A few points in response: 1. The knowledge is created by people working for the company. Both the people and the company are part of a broader society, and al

A few points in response: 1. The knowledge is created by people working for the company. Both the people and the company are part of a broader society, and all (people, company, society) have an interest in keeping the ability to manufacture alive. 2. Reinventing everything from scratch while risking submarine patents is wasteful, especially for processes that are obsolete from the view of the original company. 3. The same secrets that go into making an iPhone go into making everything else. I'm not interested in exact dimensions and features being public before release, but I am interested in the general know-how of precision design and assembly being preserved in a way that can outlive the original company. 4. We have lost significant manufacturing capability before. Nobody knows how to recreate the Saturn V rocket. SpaceX, NASA, and others have to recreate that knowledge at high cost. Society at large has a greater interest in preventing this kind of technological regress than in preserving the secrets of one company indefinitely.