HP goes for bling with new super-thin, copper-accented Spectre notebook

While taking up minimal space, it promises to deliver on battery life and power.

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Judging by the comments and responses to comments, Ars viewers don't appreciate or know much about materials...

Still giggling over "CNC aluminum" myself.

Referring to CNC machining as just "CNC" is pretty common. It may be somewhat colloquial and new to you, but it's not unheard of.

Or to be honest you could just call it aluminum and skip the absurd, meaningless prefix.

Do you think that machining is the only way to process aluminum? I have suppliers that stamp it, die cast it, and forge it that would disagree with you. You may assume that all laptops are machined aluminum, but if the author just called it "aluminum" other readers may wonder about the process, so adding 3 letters to the story is a useful bit of info that you can just ignore since you are apparently already an authority on the subject.

Being a fellow who works with CNC's, you mostly hear "machined" over CNC, as no one in their right mind is going to use manual machining for production (If they do, they will bleat about it being artisinal and hand crafted), and straight NC is unlikely to be used in any serious capacity these days (Think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom , rather than a machine tool) of "Let's put an Arduino in everything." CNC doesn't tell you a whole lot about the process honestly, as it could be waterjet, lasercut, plasma cut, or in the case of the trash can, turned.

Now, here's the rub of it. CNC machined parts are superior to other machining processes, as CNC's are backlash compensated, and thus can use climb milling, while most conventional machine tools cannot. They are also more consistent. I personally would prefer to see the parts and processes referred to by the most relevant descriptors (In the case of apple that would be the machining process (Climb milled almost certainly), the alloy, (7000 series in the new iPhones, meaning a Zinc alloying agent, giving it very nice strength), and the finishing (Anodized, likely class 2 Type II, rather than the Type III Class 2 that I would prefer), however, most of that sounds like useless technobabble to people.

Right. CNC machining is ubiquitous. Nobody who knows what the fuck they are talking about says anything is "CNC aluminum" if they're trying to give somebody a relevant description of a material.

They might instead refer to the alloy, the temper, or a million other relevant details such as performance specifics.

I'm guessing the author received a pamphlet or some such with the laptop that included as many buzzwords as possible, and she just mindlessly repeated them in the article.

That being said I think your proposition that CNC machining yields "the highest quality" is a bit misleading. The final finish step for high precision parts is grinding, and it's obscenely expensive to setup a production grind operation. In any shop/factory where custom parts are produced, the grinding step is usually done by a manually operated swiss grinding machine. The only exception being of course if you need to make the exact same high precision part over and over and over again, in which case yes, it can be automated and computer controlled.

But even then, a CNC grind operation doesn't yield higher quality than a manual one, it just does it faster and cheaper.