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Apple's supply chain is more than 1,000 companies. Do you really think Apple has the expertise and personnel to replicate what 1,000 companies have spent decade

Apple's supply chain is more than 1,000 companies. Do you really think Apple has the expertise and personnel to replicate what 1,000 companies have spent decades mastering? Not likely. No company on earth has ever been able to make a smartphone entirely themselves, and no company ever will, although i'd like to be proven wrong.

izacus 6y ago
> Apple's supply chain is more than 1,000 companies. Do you really think Apple has the expertise and personnel to replicate what 1,000 companies have spent decades mastering? Not likely. As one of the richest corporations on the planet which always smugly tells everyone how nice they are and how much they respect people? Yes, fuck yes. They're not a mom and pop shop. They're a corporation that finds millions to lobby governments against making your electronics repairable. They can redirect those to paying the manufacturing workers directly.
- danudey 6y ago
  One of the reasons Jobs cited as being an important factor for locating in China is the availability of skilled labor. It would have taken them years to hire enough industrial engineers to handle the scope and scale and volume that the iPhone required in the US, if they could even manage it at all, but only weeks to do so in China. The supply chain is also important. One person who worked in Shenzhen commented that, as a manufacturer, if you suddenly discover you need a certain kind or size or shape or length of screw, you can have a shipment at your door the same day, because the factory that produces a thousand different kinds of screws is just down the road. To move to the US, they'd either have to replicate most of that manufacturing in the US, which would take decades and be extremely expensive, or deal with a week of latency every time they need a new or different part as they get it shipped from China anyway, making most of this process moot. Yes, Apple should do something about this issue, and yes it's horrible to imagine them profiting off this with their "nice guy" image, but keep in mind that if they did this and increased the cost of the iPhone, other companies wouldn't, and it would put Apple at a huge disadvantage. One thing we've seen over the last century of western civilization is that cheaper wins over better. Cheaper toasters that don't last, cheaper fridges that break down after their three-year warranty is up, cheaper laptops that come infected with bloatware and adware. If Apple refused to manufacture in China because of forced labour issues, then they'd lose out on sales to companies who kept benefitting from it, because consumers, as a whole, just don't give a shit. I mean, if anyone cared about what it takes to provide them with cheap products, they'd be enraged that Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world even though the workers that run his company are subsisting on food stamps and burnout quotas. That said, Apple is working on moving production to India, and I'd wager that the more they can do that and expand their operations there, the less and less they'll deal with China for manufacturing, but right now no one who manufactures electronics in large volumes can do so without involving China. In the meantime, they can work on cutting this supplier out of their supply chain; the article is talking about only one of their suppliers, though a long-term supplier, and not actually people working for Apple or manufacturing iPhones directly, so hopefully they can draw a line in the sand and force Lens to either stop using forced labour or lose the contracts. Fingers crossed.
  - guessbest 6y ago
    This doesn't sound like they are using skilled labor. > It suggests that iPhone glass supplier Lens Technology has been using Muslim minority Uighurs, who were given the stark choice of working in the company’s plant or being sent to detention centers which have been likened to concentration camps
  - nubb 6y ago
    And yes we see how well this is working out with the recent uprising at the Indian iphone plant.
  - racl101 6y ago
    > One of the reasons Jobs cited as being an important factor for locating in China is the availability of skilled labor. It would have taken them years to hire enough industrial engineers to handle the scope and scale and volume that the iPhone required in the US, if they could even manage it at all, but only weeks to do so in China. So, potentially, if the phones were made in the US they'd be like Ferraris? Very expensive and only a few made at a time?
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    > One thing we've seen over the last century of western civilization is that cheaper wins over better. Cheaper toasters that don't last, cheaper fridges that break down after their three-year warranty is up, cheaper laptops that come infected with bloatware and adware. If Apple refused to manufacture in China because of forced labour issues, then they'd lose out on sales to companies who kept benefitting from it, because consumers, as a whole, just don't give a shit. Apple customers have made it very clear that as a whole, they are not price conscious. Better beats cheaper, or they’d be all using cheapo Android phones. Apple has very high profit margins compared to their competitors in the same industries. Apple can pay their suppliers more, rather than driving them down to the bone, which of course results in workers being exploited. Or they could be more transparent that the only thing that matters is the size of their profits, instead of cultivating a good guy corporate image, as the hypocrisy stinks.
  - justapassenger 6y ago
    > One of the reasons Jobs cited as being an important factor for locating in China is the availability of skilled labor Highly skilled forced labor? Let's not kid ourselves - it's all about cost cutting. They're trying to diversify and move to another low wage country, India. Not - I'm not saying that China or India lacks skilled labor, or highly paid experts. But that's not why companies like Apple are there. They're there for cheap labor, and close to non-existent labor protections. But China is starting to change, so Apple is looking for new places. > Yes, Apple should do something about this issue, and yes it's horrible to imagine them profiting off this with their "nice guy" image, but keep in mind that if they did this and increased the cost of the iPhone, other companies wouldn't, and it would put Apple at a huge disadvantage. It's like saying that Google and Facebook should continue to disregard privacy, because their huge margins relay on that?
- geodel 6y ago
  > As one of the richest corporations on the planet .. Huh, they are richest because they are not swamped with mass manufacturing and all issues that come with it.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co) makes pretty good money for themselves, too.
  - raffraffraff 6y ago
    As the Daleks put it, "EXTERNALIZE!"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- emteycz 6y ago
  Why should a business be doing the job of a government and multinational governmental organisations such as the UN?
barnacled 6y ago
Interesting that large parts of that supply chain coincidentally operate in parts of the world which have extremely low wages and virtually no worker rights. Having worked at a company that Apple bankrupted in order to bring their work in-house I respectfully disagree that they lack the will or ability to avoid complicity with a genocidal totalitarian state.
AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
Perhaps the OP's point was missed here. Pointing out that no company can make the entire smartphone by themselves is all well and good. The OP was applying that wisdom to the "woke" culture Cook is seeking to solidify within Apple. It's just as unrealistic for Apple to be woke as it is for them to make the whole phone by themselves. They love existing under that banner, though, because it succeeds in tricking many people into believing they can use iPhones and avoid being hypocrites.
- desiarnezjr 6y ago
  The point of any kind of messaging is to broadcast intent and is always at least a little aspirational. That's the first step. I'd honestly be far more wary about companies who doesn't broadcast anything, just to make whatever profit at whatever cost. Any Chinese phone brand right now (correct me if I'm wrong) or companies like Huawei or Lenovo, where, like it or not would have that approach to business possibly baked into their DNA.
CydeWeys 6y ago
> Apple's supply chain is more than 1,000 companies. And whose choice was that? Apple has chosen to do business with all of these companies and they have chosen to consistently do business in China even despite the long history of China's violations of human rights abuses. Of course Apple is responsible for their choices of who to do business with!
tyingq 6y ago
I do think they have the market share and leverage to strong arm those 1000 companies into reasonable labor conditions.
- ada1981 6y ago
  Yes. Plus they can lobby governments for increased standards so their competition doesn't benefit from their higher standards.
xbmcuser 6y ago
Apple annual income is more than the annual budgets of many countries they don't need to make everything themselves but they can have few thousand trained inspectors which monitor all the places where it products are being produced. If they are able to keep new phone designs months into production secret they are also capable of monitoring and finding about worker abuse.
- cghendrix 6y ago
  But think about the abuse of the shareholders! The horror
lumost 6y ago
Most companies can and do prioritize vendors who meet non-monetary criteria. Apple can easily ask vendors to complete external ethics audits, these audits usually request information on each vendors suppliers, suppliers of suppliers, etc. Apple absolutely has control over who they buy from in this regard. Failing their willingness to act the US federal government has the authority to enforce labor law parity with trading partners through trade negotiations, tariffs, and bans.
imglorp 6y ago
> Do you really think Apple has the expertise and personnel to replicate what 1,000 companies have spent decades mastering? Yes absolutely. They do supply chain all day, every day: in order to keep high quality, they need to be in tight control. They're very, very good at outsourced manufacture or they wouldn't be a US$1T company. Foxconn was only the first to reach our awareness but it seems there's many other vendors with dubious HR.

izacus 6y ago

> Apple's supply chain is more than 1,000 companies. Do you really think Apple has the expertise and personnel to replicate what 1,000 companies have spent decades mastering? Not likely. As one of the richest corporations on the planet which always smugly tells everyone how nice they are and how much they respect people? Yes, fuck yes. They're not a mom and pop shop. They're a corporation that finds millions to lobby governments against making your electronics repairable. They can redirect those to paying the manufacturing workers directly.

danudey 6y ago
One of the reasons Jobs cited as being an important factor for locating in China is the availability of skilled labor. It would have taken them years to hire enough industrial engineers to handle the scope and scale and volume that the iPhone required in the US, if they could even manage it at all, but only weeks to do so in China. The supply chain is also important. One person who worked in Shenzhen commented that, as a manufacturer, if you suddenly discover you need a certain kind or size or shape or length of screw, you can have a shipment at your door the same day, because the factory that produces a thousand different kinds of screws is just down the road. To move to the US, they'd either have to replicate most of that manufacturing in the US, which would take decades and be extremely expensive, or deal with a week of latency every time they need a new or different part as they get it shipped from China anyway, making most of this process moot. Yes, Apple should do something about this issue, and yes it's horrible to imagine them profiting off this with their "nice guy" image, but keep in mind that if they did this and increased the cost of the iPhone, other companies wouldn't, and it would put Apple at a huge disadvantage. One thing we've seen over the last century of western civilization is that cheaper wins over better. Cheaper toasters that don't last, cheaper fridges that break down after their three-year warranty is up, cheaper laptops that come infected with bloatware and adware. If Apple refused to manufacture in China because of forced labour issues, then they'd lose out on sales to companies who kept benefitting from it, because consumers, as a whole, just don't give a shit. I mean, if anyone cared about what it takes to provide them with cheap products, they'd be enraged that Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world even though the workers that run his company are subsisting on food stamps and burnout quotas. That said, Apple is working on moving production to India, and I'd wager that the more they can do that and expand their operations there, the less and less they'll deal with China for manufacturing, but right now no one who manufactures electronics in large volumes can do so without involving China. In the meantime, they can work on cutting this supplier out of their supply chain; the article is talking about only one of their suppliers, though a long-term supplier, and not actually people working for Apple or manufacturing iPhones directly, so hopefully they can draw a line in the sand and force Lens to either stop using forced labour or lose the contracts. Fingers crossed.
- guessbest 6y ago
  This doesn't sound like they are using skilled labor. > It suggests that iPhone glass supplier Lens Technology has been using Muslim minority Uighurs, who were given the stark choice of working in the company’s plant or being sent to detention centers which have been likened to concentration camps
- nubb 6y ago
  And yes we see how well this is working out with the recent uprising at the Indian iphone plant.
- racl101 6y ago
  > One of the reasons Jobs cited as being an important factor for locating in China is the availability of skilled labor. It would have taken them years to hire enough industrial engineers to handle the scope and scale and volume that the iPhone required in the US, if they could even manage it at all, but only weeks to do so in China. So, potentially, if the phones were made in the US they'd be like Ferraris? Very expensive and only a few made at a time?
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  > One thing we've seen over the last century of western civilization is that cheaper wins over better. Cheaper toasters that don't last, cheaper fridges that break down after their three-year warranty is up, cheaper laptops that come infected with bloatware and adware. If Apple refused to manufacture in China because of forced labour issues, then they'd lose out on sales to companies who kept benefitting from it, because consumers, as a whole, just don't give a shit. Apple customers have made it very clear that as a whole, they are not price conscious. Better beats cheaper, or they’d be all using cheapo Android phones. Apple has very high profit margins compared to their competitors in the same industries. Apple can pay their suppliers more, rather than driving them down to the bone, which of course results in workers being exploited. Or they could be more transparent that the only thing that matters is the size of their profits, instead of cultivating a good guy corporate image, as the hypocrisy stinks.
- justapassenger 6y ago
  > One of the reasons Jobs cited as being an important factor for locating in China is the availability of skilled labor Highly skilled forced labor? Let's not kid ourselves - it's all about cost cutting. They're trying to diversify and move to another low wage country, India. Not - I'm not saying that China or India lacks skilled labor, or highly paid experts. But that's not why companies like Apple are there. They're there for cheap labor, and close to non-existent labor protections. But China is starting to change, so Apple is looking for new places. > Yes, Apple should do something about this issue, and yes it's horrible to imagine them profiting off this with their "nice guy" image, but keep in mind that if they did this and increased the cost of the iPhone, other companies wouldn't, and it would put Apple at a huge disadvantage. It's like saying that Google and Facebook should continue to disregard privacy, because their huge margins relay on that?
geodel 6y ago
> As one of the richest corporations on the planet .. Huh, they are richest because they are not swamped with mass manufacturing and all issues that come with it.
- jbay808 6y ago
  Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co) makes pretty good money for themselves, too.
- raffraffraff 6y ago
  As the Daleks put it, "EXTERNALIZE!"
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
emteycz 6y ago
Why should a business be doing the job of a government and multinational governmental organisations such as the UN?

barnacled 6y ago

Interesting that large parts of that supply chain coincidentally operate in parts of the world which have extremely low wages and virtually no worker rights. Having worked at a company that Apple bankrupted in order to bring their work in-house I respectfully disagree that they lack the will or ability to avoid complicity with a genocidal totalitarian state.

AndrewUnmuted 6y ago

Perhaps the OP's point was missed here. Pointing out that no company can make the entire smartphone by themselves is all well and good. The OP was applying that wisdom to the "woke" culture Cook is seeking to solidify within Apple. It's just as unrealistic for Apple to be woke as it is for them to make the whole phone by themselves. They love existing under that banner, though, because it succeeds in tricking many people into believing they can use iPhones and avoid being hypocrites.

desiarnezjr 6y ago
The point of any kind of messaging is to broadcast intent and is always at least a little aspirational. That's the first step. I'd honestly be far more wary about companies who doesn't broadcast anything, just to make whatever profit at whatever cost. Any Chinese phone brand right now (correct me if I'm wrong) or companies like Huawei or Lenovo, where, like it or not would have that approach to business possibly baked into their DNA.

CydeWeys 6y ago

> Apple's supply chain is more than 1,000 companies. And whose choice was that? Apple has chosen to do business with all of these companies and they have chosen to consistently do business in China even despite the long history of China's violations of human rights abuses. Of course Apple is responsible for their choices of who to do business with!

tyingq 6y ago

I do think they have the market share and leverage to strong arm those 1000 companies into reasonable labor conditions.

ada1981 6y ago
Yes. Plus they can lobby governments for increased standards so their competition doesn't benefit from their higher standards.

xbmcuser 6y ago

Apple annual income is more than the annual budgets of many countries they don't need to make everything themselves but they can have few thousand trained inspectors which monitor all the places where it products are being produced. If they are able to keep new phone designs months into production secret they are also capable of monitoring and finding about worker abuse.

cghendrix 6y ago
But think about the abuse of the shareholders! The horror

lumost 6y ago

Most companies can and do prioritize vendors who meet non-monetary criteria. Apple can easily ask vendors to complete external ethics audits, these audits usually request information on each vendors suppliers, suppliers of suppliers, etc. Apple absolutely has control over who they buy from in this regard. Failing their willingness to act the US federal government has the authority to enforce labor law parity with trading partners through trade negotiations, tariffs, and bans.

imglorp 6y ago

> Do you really think Apple has the expertise and personnel to replicate what 1,000 companies have spent decades mastering? Yes absolutely. They do supply chain all day, every day: in order to keep high quality, they need to be in tight control. They're very, very good at outsourced manufacture or they wouldn't be a US$1T company. Foxconn was only the first to reach our awareness but it seems there's many other vendors with dubious HR.