FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The Other Reason Your iPhone Isn't Made in the U.S.

This past Saturday the New York Times dropped what amounts to a _tsar bomba_ onto the already-volatile environment currently enveloping the tech industry and the contentious debate about jobs, the American middle class, and globalization. "The piece...

This past Saturday the New York Times dropped what amounts to a tsar bomba onto the already-volatile environment currently enveloping the tech industry and the contentious debate about jobs, the American middle class, and globalization. The piece, by Keith Bradsher and Charles Duhigg, began with a simple question, one that President Obama put to Steve Jobs at that fancy Silicon Valley dinner last year: What’s keeping the iPhone, a hugely popular status symbol of a device, from being manufactured in the U.S. of A.?

Advertisement

Jobs famously told Obama that those manufacturing jobs, since sent overseas, aren’t ever coming back. The reasons are myriad, and don’t solely revolve around Chinese factories paying workers lower wages. The shift is more fundamental and systemic, and as pointed out in an excellent rebuttal by ZDNet, isn’t necessarily entirely negative. Both stories are more than worth a read, as they both offer valuable insight into the behemoth gadget industry and the impulses that drive it.

One detail stuck out. The Times piece shares an anecdote about a last minute change Steve Jobs made to the design of the iPhone’s screen — a switch from a plastic face to Corning’s super-tough Gorilla Glass. When the change came in, the assembly line switched immediately, with new screens arriving at midnight one day and the foreman immediately waking 8,000 workers to get cooking. Within half an hour each of those workers was awake, fed a biscuit and tea, and set to work on a 12-hour shift.

"The speed and flexibility is breathtaking," an executive quoted by the Times said. "There's no American plant that can match that."

This is a major point of the Times story: It’s not solely that Chinese wages are lower than those in the States. Chinese factories also happen to offer a level of on-demand service that could never be found in the U.S. How does that reflect on the end user?

The fact that factories like Foxconn can rouse legions of workers at any hour of day is far from the only reason tech manufacturing has been shipped overseas. But when customers have been promised, and now absolutely expect, a steady stream of gadgets that are just superior enough to make prior iterations obsolete, having an ever-ready workforce is a big selling point, never mind those workers’ shabby mental state.

With people getting ready to line up outside Apple stores with hundreds of dollars in their pockets and a healthy disdain for their six-month old phone, having a supply chain that’s ready to move at any hour is an asset. And that’s a big reason why Jobs said that manufacturing jobs won’t be returning to America: Consumers demand the cheapest and the fastest, without delay, and the flexibility in the manufacturing process required to sustain that is better found in countries where workers are much cheaper, middling engineers are in greater supply, and labor rights are ethereal.

But, hey, at least the screen is tougher.