. “For 3D-printing, we lay down the special titanium powder in an inert bed and come over it with a laser and fuse every single layer of that titanium into the shape of our watch. This allows us to do things that we cannot do by machining. We can angle that laser head and create undercut features or things that just cannot be reached by a CNC tooling pass.”

After the parts come out of the printer, the team runs them through a final stage that uses heat and pressure to bring the titanium to its polished state. The process delivers the mirror-like finish the industrial designers wanted without altering the geometry created during printing, a technical achievement Bergeron’s team took a long time to perfect.

Sarah Chandler, Apple’s VP of Environment and Supply Chain Innovation

One of the biggest differences for the team happens long before production, at the moment designers sit at a CAD station. 
“When you are going about it from a subtractive process there is a bunch of work you need to do to conceptualize the shape of the machine cutters and all the corners and crevices, and how tool paths intersect”, says Bergeron. 
With the new method, that constraint falls away. Fine internal features in the Watch housing, antenna window interfaces, and hidden geometries inside the case all benefit from the new method. CNC-machining would have struggled to achieve them as cleanly or efficiently as 3D-printing.

The environmental gains that make this new process a key step in Apple’s sustainability commitments came mostly from the material and energy savings that derive directly from the additive approach. “The biggest win is the material efficiency, using fifty percent less metal. When you use less of something, you are saving at every step of the supply chain, from shipping to the final stages,” says Chandler. “We save electricity in the CNC process because we are CNCing so much less, and because we are working with very strong metals that CNC process is quite energy intensive. And while Apple already uses 100% renewable energy, the most environmentally friendly electricity is still the electricity you do not use.”

For Chandler, this kind of project reflects a virtuous circle that teams at Apple are incentivized to follow in pursuit of the company’s 2030 objectives.  “If we partner deeply with our design teams, with hardware teams, with our operations teams, then we are essentially designing a new supply chain that is much more sustainable from the beginning”. Apple has already begun applying the 3D-printing method elsewhere, although admittedly its benefits and scalability only apply within a certain size limit of the manufactured part. While we probably won’t see a 3D-printed iPhone chassis anytime soon, smaller parts in other Apple products are perfect candidates for LPBF printing. “We have applied the same technology in the iPhone Air around the USB C connector on the inside of the product. We already are starting to look at additional applications in places where titanium makes sense.”

Innovations that can move a company forward technologically but in an environmentally friendly way often sit at the intersection of design, hardware engineering, and sustainability planning. Apple has followed this pattern before, using design requirements to drive changes in materials sourcing, and informing design from the perspective of its long-term sustainability goals. It is also a reminder for tech companies that sustainability gains come in practice from design teams following clear goals, and engineering teams finding workable methods to support them.

“Our hope is that we can lead the way in how products are made and how they can be used in the future”, concludes Chandler. “We want to make the best products in the world and the best products for the world.”

All images: Courtesy Apple