Those from Businessweek made one reportaj quite interesting about the president of Foxconn Terry Gou, a report that took him through the underbelly of the business called Foxconn. According to the report, Foxconn currently produces 90 iPhone 4 terminals per minute, that is 137,000 terminals per day, but certainly far too few compared to what Apple needs at the moment. Foxconn produces the most iPhone terminals among all Apple associates and next year the company will open a new factory that will produce even more terminals for those from Apple.
The report reveals a very interesting piece of information about the iPhone 4 terminal, so that the external structure of the phone, which serves as the antenna, can be produced by a special machine that generally only makes prototypes. This machine has a very small volume of work, but due to the fact that Apple insisted on keeping the design, those from Foxconn were forced to order 1000 such machines at the price of $20,000 each. In general, component manufacturers have only one such machine in their factories, but Foxconn has 1000.
When Apple's iPhone4 was nearing production, Foxconn and Apple discovered that the metal frame was so specialized that it could only be made by an expensive, low-volume machine usually reserved for prototypes. Apple's designers wouldn't budge on their specs, so Gou ordered more than 1,000 of the $20,000 machines from Tokyo-based Fanuc. Most companies have just one.
Now we know why the iPhone 4 is so difficult to produce and to be honest it probably would have been better for Apple to abandon the design because it would have avoided all the signal problems.
