But when Apple began making the $3,000 computer in Austin, Tex., it struggled to find enough screws, according to three people who worked on the project and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.
In China, Apple relied on factories that can produce vast quantities of custom screws on short notice. In Texas, where they say everything is bigger, it turned out the screw suppliers were not.
Tests of new versions of the computer were hamstrung because a 20-employee machine shop that Apple’s manufacturing contractor was relying on could produce at most 1,000 screws a day.
Manufacturing at the kinds of scales Apple operates at is infinitely more complex than most people seem to think. It’s easy for a president to spout some rambling nonsense about building iPhones in the US to get people riled up, but if you can’t even produce enough screws for a low-volume product like the Mac Pro, you really have no business in the production of technology products.
Sounds like a lame excuse, lots of their parts will be shipped from remote locations anyway, there is no reason why the screws, that are tiny and cheap to ship, need to be locally produced.
They could also consider using standard components where it makes sense, like, you know, screws. But i guess making their stuff hard to repair is higher priority
Couldn’t agree more. I’m not a huge fan of comments that don’t make a contribution to the debate, but this version of the site does not have the +1 upvote thingie the old version had 🙁
Sounds like something to fit in to their “just in time” pipeline.
What this says is that they’re not willing to do it. I dunno, maybe itty bitty screws represent 90% of the costs of an iPhone. But, skeptically, I think that’s not the case. If they wanted to do this in the U.S., buying some extra screws seems like a small price to pay.
I know, all these compromises add up. If the company is PRINCIPALLY committed to building in the U.S. then something like a container filled with screws you’d think would not be the limiting factor.
whartung,
Agree. To a company that is committing to doing it in the US, the lack of screws seems to point to bad management and poor planning. If they had all the other parts for assembly but not the screws, then clearly someone in charge of apple’s parts inventory screwed up (pun intended). Given that the pictured screw is non-standard, the issue may be partly self-inflicted as standard screws would have enabled them to order parts from local hardware stores if needed.
Ultimately it’s likely true that assembly is more efficient in china, but blaming the screws specifically sounds like an excuse to me. Obviously screws need to be preordered and stocked just like any other component (from china or elsewhere) especially if it’s custom. Worldwide logistics are inconvenient but solvable, it’s far more likely the reason for shutting it down the US assembly plant came down to financial reasons rather than screws.
Isn’t Tim Cook a master of supply chain management
Yes, i am sure too that it has to do with the modern and in my oppinion heavily overhyped just in time pipeline. I mean, i understand you would like to minimize the money spent on dead inventory, and tons of extra storage space, but there are plenty of things that does not lose value while on a shelf, like, again, screws.
If you read deeper into the story, the real reason seems also to be that you cannot whip your western employees to bend over backwards and throw in tons of extra hours whenever you need it because your planning was off and you have decided hardly to have any stock in reserve. So of course with such requirements, countries with poor human rights will be a better fit.
There are a lot of parts that make up an iphone. If they are doing their manufacturing engineering properly they should understand the availability and cost of each of the components. I have no idea what happened here. My best guess is that the engineers were over ruled by management, or just not experienced enough.
Its impossible to judge what the impact to Apple’s profitability would be making devices here without a detailed knowledge of the parts and their availability. But my gut would tell me that its a hell of a lot cheaper in China due to all of the reasons the article goes into.
One detail that confuses me a little, is that Apple was directly dealing with the manufacturer. Most of the factories I know deal with distributors, who a responsible for just in time delivery. So they bear the burden of keeping things in stock and delivered on time. But apparently Apple doesn’t do that even for screws for reasons.
Completely agree that this smacks of making excuses to justify current status quo. I am quite sure that if America wanted, it would be capable of producing sufficient screws for mac production. It was capable of supporting the majority of the worlds production less than a decade ago, I am fairly sure it could do so again. IF IT WANTED.
The truth is not the component cost and production, but the cost of workers. Giving workers basic rights costs money and affects the bottom line.
America manufactures plenty. Most of the jobs in the manufacturing sector were lost to automation.
But go ahead and create your own supply chain for the iPhone in the US, since all it takes is for you to write WANT in capitals.
Some Americans are still hung up in their exceptionalistic(sic) way of thinking and are having a hard time waking up to the reality that there is a whole world out there who is as greedy, capable, and hungry for success as you guys are supposed to be.
I don’t think it was ever _that_ much… (and certainly not so short time ago)
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I could be wrong, but the screws in question look custom & proprietary, which would mean there’s no chance a 3rd party distributor would happen to carry them without special ordering and advanced notice. I think it’s done to help apple control the aftersale market, it’s just ironic that their own choice of non-standard parts bit them too. Regardless though, yeah it sounds like somebody forgot to order sufficient screws in time for production.
The screw story is misleading for sure. However, any kind of complex product made in China cannot simply be transferred back to US manufacturing. The Chinese leave a lot of the decisions on final fit and assembly to the lowest rung manufacturing people. It’s efficient, avoids language issues and avoids endless looping back to the top level designers to solve manufacturing issues the correct way. This results in an assembly process involving lots of tricks and dexterity that would not be readily transferable to a US scenario. This includes ways to deal with tolerance stack-up by manually matching components with opposite deviations. The iPhone physical (and maybe functional) component spec and assembly process would need to be redesigned with US manufacturing in mind. The skill required to do that is genuinely rare in the US at present and is probably completely gone inside Apple. Now the screw story makes a little more sense, but it’s not about the screws. It’s about manufacturing competence inside Apple (and in journalism).
Nonsense imagine , but if that’s really what’s stopping production in the US (like hell) they could just use normal screws …radical idea.
This is so common in sites like this; people with no direct understanding of the issue, saying how it could have been easily solved just after reading the headline.
The screws are just an example. The truth is that China is now edging the US, and Europe, in certain production areas mainly because they built a much better ecosystem for rapid manufacturing of electronics. Period.
I know that’s not something some people want to hear.
javiercerol,
That’s because the narrative is sketchy. Even if you grant that the parts are neither available nor manufacturable in the US, there’s no reason apple couldn’t have also ordered the screws from china just like all their other parts in order to have them assembled in the US. It genuinely looks like apple screwed up and did not order all the parts it needed on time and consequently suffered delays. Apple needs to internalize some of the blame for that. However to be fair to them this could be more about the york times pushing it’s narrative than apple themselves making excuses.
You say this as if this is news to us, but it isn’t. Everyone knows that china has a stronger manufacturing base and it’s been this way for many years. Companies go there for manufacturing because of cheap labor, and factories have been closing here because US factories are less profitable. None of this is a secret.
Adurbe’s right that it could be done in the US, the reasons to offshore are predominantly driven by cost considerations. Building it in the US would either take a large chunk out of apple’s profits (which they could probably afford to do if they wanted to given just how profitable they are), or it would be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices – either outcome is bad for apple. You are right to bring up automation as a game changer, albeit one that comes at the expense of jobs.
Again, so much arm chair quarterbacking in these threads haha.
The reason why China is leading in electronics manufacturing is not just the cheaper labor, but the fact that they have developed huge ecosystems that are not matched any where else. So you can get prototypes in far shorter time than in the US, for example. And you can go into production, again, far quicker than if you were working with an “all American” supply chain.
There’s this backwards narrative among many Westerners, who refuse to accept Asia could do certain things better. In this case, it makes no economic sense to use an American supply chain (other than for some misguided patriotic nonsense) that is going to be a) slower, b) less efficient, and c) more expensive overall.
BTW, most manufacturing jobs in the US have been lost to automation, not 3rd world peasants. The US still has a very strong manufacturing sector, it just employs much fewer workers. That’s a narrative many people in this country refuse to accept for some reason.
javiercero1,
Yourself included 🙂
Yes but you shouldn’t disconnect the effect from it’s causality. The reason the US cannot adequately serve the demand is largely because US fabs have shuttered and the reason for that is that offshoring is cheaper. The business case for manufacturing in the US isn’t there when foreign factories are so much cheaper to operate. It really does come down to money.
This narrative is a bit of a straw man for this osnews audience though because nobody’s claiming american superiority. Everyone here admits that china can get the job done for less. If we could get it done for less here, then suddenly we’d find investors opening and building new factories here rather than in china, it’s just business. Ultimately the 30,000 ft view economics really are that simple and there’s no need to make this about race/superiority.
Why do you keep repeating this refusal to accept narrative? Do you really mean for that to apply to the osnews audience? Because I literally said the same thing in the post it looks like you were responding to “You are right to bring up automation as a game changer, albeit one that comes at the expense of jobs.”
Rather than “no need to make this about race/superiority”, I should have said there’s no need to make it about nationality.
Anyways I don’t think we significantly disagree on the main points. Automation is one of those things that has the potential to be good for humanity, but as more and more workers loose their jobs and owners become more and more profitable without them, it’s stands that the wealth gap will continue to increase….the question is to what end? We’re already at the point where the 1% have more wealth than the bottom 99%, If we (ie politicians) are unwilling or unable to redistribute the profits that automation brings, then it’s quite conceivable that the top 0.1% will eventually own more wealth than the bottom 99.9%, most of whom will not be able to get meaningful employment because they’re redundant due to automation.
I actually work in the industry, so no “armchair.”
America manufactures plenty, it’s just that it can not longer compete in this particular industry.
And I still stand with what I say regarding some Westerners, which you tried to somehow turn as an indictment against the entire readership of this site.
It’s not just about China being cheaper, but also better. Which is something a lot of people refuse to accept in the West, and yes… a lot of that has to do with ignorance/racism/exceptionalism.
Apparently apple was not willing to look further afield in the US than just Texas. like to say Rockford Illinois a city that has many different manufacturers of Fasteners. I suspect the problem, is apple was simply no longer aware of how to work with the manufacturing supply chain in the United States and how you have to pull in parts from many corners of the country. Instead of crying about fasteners they should Case study how heavy goods manufacture, the one industry the U.S. still rules the world in (Large construction and mining equipment.) manages to function so well here and how they bring in parts from all over the country.