Re: Design goals 101...

[pedantry begins]

Aluminium, as any fule kno, is very soft in its pure state. Suitably heat treated and alloyed, it is quite hard. Unfortunately the cycle of manufacturing, machining while cold, and then heat treating, is rather expensive.

You get good results by bending sheet aluminium, which is why most cases which use it (like the Asus on which I'm typing this) use sheet metal. But then you cannot claim the thing is made out of a single piece of metal.

You can make the surface of aluminium harder with heavy anodising but then you cannot get the sharp edges.

This is why other, more sensible manufacturers make their mobile devices out of a magnesium alloy chassis with a suitable polymer injection moulded around it. Strong, light, withstands deformation, just not quite as pretty.

Sympathy for Apple? Nonexistent. Sympathy for Jonathan Ives? Zilch. British industry used to be overloaded with products which were supposed to show off engineering cleverness rather than be well designed from a functional point of view, like the awful Austin Rover integrated gearboxes, the dreadful Enfield drive that was the bane of so many glass fibre boats, Concorde, Evening Star (the locomotive), any number of motorcycle designs, and the Doxford marine engine. On the other hand you had a company which made stuff which worked practically forever by simply concentrating on the best possible engineering. Of all of these, only the last (Rolls-Royce) is still around. I wonder why?