The image of "shipping phones off to be built by other people in China" could not be farther from the truth. Not only does Apple plan every build in extreme de

The image of "shipping phones off to be built by other people in China" could not be farther from the truth. Not only does Apple plan every build in extreme detail (stations, tests, flow, etc), they send an army of PMs, EPMs, engineers, etc. to oversee each build in person. They have to. Apple's manufacturing and operations expertise is enormous. It's a competitive advantage on the same scale as, say, Google's data center expertise.