There are different ways of doing outsourcing. Companies like IBM (and Dell, at one point) outsourced more and more of their value chain, until eventually all t

There are different ways of doing outsourcing. Companies like IBM (and Dell, at one point) outsourced more and more of their value chain, until eventually all they contributed to their products was their logo. I believe Apple is trying to go down a different path, by staying involved in the minutiae of manufacturing, materials science, etc, basically everything but actually doing the manufacturing.