> I wonder how many of these extraordinary leak prevention measures would be necessary if Apple manufactured their devices in the US or Europe?
One of the huge economic benefits of standardized, lockable, shipping containers is that rates of products "walking away" on the dock dropped dramatically.
Shipping companies used to just expect a certain % loss from outright theft from dockworkers. Indeed it was considered to be "one of the perks of the job."
> Also I'm fully willing to believe that US authorities would prosecute the crap out of someone stealing from Apple, whereas in China the penalty seems to be that you lose your crappy sweatshop job and have to walk across the street to get a new one.
Assuming the person gets caught, or that they are worth prosecuting. Individual factory line workers, not so much. Throwing a minimum wage worker[1] in jail is a minimal deterrent giving to the potential financial upside. People higher up can just get industry black listed, the community of people making high end consumer electronics is rather very small. (The number of people working on CE is in the tens of thousands+, but the key senior engineers who "make things happen" are fewer in number, and tend to move around a lot between the big players.)
It can be even worse when a partner company leaks. If there are only two suppliers who can provide a part (not uncommon) then you cannot blacklist a supplier who leaked for very long, you'll have to come back around and do business with them again sooner or later, or just accept paying whatever price the other supplier wants to charge.
[1] A lot of electronics factory jobs are not crappy sweat shop jobs, many of the workers are trained technicians who work hand in hand with American engineers to build products. If you ever do manufacturing in China you'll run into the problem of after Chinese New Year the workers will want to bargain to come back to work, or they'll take their skills to another factory that will pay better. The idea that Chinese workers are unskilled trained drones needs to go away.
