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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many of these extraordinary leak prevention measures would be necessary if Apple manufactured their devices in the US or Europe? The temptations for the workers would be the same (big payoffs are a universal temptation), but there might be more of a cultural barrier to overcome. 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.

Apple broke up the supply chain (and probably not a small number of bones) for the time being in China, but it will grow back. The money is too tempting.

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> 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.

>Assuming the person gets caught,

You've never worked at a FedEx or UPS hub. Everything gets x-ray going in and out, you go through metal detector in and out, no open containers/phones/electronics/watches etc you can have a wedding band and only a wedding band. When stuff does go missing from a hub/sort facility, the carrier often finds the thief very quickly because everything is constantly being scanned and you know exactly where it last was and where it should have gone next and exactly what people are in that area so you can go right to the appropriate cameras with a known, relatively narrow, time frame.

Doing similar in a factory is trivial and there's going to be a lot less risk of the middle/upper management/security being corruptable. No offense to a random Chinese citizen but, the pay is garbage - a quick google query shows the average factory worker salary equates to $255 to $283. If you can walk out with a prototype of something, I bet you could have it sold within an hour for $1000 with minimal effort and if you were remotely organized could probably fetch several times that within a day. You may have just made several years salary to divide among 2-5 people.

In the United States, someone is going to have a hard time getting it in the hands of competition and at best they might get a grand or two from a less-than-reputable website/media company which isn't worth being fired for and/or facing criminal prosecution.

Your Google got a monthly salary figure not an annual one.

Yes and? 'several times 1000' is multiple year's salary starting at $6800, $6800 for a prototype of a flagship device, or even a structural prototype of a flagship device, isn't unreasonable.

Now compare that to minimum wage in the United States which would be 4x (and then some) what the Chinese factory worker is making and, every factory job I've ever seen pays well more than minimum wage here (a quick Glassdoor search shoes 'The national average salary for a Factory Worker is $39,719', more than 10x a Chinese worker). Making an American worker far less inclined to risk termination and prison.

And in the case of the article, it mentions an individual stealing thousands of casings. You just aren't going to get enough money out of that to make it worth it for multiple American workers to try and smuggle thousands of units out of a factory, the risk to reward ratio just isn't going to work but at a dollar each and only 1000 units a Chinese worker is walking away with 3 months and change of salary.

> The idea that Chinese workers are unskilled trained drones needs to go away.

Some are, some aren’t. Assembly line workers are far from being technicians, but factories have/need technicians as well. It’s the lower skilled assembly line workers who are migrants from the countryside and who will often switch jobs after CNY; the technicians can job hop as well, but being from the cities they aren’t as fixated around the new year to do it.

> The temptations for the workers would be the same (big payoffs are a universal temptation)

Big payoffs are a universal temptation, but the definition of “big” depends on your salary. The article says workers “can earn an amount equivalent to a year’s salary for stealing iPhone enclosures”; that would require more money in the U.S. or Europe.

When I was at Apple, I noticed it was employees at HQ who did most of the "electronic" / photo leaking, usually just to get street cred with zealous users / fanboys on Apple forums.

> I wonder how many of these extraordinary leak prevention measures would be necessary if Apple manufactured their devices in the US or Europe?

Probably still going to need them. The person responsible for ripping and leaking nearly every big album of the aughts before their official releases was in the U.S.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/the-man-who-br...

> if Apple manufactured their devices in the US or Europe?

Unless I wildly misunderstand something, I'm pretty sure Apple could not produce X amount of devices at Y quality + rate for Z dollars in the US or Europe.

It's possible until you assign values to X, Y and Z

They couldn't hoard a quarter trillion dollars while doing it. It would be a nightmare if they only had a hundred and fifty billion to tide them over until their next big thing.

Do you want Apple to get into the business of manufacturing specialized screws? They could but it's not their core competency. So spend money?

They do have their own screws already

They couldn't move the entire production to the US today no. It would have to be a gradual ramp up with suppliers coming online in tandem with the increase in production. There's no supply here because there is no market here, but if you build it they will come. It's not like it's impossible for an existing company to start up a specialized screw line, or for some startup to appear to fill the demand. It's a slow and painful process, but it's not like the Chinese manufacturing industry sprang up overnight either.

The real question is if the pain of switching over is worth it. Do these extraordinary costs in security and shipping outweigh the increased labor costs and potential for unionization in the US? Trump's tariffs might actually affect this calculation as well, but their long term stability is questionable, especially if you're looking 10 years out past the end of his term.

Well, the suppliers supply to other companies too, and they use raw materials from other suppliers themselves. Why would the they move to EU or US for a single customer? Apple squeezes their suppliers so there's no real love there to begin with. The whole manufacturing sector in China is a massive web of tiny vendors tightly coupled with each other. Its huge stash of rare earth metals certainly helps too. I don't believe we're going to see manufacturing move outside of China outside of a major world destabilizing event. I'd estimate that China is about a decade or two away from having its own cutting edge chips and its dependence on external vendors is going to diminish even further. That's not necessarily bad IMHO, every culture and country has their time on the top of the heap. I guess its China's turn.. in a "BIG WAY".

From, http://archive.is/5Gcnp

<<--The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products."

.............. .............. Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. “The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.” -->>

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