Transcript please (Can't listen from office)
Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
21–30 of 59 posts
Re: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
#22I find Steve Jobs repellent, but he was once committed to manufacturing hardware in the United States. The minor undercurrent of criticism since his passing has been Apple's manufacturing vendors in Asia. Forgotten is the drag on NeXT by its decision to build a factory in Fremont, CA. It was way overbuilt, and sucked up a lot of the money fronted by Canon and Ross Perot to keep NeXT alive while it was largely unable…
Steve Jobs took it up publicly before he died about how the American government could make manufacturing in the US to be a more attractive option for companies like Apple.
I dont buy it.
in the good ole days even before Standard Oil, fierce competition and W-2 (and IRS/SS in that matter), the reason behind owning any business was not to get rich or satisfy the board with higher dividend, but to give people job and ability to keep their families respected.
to me its a simple math: Apple produce stuff in China saving 40% of production costs, then sells its goods in America putting 40% profit margin on it. I smell greed, regardless if people accept to be ripped of or not.
Re: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
#23If one of you guys, someday happen to be wealthy; i highly recommend hiring people that work at Foxconn and other corporate farms of misery; they would probably be really, and i mean really the most loyal and thankful workers in the world if you can give them a decent salary for decent amount of hours.
Hiring the people that make the worst hardware in the world to make my stuff? No thanks
Re: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
#24I find Steve Jobs repellent, but he was once committed to manufacturing hardware in the United States. The minor undercurrent of criticism since his passing has been Apple's manufacturing vendors in Asia. Forgotten is the drag on NeXT by its decision to build a factory in Fremont, CA. It was way overbuilt, and sucked up a lot of the money fronted by Canon and Ross Perot to keep NeXT alive while it was largely unable…
The original macintosh used to be built in Fremont too.
http://www.onedigitallife.com/2006/03/21/flickr-find-mac-fac...
As I recall, the US stupidly made that uncompetitive by enforcing anti-"dumping" duties on DRAM chips. We required that RAM sold to the US should be really expensive, to protect our (then largely hypothetical) local suppliers. So clone PCs built abroad could include cheap DRAM chips while Apple could not legally do the same.
Eventual solution? Move Mac assembly offshore to places like Cork, Ireland.
Re: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
#25This isn't as exciting, but along the same lines, I once spied on the people repairing my MBP: http://ecritters.biz/applecarefacility/
It'd be great to see the iSight script if you're up for sharing. I also wonder what was wrong with your MBP, from the photos it looked like there was some initial activity and then a lot of nothing, then a final check and I guess they returned it fixed? Hilarious, thanks for sharing.
Here you go: http://defiant.ecritters.biz/PeriodiciSight.zip
It depends on a library called CocoaSequenceGrabber. I'm sure you can find it somewhere, but the first Google link seems to be dead. I also have no idea whether it works on recent versions of OS X.
A fan was making a lot of noise. (Not just the usual noise fans make when they spin up; it sounded broken, like it was grinding against something.) They couldn't hear it, and didn't fix it. (Later, I brought it back and asked them to please just replace the fan, regardless of whether they could hear it. They did.)
Re: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs took it up publicly before he died about how the American government could make manufacturing in the US to be a more attractive option for companies like Apple.
I dont buy it. in the good ole days even before Standard Oil, fierce competition and W-2 (and IRS/SS in that matter), the reason behind owning any business was not to get rich or satisfy the board with higher dividend, but to give people job and ability to keep their families respected. to me its a simple math: Apple produce stuff in China saving 40% of production costs, then sells its goods in America putting 40% pr…
"in the good ole days even before Standard Oil, fierce competition and W-2 (and IRS/SS in that matter), the reason behind owning any business was not to get rich or satisfy the board with higher dividend, but to give people job and ability to keep their families respected."
I don't know of any such time. Which good ole days are you talking about? I think you're dreaming of a romantic past that never existed.
Re: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs took it up publicly before he died about how the American government could make manufacturing in the US to be a more attractive option for companies like Apple.
I dont buy it. in the good ole days even before Standard Oil, fierce competition and W-2 (and IRS/SS in that matter), the reason behind owning any business was not to get rich or satisfy the board with higher dividend, but to give people job and ability to keep their families respected. to me its a simple math: Apple produce stuff in China saving 40% of production costs, then sells its goods in America putting 40% pr…
Half the people who came to America did it for money. It was the place where you didn't owe anybody anything, and nobody owed you anything either. That was the beauty of it.
Re: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
#28If one of you guys, someday happen to be wealthy; i highly recommend hiring people that work at Foxconn and other corporate farms of misery; they would probably be really, and i mean really the most loyal and thankful workers in the world if you can give them a decent salary for decent amount of hours.
They do get a decent salary by local standards, and (so long as they're being paid for it) tend to want all the hours they can get. There was a riot a few years ago in a chinese plant because the plant owners stopped giving so much overtime and the workers were upset that they lost out on the extra work.
If you read Apple's status reports, one of the problems they seem to be battling is that these jobs are so good that workers are willing to pay huge bribes to middlemen in order to get the jobs. The workers are routinely willing to give up at least a month's salary to get these jobs, often more.
(Apple can't ban this practice outright because it's too widespread (and probably serves a useful market purpose), so they try to put a cap on it and make sure workers pay only a month's salary to get the job, no more than that.)
Re: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
#29Transcript please (Can't listen from office)
Listen from home, it's really a great performance.
Re: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
#30This is incredible storytelling and is very humanist. I'd really recommend listening to it. We use these devices everyday and don't even think about it. Here's an article from Gizmodo about an undercover journalist: http://gizmodo.com/5542527/undercover-report-from-foxconns-h... http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/metro/2010-06/02/content_992207... and a direct link to the mp3: http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/45…
There was also this game that showed the story behind such devices: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/sep/14/ap...