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Foxconn Thinks the iPhone 5 Is a Pain
pigrabbitbear writes "China's largest electronics manufacturer, the already-loathed Foxconn, is now taking the fall for the iPhone 5 shortage that's annoyed consumers and worried investors in recent weeks. What's the holdup? They don't have enough parts? They're training new line workers? They're too busy trying to regain control of their factories after employees started rioting? Nah. According to the company, the iPhone 5 is just a huge pain to put together. That bit about the riots is a little bit true, too, though."
Why not build them here? Yes they will cost slightly more but obviously given the rabid demand they haven't crossed the price point that drives away customers. The bigger issue is in spite dividends and buy backs and such Apple still has over 100 billion in their mattress and they don't have a clue what to do with it! Even with the increased production costs it's doubtful it would dent the 100 billion in the bank while it would mean hiring 500,000 new people that might turn into iPhone customers! It worked for Henry Ford. Being a good citizen could result in a windfall instead of reduced profits. Apple can't go broke at this point so why not help their mother country out for once? They get the added benefit of getting rid of two weeks in shipment delays due to having to ship them from China. They could also get them to Europe quicker so it's a win/win!
Foxconn may say the iphone5 is a pain, but I think the workers getting paid peanuts for 80 hours shifts might have a different idea of what 'pain' means. Besides, how much quality assembly is really possible when your workforce is bleary-eyed and exhausted? I bet there's a lot of QA rejects and extra controls required to keep quality from plummeting.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
They can't build robots capable of the same wide variety of fine, rapid movements as people. Assembling the device robotically would require a large number of purpose build machines to carry out each step. That would add years to the amount of time it takes to bring a product to market, which is unacceptable in consumer electronics.
I have no interest in defending Foxconn or Apple for the conditions in their factories, but yes, this article (and others on that site) is so flawed and snarky it's barely worth crediting.
My favorite gems:
The company had been running an internship program that put 14- to 16-year-old children on the factory floor
And the link they reference in that quote (to anther article on their OWN site) says it was vocational interns (16+) and college students (18+). So more accurate would be "16 to 22". You'd think they could quote their own articles correctly.
Also from that article referenced: The suicide rate at Foxconn is still lower than that of the general population in China, but striking for its concentration among a group of workers at a single company.
Wha?? Someone failed basic statistics. If the rate is lower over a population (where "rate" = incidents/population), how is the concentration (eh, also incidents/population) striking? In fact, it's only striking because of the *anecdotes* sensationalized by stories like this...
Basic human rights and working conditions in China are a big problem, but it doesn't help the cause to make up facts and statistics that don't exist...
Contextualizing, it is likely that work environment should discourage suicide, maybe the rate is alarming compared against similar factories
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
The folks who stood in line for hours(or days in some cases), or ordered one online and still haven't seen it yet, got screwed. Not because of manufacturing delays, but because they bought a phone that was already out of date before it was even released. HTC and Samsung had better phones out eight and six months ago, respectively. I bought the one x. It has a better LCD, better resolution, better talk time, same resolution camera, NFC, WiFi direct, and a whole list of other things the "cutting edge" iPhone 5 doesn't have. And here's the punchline..... I paid $300 less for my One X than you did for the 32 gb iPhone 5.
"A lot of that can be done quickly using 3D printers"
ugh, ok when your producing thousands to millions of units per day, you cant take the line down every 20 min cause your rep-rap made doohicky crapped out. even good 3D printers cant make parts that are going to hold up in a production line very long.
so now your getting shit milled and waterjet to make special tools for a product that changes every year just to inset a screw that cost a multiplier more than a persons yearly income, even if you were paying American rates.
health care being tied to jobs hurts the USA for jobs and getting rid of that can give us more jobs hear.
Is that Chinese years or Western ones? Because a Chinese who says they are 14 is actually 13 (they start counting at 1, like Fortran).
Samzenpus, can you please do a better job on the submission approval process?
" China's largest electronics manufacturer, the already-loathed Foxconn ..."
First of all, Foxconn is from Taiwan, not China.
Second, no matter how much the submitter pigrabbitbear loaths Foxconn, the ill-feeling pigrabbitbear has towards Foxconn is NOT related to the story of TFA, and Samzenpus, the mod who approved the submit, should have known better than allowed "the already-loathed Foxconn" to pass through the approval process.
Slashdot is faltering, and it's not the users who has brought it down.
It's the moderators, such as Samzenpus, who have failed to carry out their job duty, in a professional manner.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I am NOT a fan of globalism. (But that doesn't mean I am a protectionist. I simply feel that it is unsustainable to expect a high wage economy to purchase high wage products indefinately, when employment rates in that high wage economy drop like rocks, as all the jobs move overseas, due to people chasing low low prices. The result muddies the market terribly, and I really don't see how it can be sustained. In the short term it makes you filthy ass rich. In the long term it causes protracted recessions.)
During the Cold War we in the West were sheilded from a huge pool of cheap skilled labor. This created a high standard of living in the West. When the Americans set out to destroy the economy of the USSR and 'won ' the Cold War they also made that pool of cheap labor available for exploitation by Western corporations. Naturally Western corporations sought to maximize their profits by migrating production facilities to where the most skilled of the cheap labor is, to the old 'Eastern Bloc', without thinking about the long term consequences since American corporations in particular are incapable of planning further ahead than one fiscal quarter. Are you missing Communism and the Iron Curtain yet? (That last part is sarcasm.)