Gassée

"Frustrated by Apple’s in-house manufacturing deficiencies, Gassée advocated for the Portable’s laptop successor, the PowerBook, to be outsourced to contract manufacturers in Japan. This ignited a contentious debate in Cupertino, and Gassée, a Frenchman, was branded “anti-American.” But he won the debate, partially. Apple designed three PowerBooks—the 100, the 140 and the 160, in order of price—and had the 100 assembled in Japan. Sony canceled other projects to take on the challenge and freed up seven of its top engineers. Working from a half-page document of Apple specifications, Sony crammed the innards of a $4,500 Mac desktop into the form factor of a five-pound laptop. The whole project went from drawing board to production in just thirteen months, wowing Apple. It was priced at $2,300."

"“That’s how it all started—our relationship with contract manufacturing,” Gassée says. “As opposed to just getting the pieces like a disk drive and then assembling it ourselves. It started a culture of relying on, mostly, Japanese manufacturers.” The cost and quality of what Sony did, he says, awakened many to the capabilities of the Japanese in particular and outsourcers in general. “They were very good, and it was clear to me that we—the Americans—had no way to compete with what they did.”"