Where does your Apple come from?

Where does that Apple product that you have, whether it is a Mac, IPhone, IPod, or IPad, come from? When Apple started, it made all its products in the US; now, it doesn't make anything here. A New York Times article reports on a Silicon Valley dinner last year whose attendees included Steve Jobs and President Obama:

But as Steven P. Jobs spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The article details a number of reasons why Apple prefers to manufacture its products in China. Lower labor costs are just one reason. The Chinese labor force gives Apple a flexibility that it could never achieve in the US. Foxconn, a Chinese company that does most of Apple's manufacturing, has a facility that employs 230,000 people, many of whom live onsite in dormitories. It can respond to changing production needs far more quickly than any factory in America could. To build Iphones, Apple needed 8700 industrial engineers to oversee the process. One estimate was that it would have taken 9 months to find those engineers in the US. In China, it took 15 days.

Apple still designs it products in the US, and provides many highly skilled engineers with good high paying jobs. However it no longer provides high paying jobs to Americans with mid-level skills. Those types of jobs, whether they were auto workers building cars in the 1950s and 1960s or electronics manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s, were once one of the foundations of the American economy.

A recent radio show provides a fascinating portrait of Apple's China manufacturing operations. From a history of technology perspective, people once lived in close proximity to where the things they used in daily life were made. They could see the blacksmith making parts they might use in the house. They could see a cooper making a bucket. Now we are far removed from where the things we use are made. Would we be as enthusiastic about using them if we saw how the people who made them suffered? This audio piece has a segment where New York Times columnist Nick Kristof (he and his wife wrote the book Half the Sky, which was a former freshman summer reading book at NCSU), argues that sweatshops, such as Apple uses, actually have helped to raise many people out of poverty. All of this echoes debates about whether the Industrial Revolution in England in the 1700s and 1800s actually improved or degraded workers' lives.