Is Apple's "Brick" a Manufacturing Process?

When rumors first started about "The Brick," it was thought it was a product. Theories rose that it was:

• A Macbook refresh
• An Apple Netwook
• A Mac tablet
• A wireless USB hub
• Anything you could shake a stick at

But according to 9to5Mac, it's not a product at all. It's a manufacturing process.

It is the beginning of the new Apple manufacturing process to make MacBooks. It is totally revolutionary, a game changer. One of the biggest Apple innovations in a decade.

The MacBook manufacturing process up to this point has been outsourced to Chinese or Taiwanese manufacturers like Foxconn. Now Apple is in charge. The company has spent the last few years building an entirely new manufacturing process that uses lasers and jets of water to carve the MacBooks out of a brick of aluminum.

While it sounds outlandish, 9to5Mac's source is pretty sure about this. It also falls under the category of familiar in terms of Steve Jobs: he built what Fortune called the "Ultimate Factory" for his ill-fated NeXT venture in 1990.

As described then, the factory had robots, lasers, tolerances within one 10,000th of an inch, defect rates of less that 17 parts per million, and the speed to turn out 60 $10,000 NeXT machines a day.

Of course, one point: it's dang hard to hide a factory, so where the heck is this new factory with the new process?

All of this will supposedly be revealed on October 14th, when Apple announces what is exptected to be newly redesigned MacBooks. Factory or not, manufacturing process or not, I await with bated breath.