When he ran NeXT Computer, Steve Jobs decided that his machines were too precious to be handled by slow, accident-prone, whiny humans. Only the machines really knew how to handle the machines.To assemble one of his sleek $9,995 NeXT workstations, Jobs employed a robot workforce at his Fremont, CA factory that outnumbered his humans 13 to five, and could turn out a completed computer in under 20 minutes.For Jobs, who had recently left Apple, this wasn’t about money: the cost of labor is only a tiny fraction of the cost of manufacturing computers at rapid speed. It was about quality. For a brief time, the 40-person team of engineers that Jobs dedicated to figuring out the manufacturing problem had more Ph.D.s than the group designing the machine itself.Even for the naive 90s, the process, described in this NeXT promotional video, is an overly romanticized portrait of mechanization and efficiency optimization. It’s a vision of manufacturing that, even a decade and a half later, seems both tangible and significantly far away now. Like every computer company, Apple relies on tens of thousands of workers in China whose emotional lives, in some cases, are very human. In the U.S., those workers aren’t the only threat to American jobs: in some sectors, the machines have arrived in full force, and if you believe what’s suggested in a new book by a couple of MIT economists, they’re stealing jobs too.Of course, as NeXT told Fortune in 1990, the emphasis on robots had measurable benefits: the computer’s circuit boards had a solder joint defect rate of only 15 to 17 parts per million, which is less than one-tenth the typical rate for the industry. And once ordered, they could be manufactured and sent out the door in 24 hours, an industry first.The system was even designed for constant optimization, with humans tasked with doing statistical analysis of defect rates to find potential snags. The vision was huge. Jobs imagined the plant could produce up to $1 billion worth of the computers a year with no more than 100 workers.But manufacturing didn’t work out for NeXT. After two years of producing about 60 machines a day, or approximately $100 million of hardware in a year, the factory in California closed. But in 1990, copying and pasting the ease of computer use to the work of a factory using robots was a piece of the Jobsian vision of elegance-meets-absolute-perfection. ’’I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer," he said. He did not say anything like that about his iPhone factories.
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