I love how they wrote an entire article fawning about how awesome this process is before showing that it doesn't actually work at resisting fingerprints. Apple's reality distortion field at work.
If you compare Apple's effort to PC laptops you see what they are on about.
It does leave fingerprints which are noticeably worse than Space Grey but it's easily 10x better than the dozen other black laptops I tried at the store today. Clearly there's a lot of engineering just to achieve that level of improvement.
It seems to have less of a print than the current space grey. An improvement over the status quo lines up with Apple’s claim of “more resistance” to fingerprints.
I asked ChatGPT4 for the best commercial alternatives to vanta black:
1) Black 3.0
2) Musou Black
3) Singularity Black
Found a reddit post of someone saying they painted their laptop with black 3.0 but the paint rubs off and its not something they'd want to handle on a daily basis.
Best I could find is a video of someone painting a laptop case with musou black
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwvSX12MITk which while looks awesome it also looks like it would rub off on everything you own so probably not realistic either.
The article says they aren’t sure about the details of the etching process, so I had a look at the patent which says briefly, in a paragraph towards the bottom of page 16 / column 8, that they use a bath of hot phosphoric acid. Phosphoric acid is one of the main flavours in cola drinks.
Science! Apple scienced it again! I do think this is a repeat of a decade ago with the original black core 2 duo, a processor change instigated new colors. Then again a decade ago from the core 2 duo black and gray were apple standard colors.
Readit News
It does leave fingerprints which are noticeably worse than Space Grey but it's easily 10x better than the dozen other black laptops I tried at the store today. Clearly there's a lot of engineering just to achieve that level of improvement.
> A-for-effort and partial credit for the outcome
1) Black 3.0 2) Musou Black 3) Singularity Black
Found a reddit post of someone saying they painted their laptop with black 3.0 but the paint rubs off and its not something they'd want to handle on a daily basis.
Best I could find is a video of someone painting a laptop case with musou black https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwvSX12MITk which while looks awesome it also looks like it would rub off on everything you own so probably not realistic either.
Did more research and found this reddit post of someone who anodized their macs: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/wswe1r/my_anodized_mac...
Now I'm wondering how dark a matte look you can get using a similar approach.
Everything else is a fad.