Faraway, So Close

The recent New York Times arti­cle is an impor­tant one to read if you use any­thing remotely com­put­er­ized or dig­i­tal. They picked the big tar­get of the day, cur­rently Apple, to build a great head­line. But don’t fool your­self into think­ing that if you own some­thing with an Ama­zon, Sam­sung, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Sony, etc. etc. etc. label on it that you’re ok.

That Kin­dle you’re hold­ing was very likely made in a fac­tory right beside the one my iPhone was made in. And that Xbox con­troller is from a fac­tory just down the street. As Devin Cold­ewey wrote in his response arti­cle on TechCrunch¹:

Some­thing the arti­cle only fleet­ingly acknowl­edges is that Fox­conn is used by most of the major elec­tron­ics brands in the world. Sam­sung, Microsoft, Ama­zon, and the rest all con­tract with Fox­conn to man­u­fac­ture, assem­ble, or fin­ish their prod­ucts. The threat­ened mass sui­cide the other week was, in fact, at an Xbox pro­duc­tion facility.

The web page you’re view­ing this arti­cle on is hosted on a web server who’s RAM, CPU and hard dri­ves were prob­a­bly made in a sim­i­lar fac­tory. Just about every­thing in our dig­i­tal world has been touched or built by some­one in China who’s being paid a lot less per day then you make per hour.

At the end of the day, as ruth­less as Apple is painted in the arti­cle on their busi­ness prac­tices — and I’m sure that they are that ruth­less — I really do trust that of the com­pa­nies build­ing our wid­gets and giz­mos, Apple is one of the few that will actu­ally do some­thing about it.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, emailed every Apple employee in response to the article

We will con­tinue to dig deeper, and we will undoubt­edly find more issues. What we will not do — and never have done — is stand still or turn a blind eye to prob­lems in our sup­ply chain. On this you have my word. You can fol­low our progress at apple​.com/​s​u​p​p​l​i​e​r​r​e​s​p​o​n​s​i​b​ility.

The sup­ply chain that Apple has built is all Tim Cook. Under Steve Jobs, he was the one who was at the helm of set­ting all of this up and why Apple has been able to main­tain a huge lead on com­peti­tors by buy­ing up vast amounts of screens, hard dri­ves, mem­ory, etc. for their var­i­ous devices. He has the most to gain and/​or lose by Apple get­ting raked over the coals on this issue. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see where Apple and the other tech com­pa­nies are at on this issue 6 months to a year from now.