Posted on 09/05/2020 7:22:34 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Take a look at the back of the box from which you unpacked your iPhone and you'll see this: "Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China."
Reading this tagline might trigger a vision in your mind of Jonathan Ive, Apple's legendary chief design officer, dropping the drawings and technical specs for the next-generation iPhone into a (highly secure) shared folder that its low-cost suppliers in China can access as they manufacture and assemble the product by the millions.
But as Apple CEO Tim Cook recently pointed out, this picture wouldn't tell the entire story of how an iPhone actually gets made today, or why Apple prefers to make them in China. At the Fortune Global Forum in Guangzhou in early December (my firm, McKinsey & Company, was the Knowledge Partner), I listened to Cook as he explained why Apple continues to favor China as its central base for manufacturing iPhones:
The number one reason why we like to be in China is the people. China has extraordinary skills. And the part that's the most unknown is there's almost two million application developers in China that write apps for the iOS App Store. These are some of the most innovative mobile apps in the world, and the entrepreneurs that run them are some of the most inspiring and entrepreneurial in the world. Those are sold not only here but exported around the world.
Highly skilled software developers developing apps for the App Store are one reason Apple likes to be in China. But the depth of highly skilled labor in the manufacturing space is why Apple makes its iPhones there:
China has moved into very advanced manufacturing, so you find in China the intersection of craftsman kind of skill, and sophisticated robotics and the computer science world. That intersection, which is very rare to find anywhere, that kind of skill, is very important to our business because of the precision and quality level that we like. The thing that most people focus on if they're a foreigner coming to China is the size of the market, and obviously it's the biggest market in the world in so many areas. But for us, the number one attraction is the quality of the people.
Citing an example of the type of a highly skilled supplier Apple works closely with, Cook talked at length about recently visiting one company that it has collaborated with for several years:
I visited ICT--they manufacture, among other things, the AirPods for us. When you think about AirPods as a user, you might think it couldn't be that hard because it's really small. The AirPods have several hundred components in them, and the level of precision embedded into the audio quality--without getting into really nerdy engineering--it's really hard. And it requires a level of skill that's extremely high.
And the idea that Apple simply hands over the design to a company like ICT, which just manufacturers according to spec, is simply untrue, says Cook:
It's not designed and sent over--that sounds like there's no interaction. The truth is, the process engineering and process development associated with our products require innovation in and of itself. Not only the product but the way that it's made, because we want to make things in the scale of hundreds of millions, and we want the quality level of zero defects. That's always what we strive for, and the way that you get there, particularly when you're pushing the envelope in the type of materials that you have, and the precision that your specifications are forcing, requires a kind of hand-in-glove partnership. You don't do it by throwing it over the chasm. It would never work. I can't imagine how that would be.
Addressing the designed-in-California, made-in-low-cost-China impression that many people have--an impression reinforced by the tagline that is printed on every box containing a new iPhone--Cook had this to say:
There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.
And China has an abundance of skilled labor unseen elsewhere, says Cook:
The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.
Cook credits China's vast supply of highly skilled vocational talent:
The vocational expertise is very very deep here, and I give the education system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even when others were de-emphasizing vocational. Now I think many countries in the world have woke up and said this is a key thing and we've got to correct that. China called that right from the beginning.
This article also appeared on LinkedIn.
Watch the entire interview with Tim Cook at the Fortune Global Forum:
Why hasn’t one of Swordmaker’s fanboy minions pinged him here this morning? I am sure that he will want to contribute regarding the comments of Saint Tim of Palo Alto.
I've heard the same slew of excuses for H1-Bs.
Oops, sorry, the guardian of the Golden Delicious has already arrived.
“Vocational skills” can be developed in schools that do what?
Vocational skills can be developed in schools that provide the means and the opportunity to learn them, and learning them is primarily hands on learning; finding out how the properties of material determine how you can and can’t work with it and what you can and can’t do with it; finding out/figuring out which tool, and which approach will give the best result you are trying to achieve, from the smallest step to the largest.
“Vocational skills” are about giving the brain the tests from which it can learn how “to do” things. it does not require philosophy or “social studies” or many other things demanded of a school curriculum.
“Vocational skills” are also always being acquired informally, individually, be folks willing to put themselves to the test to try to do something. My brothers and I became mechanics, beginning with bicycles because we were too poor to have new stuff most of the time, and later on we were cheaper than dad sending his cars to a professional mechanic. Learning about vocational skills is learning that your mind can “figure things out” (how things work) if you make the demands on it to do that.
But yes, it would help if more of U.S. schools offered as much in vocational skill development as they do in “social studies”., and yes it could include learning the basics of “coding” beginning very early (basically not a lot different than learning a spoken language, as coding is just learning to tell a computer how to do something you want it to do using a language, writing instructions, the computer will understand).
China is not rich enough yet to produce a full generation or two of lazy asses that don’t need to figure things out for themselves. Maybe with a billion plus people there will always be a large residual block of people who have always had to learn to figure things out, to develop “skills” because they need to.
“Yeah, Americans can’t program despite inventing most of the languages used today.”
The bottom line is that Chinese will do that work for less money, they work harder, are happy to have that job, are more dedicated to the company and the job and the companies are not constantly having to walk on eggshells with all the identity politics crap that pervades American workplaces.
Those are pretty good incentives for any CEOs.
If you want an eye opener of the contrast between the attitudes of Chinese vs American workers and a preview of where things are headed, take a look at this documentary...
https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/american-factory
I chucked my iphone several years ago, though it’s all made in China crap anyway. Jobs’ widow is the new owner of Atlantic Mag; which is running the hit pieces on President Trump; so now there’s plenty more reasons to NOT enrich that empire.
I know who the tool is here...
1 rod-from-god on the Three Gorges Dam and all those jobs come back to the US. :-)
Maybe if American students were learning technical skills instead of taking "gender studies", and our industry employees were attending technical training seminars instead of "sensitivity awareness" seminars, we might have a chance at catching up to the Chinese.
As it is, we're doomed to "also ran" status, unless and until we turn this damn thing around, and we better do it soon.
Chinese manufacturing is problematic for Americans on several levels.
First is the concerns of forced, coerced, or low wage labor. Leftists continually use this as a straw man argument for US based labor, but where it’s a lie here, in China, it’s reality. These same social warriors for “fair wages” and “jobs for all” will rush down to the store to buy devices built on the backs of what amounts to true modern-day slavery.
The second concern is that we are putting our communications device manufacturing at virtually all levels in the hands of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security - the intelligence and surveillance arm of the Chinese Communist Government. Don’t think for a moment that your iPhone, smart watch, routers, security cameras, home pods or a myriad of other communications devices manufactured wholly or in part in China don’t have intelligence built in to monitor your movements and communications. Tic Tok aside, we are being watched more closely right now by the Chinese than our own NSA. Chips are designed with very imperceptible communications circuits that phone home like digital ETs.
Many of these devices are used and worn in some of our most sensitive military, research, and academic areas.
This is frightening on many levels, and we now have a president who recognizes it — not accept or surrender to it readily like our own Deep State apparatchik.
The are allowed to freely pollute in China.
Capitalism 101 : Something is worth what somebody is willing to pay for it.
China has over a billion people, of course odds are they have plenty of smart people over there.
And it’s not exactly as if our education system here is cranking out geniuses.
No Unions.
“The bottom line is that Chinese will do that work for less money, they work harder, are happy to have that job, are more dedicated to the company and the job and the companies are not constantly having to walk on eggshells with all the identity politics crap that pervades American workplaces.”
There was a program that showed what amounted to factories that turned out decent quantities of art—copies of Van Gough, etc. Museum quality, no, but much better than Elvis on black velvet for about the same price.
India could possibly pull off the same trick and it’s perhaps on the same track. They do have an advantage of many speaking English, but they don’t have the history and tradition that the old Chinese Civil Service System created to value education as a way for anyone to achieve power and status.
A lot of the Korean and Japanese phones are also made in China.
For an eye opener and an education I would highly recommend you take a trip to China. You will be surprised at how wrong your preconceived notions are.
China is a formidable adversary and it’s good to have a realistic assessment of who your potential foe is. And there’s nothing better than seeing it with your own eyes. The advances they’ve made over the past 30 years are nothing short of phenomenal.
Sadly most conservatives still have a notion of Chinese as backward, starving slave laborers run by communists with no private enterprise. The reality is very different. They probably have more billionaires than we do, their highways are crowded with Mercedes and Porsches, and they have a culture that is much more meritocracy based than our “affirmative action” “social justice” one.
They’ll kick our asses if we keep going in the direction we’re on.
Xi Jinping must be licking his chops when he reads articles like this...
Actually, many of the LG phones ARE made there. So are over 600 of the Consumer Electronic manufacturers in the world. You cannot escape it. Apple is one of the only ones that takes pro-active steps to assure the workers on it’s assembly lines get better pay and working conditions than on others. Apple has its own employees monitoring working conditions and has actually pulled multi-billion contracts from sub-contractors who failed to meet Apple’s stringent requirements for worker’s rights, and awarded that contract to another contractor who would meet those requirements.
Here is a list of the top 72 of those over 600 CE companies that contract with FoxConn, a Taiwanese contractor, to assemble their products in China. (Note, I’ve bolded your LG phone):
- Acer Inc. (Taiwan)
- Alcatel (France)
- Amazon (United States)
- Amoi (China)
- Apple Inc. (United States)
- Archos (France)
- ASRock (Taiwan)
- Asus (Taiwan)
- BBK (China)
- Barnes & Noble (United States)
- BenQ (South Korea)
- Blackberry (Canada)
- Brother (Italy)
- Cisco (United States)
- Coolpad (China)
- Dell Inc.(United States)
- EVGA Corporation (United States)
- Fujitsu (Japan)
- GE Thomson (France)
- General Electric (United States)
- Google (United States)
- Griffin Technologies (United States)
- Gründig Mobile (Germany)
- Haier (China)
- Hewlett-Packard (United States)
- HiSense (China)
- Honor (China)
- HTC (Taiwan)
- Huawei (China)
- Intel (United States)
- IBM (United States)
- Kyocera Communications (Japan)
- Komko (China)
- LeEcco (China)
- Lenovo (China)
- Lenovo/Motorola Mobility (China)
- LG Lucky GoldStar (South Korea)
- Meizu (China)
- Microsoft (United States)
- Microsoft MSI (Taiwan)
- Motorola Communications (United States)
- NCR (United States)
- NEC Casio Communication (Japan)
- Netgear (United States)
- Nintendo (Japan)
- Nokia Oyj (Finland)
- Olivetti (Italy)
- OnePlus (China)
- Oppo (China)
- PackardBell (Netherlands)
- PackardBell (China)
- Panasonic (Japan)
- Philips (Netherlands)
- Pioneer Electronics (Japan)
- Samsung (South Korea)
- Sanyo (Japan)
- Sharp (Japan)
- Siemens (Germany)
- Smartisan (China)
- Sony (Japan)
- TCL Communication Technology (China)
- Technology Happy Life (China)
- Telefunken (Germany)
- Thomson (France)
- Toshiba (Japan)
- Vivo (China)
- VSun (China)
- Vizio (United States)
- Vodophone (UK)
- Wasam (China)
- Xiaomi (China)
- Zoostorm (New Zealand)
- ZTE (China)
- ZUK (China)
However, there really are no “slaves” working in the electronic manufacturing in China. All of the assemblers and manufacturing employees are hourly workers earning what, in the Chinese economy, is the equivalent of what is a middle income wage in the USA. They can afford their own homes, cars, transportation, food, etc. Many do elect to live in factory available housing, but many others elect to rent or buy housing in the nearby cities. When openings become available on the Apple assembly lines, workers queue up by the thousands for a few hundred openings. The day of dormitory housing is long past.
The videos you may have seen come out of an organization called “China Labor Watch” which is headquartered in New York City. CLW has been caught faking videos and interviews where the translated Chinese to English was completely WRONG, with the worker NOT saying what the English translation claimed to represent they were saying. Actual Chinese or Mandarin speakers could hear what they were saying it it did not comport at all with the China Labor Watch translation. Videos purporting to be working conditions at an Apple assembly line were taken at some other plant, not at all associated with Apple or Foxconn. In other words, they exist to raise money, very little of which resounds to benefit the workers of China, but instead pays lobbyists and PR flacks.
The fact is that workers on Apple assembly lines are paid 50% to 75% MORE than workers on your LG assembly lines, and their working conditions are monitored to assure they are not mistreated by management. Apple’s contract with the assembler requires that. You will NOT find that in the case with the LG assembly line workers, even though they may work at the same plant assembling LG phones.
Enjoy your two soup cans and a string.
Yep, big corporations sure do like their “partnership” with the CCP. They would like the same “partnership” with the uniparty here.
Boycott Apple until they get their collective mind right.
iPhones could easily be made in the US.
RE: I know who the tool is here...
Let’s talk about tooling and assembly if you know how to discuss it. Here’s the question, do you agree with Tim Cook’s statement regarding this:
“The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”
DO YOU DISAGREE WITH THIS STATEMENT? IF SO, TELL US WHY.
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