The Man Who Makes Your iPhone

Well, to be fair, these people commited suicide at work and sometimes left notes pointing to their failures at work while working 7 days a week for 15 hours a day. I don't personally think this story is just media hype. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-05/25/c_133... http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/malcolmmoore/100039883/wha...

From the linked Telegraph article, "For those who believe the spate of suicides is statistically in line, given how many people work at Foxconn, consider this: the company says it has prevented a further 30 people from trying to kill themselves in the past three weeks alone."

Of course! These people are in a war! They get slaughtered, they slaughter, they can get woken up anytime by a crazy ally shooting everybody! They can't trust even most common items as they can be stuffed with explosives. They can't trust the locals because they might be after them.

Would you like your workplace to be like that? I mean, I hope that there is no workplace as stressful as a war.

To be fair, this is no the only thing they did, and it is a lot more visual than the other methods they tried. Visual can be good.

They had to do the same thing at a mall near where I live, they strung up safety nets to stop people jumping the 7 stories to their deaths. Of course, there weren't workers at the mall, but it is just something you can do, on top of the usual.

I knew this was coming when I didn't elaborate on my response, but I don't really see what the parent was trying to get at. Apple uses Foxconn/Hon Hai because they are the biggest and the best at mass manufacturing consumer electronics. Foxconn is the only EMS company with the scale to depress supply chain costs to a point where they can actually make money on tiny margin products (like cell phones, mp3 players, and even PCs[1]). I am 100% sure the tooling debate arose during the planning phase, and I'm also 100% sure that it's in both Foxconn's and Apple's best interest for Apple not to have to go elsewhere. At the end of the day, a machinery investment like this isn't just going to support the iPhone contract (though it will be used by Foxconn in future negotiations, I'm sure), but other similar business they win. Here's another tidbit: Foxconn doesn't use Fuji pick & place machines. Anecdotally I've heard it's because Fuji is a Japanese company, and since there's a viable non-Japanese alternative -- Siemens[2] -- there's no need to use Fuji. However, what Foxconn did was negotiate an exclusive contract with Siemens so that they'd have the exclusive manufacturing contract for Siemens Siplace line and in return they'd commit to only using the Siemens equipment themselves. At their scale -- thousands of SMT lines, with each machine costing in the $250k range, this saves many millions each year.

I work in this industry and am happy to answer any questions about electronics manufacturing.

[1] Taiwanese companies like Quanta and Compal are excelling at laptop design and manufacturing, and in some cases Acer and Asus still build their own products, but almost all of it is outsourced to Quanta & Compal. [2] http://ea.automation.siemens.com/11116/Products/Placement-Sy...

I believe it was Intel that used to joke about the "million-dollar club". The story I heard is that, as a fab engineer, you got admitted to the club by accidentally spoiling one lot of wafers, each of which represented more than one million dollars in gross revenue.

Since there are many, many potential process mistakes that can spoil an entire lot at once, the implication was that you weren't going to remain outside the club for very long.

...yeah, but that's not what it means.

Although I suppose letting words mean whatever you want them to mean is fairly postmodern.