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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

100% of the FaceID component in iPhone comes from Texas. According to Apple.

Edit: Oh and I think the accelerometer comes from Germany, but I would need to look it up, it might be a German company.

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It’s Bosch. AFAIK The chips themselves aren’t coming from Germany but are gabbed in Asia and shipped within Asia. Are you sure it’s manufactured in Germany? I don’t know enough about the mechanics of Finisar but I would be fairly surprised to learn that Apple is shipping 1 component from Texas to China for manufacturing. Of course there may be logistical reasons why that works out for that particular component (maybe the laser scanning doesn’t change much so it’s not hard to just keep pumping them out all year round so lead time for a new line isn’t as relevant). I remain highly skeptical this is done for the accelerometer as I think that changes every year (unless it’s matured enough that they don’t bother anymore but I would doubt that’s the case). This seems even less likely, to me at least, for the CPU that definitely changes significantly each year and is co-designed and brand new along with the rest of the phone (ie shipping times are critical to make sure you can set up the assembly line on time).

Apple posts annual lists of all their suppliers and where the manufacturing is done on their page here. https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/

When I worked there I got to see a few presentations on the iPhone supply chain and they do indeed source and ship single components from countries and companies. Remember though that even a single component for iPhone will end up being huge volumes of parts.

Any supplier with locations outside of Asia ALSO has locations in Asia AFAICT. It’s unclear what manufacturing occurs outside of Asia and Apple doesn’t categorize what is getting manufactured. It could be things like assembly line equipment is manufactured outside Asia and the components themselves within Asia or prototypes are manufactured outside Asia with mass manufacturing inside Asia.

Do you have a concrete example of any mass manufactured electronics component coming from outside China? Heck, I’m not even convinced that Gorilla Glass is made outside Asia because Corning is listed as having 3 locations and 2 are in Asia so it would be supremely strange to be mass manufacturing some part of the iPhone in Corning.

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