There was a long article (maybe Vanity Fair or Esquire?) that pointed out how Apple put up 1B to Foxconn for building an Apple dedicated factory where the facto

There was a long article (maybe Vanity Fair or Esquire?) that pointed out how Apple put up 1B to Foxconn for building an Apple dedicated factory where the factory processes would be dictated fully by Apple. In the lost interview of Steve Jobs, Jobs says this: I’ll give you an example. When we were building our Apple computers in a garage, we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, the accountants had this notion of a standard cost, where you kind of set a standard cost and at the end of the quarter, you would adjust it with a variance. I kept asking: why do we do this? The answer was, “That’s just the way it’s done.” After about six months of digging into this, I realized that the reason they did this is that they didn’t have good enough controls to know how much it’s going to cost. So you guess. And then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you don’t know how much it costs is because your information systems aren’t good enough. But nobody said it that way. So later on, when we designed this automated factory for the Macintosh, we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts and know exactly what something cost. If you know what exactly something costs during manufacturing, now you can optimize it.