Corning

"Given Apple’s scale and manufacturing concentration, the result of this strategy is that Apple spawned the formation of major industrial clusters in which engineers from Cupertino would teach multiple factories how to, say, shape glass for the iPhone. So instead of being beholden to Lens Technology—the company that cut and tempered Corning glass for the first iPhone—Apple would constantly send engineers from Cupertino to train its rivals. That kept Lens on its toes, lest Apple choose a different supplier for the next-generation iPhone—a potential catastrophe as Apple, by 2015, was producing a quarter billion iPhones per year. Moreover, it kept Lens from raising its prices. So any company supplying Apple with some component was preemptively thwarted from believing it had any power to exert, because Apple made it known that it had options."

"The analyses were wrong. Apple was making spectacular investments in China; it’s just that the contributions weren’t found *within* the iPhone, but in the machinery and processes that made it. “Sure, the glass comes from Corning, but does it come in that shape?” says one manufacturing design engineer, referring to the US-made glass on the iPhone. “Corning glass is useless until Lens makes it useful.” As for wages, observers were often counting only the steps in final assembly, oblivious to all the labor that went into building the components. Even so, it’s true that Chinese wages per iPhone were a small percentage of the wholesale cost; however, this wasn’t reflective of their insignificance but, counterintuitively, a sign of the China-based factories’ importance. The low cost per unit reflected their efficiency."

"What followed is perhaps the best-known anecdote on the manufacturing of the original iPhone. Jobs reached out to Wendell Weeks, CEO of Corning, a glassmaker in upstate New York, saying he needed the hardest glass they could make. Weeks told Jobs about Gorilla Glass, something Corning had developed for fighter-jet cockpits back in the 1960s. They’d never found a market for it and abandoned the project. Jobs convinced him to begin production immediately."