Disaster Barely 50% of iPhone Casings Made By India's Largest Company Meet Apple's Minimum Quality Standards - SUPAPOWER 2020

Aritlce (Arhcive)
Apple is facing difficulties scaling up its production operations in India amid poor component yields and slow progress, the Financial Times reports.

The company is apparently contending with immense difficulties in ramping up production in the country. At a factory in Hosur run by Apple supplier Tata that manufactures iPhone casings, only one in every two components coming off the production line "is in good enough shape" to be sent forward to assembly at Foxconn. The 50 percent yield is particularly low for almost any production operation and works against Apple's "zero-defect" manufacturing and environmental goals.

Former Apple engineers told the Financial Times that Chinese ‌iPhone‌ suppliers and government officials have a "whatever it takes" approach to win ‌iPhone‌ orders, describing how work was often completed weeks ahead of schedule at "inexplicable speed." Operations in India, on the other hand, are not running at this pace. "There just isn't a sense of urgency," one Apple engineer remarked.

Apple is apparently focused on a long term plan to improve manufacturing proficiency in the country. The company has sent product designers and engineers from California and China to factories in southern India to train locals and help set up production operations, according to four individuals who purport to be familiar with the matter.

Apple began producing entry-level ‌iPhone‌ models, starting with the iPhone SE, in India in 2017. Last year, Apple significantly stepped up its production in India, building some iPhone 14 models in the country within weeks of their launch in China.

Tata is said to have ambitions to become a full-service Apple supplier in the future and is in talks to take over a troubled Wistron iPhone assembly plant in Karnataka. Apple's long-term plan to diversify its global supply chain continues.

 

[The handsome tard]

As someone who has had the pleasure of dealing with customers on a global scale, Indians are the worst. Worse than the Chinese, worse than the Greeks.

Every single time it goes like this:

Indian: HELP! THE EQUIPMENT IS NOT WORKING AS YOUR COMPANY TOLD US IT IS SUPPOSED TO, PLEASE SAVE US, MR. SHROOM KING! WE ALSO EXPECT THIS TO BE COVERED UNDER WARRANTY.

Me: We have a 6 month old quotation is our system for all the parts you need to fix your system, and we did not receive a reply.

Indian: Please give us a quotation for the necessary parts ASAP and your best possible discount.

Me: *Redoes the exact same quotation but updates the price*

*six more months pass*

*open inbox*

*See an email with subject line TOP URGENT! TOTAL SYSTEM FAILURE!*

*phone call 2 minutes later*

Indian: We need your technician at our site as soon as possible, NOTHING IS WORKING! THIS IS TOP URGENT!

EVERY

FUCKING

TIME

I read it in that stereotypical indian voice and I legit think I might close to how it actually sounded

 

[NerdShamer]

Tata?

You mean the same company that made the world's cheapest, smallest, production car?

And did such a poor job of it most Indians said "Nah Bruh, we'll just keep riding our motorcycles 6-at-a-time"?

I'm SHOCKED.

SHOCKED! *






* Is not shocked.

Lmao, that thing doesn't even have airbags

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Just a reminder that China was completely unable to build iPhones until Tim Cook invested a third of a trillion dollars into building factories for them:

Yeah bro. Apple couldn't build iPhones in China before 2016.

Are you completely retarded or just a conservative? I know, I know, same thing.

Lmao, that thing doesn't even have airbags

There aren't a lot of roads in India where one can travel fast enough to make use of them.

 

[Bland Crumbs]

Yeah this was a predictable result.

Stop trying to make India happen. It is not going to happen.

 

[quaawaa]

Yeah bro. Apple couldn't build iPhones in China before 2016.

Are you completely retarded or just a conservative? I know, I know, same thing.

There aren't a lot of roads in India where one can travel fast enough to make use of them.

They were investing in China since at least 2007.

The iPhone hasn’t always had the same design and new versions require new tooling.
The CCP paid for the initial factory:

Foxconn is going to underwrite the investment. I’ll build two campuses with Chinese government partners. And when your volume is there, I’m going to build the products for you

But they weren’t willing to fund factory upgrades necessary to build newer iPhones and Macs. Apple then invested billions of their own dollars to upgrade Foxconn’s facilities:

In 2008, for instance, it launched a “unibody” MacBook Pro made from a single block rather than multiple parts, a feat of industrial engineering offering “a level of precision that is completely unheard of in this industry,” Jony Ive said at the time.

This was accomplished using a CNC machine, which allows a designer with a 3D image file to create complex parts. These machines had been around for decades but, costing upwards of $500,000 each, were only used to build prototypes.

Three former Apple manufacturing engineers say the company purchased more than 10,000 CNC machines, enabling a form of mass production that Steve Jobs called “a whole new way of building notebooks”.

Soon Apple was using the same technique for iPhones and iPads. According to two people involved, Apple made a deal with Fanuc, an automation group, to purchase its entire pipeline of CNC machines for years to come — and then it scoured the globe for more.

“There were not enough CNC machines in the world to do the machining that we needed to do,” one person says. “You have to understand that starting in 2009 we were growing exponentially. We’d go from building 10,000 parts a day one year, to 100,000 the next, and then 500,000, and then a million . . . Money was no object, basically.”

Money was no object when it came to building Chinese factories, but they have to be very price conscious when considering other countries. Unless, of course, you enact a 20% tariff on foreign-made phones like Modi did, and then suddenly they’re very interested in moving production.

It helps if you actually read the articles instead of only reading excepts.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

They were investing in China since at least 2007.

The iPhone hasn’t always had the same design and new versions require new tooling.
The CCP paid for the initial factory:

But they weren’t willing to fund factory upgrades necessary to build newer iPhones and Macs. Apple then invested billions of their own dollars to upgrade Foxconn’s facilities:

Money was no object when it came to building Chinese factories, but they have to be very price conscious when considering other countries. Unless, of course, you enact a 100% tariff on foreign-made phones like Modi did, and then suddenly they’re very interested in moving production.

It's hilarious that you're suggesting that Indians are capable of sophisticated manufacturing.

 

[quaawaa]

It's hilarious that you're suggesting that Indians are capable of sophisticated manufacturing.

I didn’t say they were. I said that Apple is investing there because of their tariffs and that their excuses for why they can’t build iPhones in the US ring hollow.