Apple delivers 160,000 medical face shields to Los Angeles

The Port of Los Angeles announced on Friday that it received 160,000 of Apple's in-house designed face shields through the company's donation program.

As part of its broader endeavor to help organizations fighting COVID-19, Apple in April said it was launching a "company-wide effort" to design and produce face shields for medical personnel and on the front lines of the coronavirus response.

Now, 160,000 of those face shields have been delivered to Logistics Victory Los Angeles, a city effort that links suppliers of personal protective equipment with organizations that need them.

"Los Angeles thanks Apple for this generous donation of face shields that are critical to frontline health care workers battling the COVID-19 pandemic," said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles and, since March, LA's chief logistics officer.

Apple first began distributing its face shields to hospitals in the Santa Clara Valley in early April, with plans to ship at least a million of the masks by the end of the month's second week.

"These pack flat. 100 per box," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a Twitter video on April 5. "Each shield is assembled in less than two minutes and is fully adjustable. We're sourcing materials and manufacturing in the U.S. and China."

Apple is dedicated to supporting the worldwide response to COVID-19. We've now sourced over 20M masks through our supply chain. Our design, engineering, operations and packaging teams are also working with suppliers to design, produce and ship face shields for medical workers. pic.twitter.com/3xRqNgMThX
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) April 5, 2020

The Apple Face Shield has a dedicated support page for healthcare employees with instructions on assembly, use and cleaning.

9 Comments

JWSC 7 Years · 1203 comments

About 4 years ago

Was hoping to see some cool industrial design action.

napoleon_phoneapart 17 Years · 550 comments

JWSC said:

Was hoping to see some cool industrial design action.

Function over form. :)

apple ][ 13 Years · 9225 comments

Apple should sell these on their site. I'd order one, especially if they had a cool Apple logo on them!

If everybody has to wear masks then obviously wearing one of these in addition to the mask would be far more effective.

If I'm already wearing a mask when walking outside, then I might as well wear one of these too on my head. I don't want any virus getting into my eyes or any other place. Who cares what it looks like. Everybody already looks ridiculous with all of their masks and face coverings.

I also have to laugh at all of the people I see wearing scarves or bandanas outside, I don't think that they're effective at all.

Xed 4 Years · 2896 comments

apple ][ said:

I also have to laugh at all of the people I see wearing scarves or bandanas outside, I don't think that they're effective at all.

Really? You're laughing at people that are unable to find N95 and better masks? You're laughing at people that are unable to get masks because we have a shortage due an incompetent government that repeatedly ignored the CDC? You're laughing at people who are less fortunate than you? Really?!

Yes, they are effective. Not as effective as N95 masks, but considerably better than nothing at all, but you go ahead and laugh at people trying to make the best of a bad situation.

napoleon_phoneapart said:

JWSC said:

Was hoping to see some cool industrial design action.

Function over form. :)

An industrial designer would say that’s a false choice, as form follows function. I’m thinking you substituted the word ‘form’ for ‘ornamentation’ and Apple is minimalist in the ornamentation department.

Don’t get me wrong. It appears to be a perfectly good face shield. But it being Apple, I couldn’t help but hope for more. It’s Apple’s fault for setting such high expectations with its products. (Yes, I’m shamelessly deflecting the blame elsewhere. 😉)

I’m guessing that the state of the face shield design is driven by the need for speed rather than having the designers ponder various functions or attributes of the design while looking at 40 prototypes and field testing hundreds of units.

Good design is truly hard. And with the immediacy of the need, Apple wasn’t going to spend months on it. But Apple, a year from now I want the gold standard face shield. No excuses. 😁