[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cL60TYY8oQ[/youtube]
In the USA, there was intense discussion about the possible development of some Apple factories that would produce iDevices on American soil and generate several tens of thousands of jobs for local industries. Apple has been criticized for choosing China as the location for the production of these iDevices, but it seems that not only cheap labor was the basis of these decisions. Reason which was the basis of China's choice for the production of iPad tablets seems to be related to rare metals because 17 of them are used in the iPad tablet and China supplies over 95% of the total amount of rare metals used in industries around the world.
But there's another important reason why Apple and other manufacturers have their heels stuck in Chinese mud. iPad manufacturing, like the manufacturing of other electronics, requires a significant amount of rare earth elements, the 17 difficult-to-mine elements used in all kinds of green technology. It's hard to say exactly what rare earths are in an iPad, since Apple is really tight-lipped about their materials.
Although no one knows exactly what rare materials are used in the manufacturing process of the iPad tablet, a Cambridge University professor assumes that anthanum is used in the tablet's battery, an alloy of neodymium is used to produce the magnets that help fix the SmartCover case and the glass used in the screen is cleaned using cerium oxide. In practice, quite a few rare materials are used in the iPad and China has a global monopoly in the industry, and this has caused an unusually high increase in the prices of these metals.
Why is all this rare earth consumption a problem? China currently controls 95- to 97-percent of the world's supply of rare earths and has repeatedly cut export quotas, sending already-high prices skyrocketing. Fearing dependence on China for rare earths, two companies — Molycorp in California and Lynas Corp in Australia — plan to begin mining rare earths this year. As green industry continues to grow, however, it's unclear if current mining operations will be able to keep up with increasing demand... Facing growing concern about the possibility of a rare earth shortage, President Obama recently lodged a complaint with the World Trade Organization against China about their rare earth policy.
In order to produce iDevices at such low prices, Apple does not really have a choice regarding the location where its tablets are manufactured, so in the future iDevices will still come from Foxconn, but not only from China, but also from Brazil.
