[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1uDYAHkkuU[/youtube]
2012 is an electoral year in the USA and many politicians have discussed a rather important issue for Americans. Most of the big companies in the USA choose China for the manufacture of their products and the American political class wants to convince them to leave the Asian country for the manufacture of these products. The Apple company was one of those that was discussed recently because tens of millions of iPhones and iPad tablets are produced in China annually and the money invested there should be brought to the US according to the opinion of some politicians.
Although they talked about various reasons why Apple chooses China instead of the USA, those from New York Times offers the most plausible explanation for the choice made by Apple. Practically, for Apple, the costs of manufacturing iPhones in the USA would not really matter (although the price would increase by approximately $65), but the biggest problem lies in the fact that all components for iDevices are produced in Asia. In order to have factories in the USA, Apple would have to transport all the components from Asia to the USA and do the assembly on American territory. This is impossible because the costs of transporting all the components are huge and Apple would waste weeks and a lot of money getting involved in an unnecessary process. Choosing China to assemble iPhones is the best solution because all components are produced in countries near China, production costs are low, profit is high and production time is much shorter than in the case of moving the business to the USA.
Although the partners in China do not respect the rules regarding labor protection and do not respect their employees, the fact that most of the manufacturers of components for mobile terminals are in that area forces any company to choose an Asian country to build its products. Leaving aside the reason for choosing China, below is the explanation why the first iPhone had a glass screen and not a plastic screen. It seems that Steve Jobs used a prototype of the iPhone 2G for several months and just over a month before the release decided that he would not give people a phone that has a screen that scratches easily when carried in a pocket along with a set of keys. He forced his engineers to find a glass screen that does not scratch, but unfortunately none of the iPhones released in the following years would be resistant to scratches.
In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.
People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. "I won't sell a product that gets scratched," he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. "I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks."
After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.
New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?
