Hoenig

"The Apple team kept pushing LG to try different things, to experiment using tools in novel ways—anything to make assembly work, but all attempts were failing. “We were doing tooling on things that just had never been done before—for injection molding parts,” Hoenig says. “I mean, just never.” He was worried about pushing too hard, creating even greater risks of production. “We were doing a lot of things called hydraulics,” he says. “If the hydraulics aren’t synced properly, the tool will crash and it will break. And then [the production line would be down] for like two months.” That risk never materialized, but it was a constant worry."

"The stress got to the team. “Everything was driven by ID,” Hoenig says, “and they weren’t taking no for an answer.” They demanded constant experimentation. A whole wave of senior engineers who wouldn’t get with the program were let go. Others quit. “They wanted ‘can do—we’ll figure it out’ attitudes,” Hoenig says. “It probably took about six months to a year for them to kinda weed out those more seasoned engineers who said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’"