Korea

"Jobs eventually canceled the other phone ideas and declared multi-touch the future. He was adamant there’d be no keyboard, so the phone would be as full screen as possible. Apple’s engineers suddenly had to find suppliers that could build multi-touch displays at scale—something that didn’t exist at the time. There was no way Apple could send the specs to some factory and wait for the parts to be built; instead, it sent teams of engineers to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China to find hungry vendors it could work with to co-create the processes. “There were a few truly groundbreaking mass production processes we were involved with, where we really had to go around to find the best people in the entire world—the peak of what humans have developed for some of these technologies,” says a product manager. By early 2006, they had a full-screen prototype enclosed in brushed aluminum. Jobs and Ive “were exceedingly proud of it,” journalist Fred Vogelstein would later recount. “But because neither of them was an expert in the physics of radio waves, they didn’t realize they’d created a beautiful brick. Radio waves don’t travel through metal well.”"

"The success quickened Apple’s consolidation into China. The low cost of manufacturing played a role, but it was the ubiquity of labor, workers’ flexibility, the presence of “next door” suppliers, and tailor-made export policies that were groundbreaking. “Any time you had some problem or change, you could get a mountain of people to follow you down to the X-ray room or to the testing lab or to the sourcing lab to get materials or parts, or to try some machining or something. It was all right at your fingertips,” says one PD engineer who also worked in Korea and Taiwan. “Anything we wanted, we could get it,” this person adds. “If they didn’t have it, they’d go buy it. We’d send ’em out to the store at two in the morning to get some measurement device or some material to remove something or to apply something so it would work better.” Summing up what made the experience so distinctive, he said, “It was just the total control of those factories and the people there—whatever we needed, it would happen.” A manufacturing engineer recalls trying to get somewhere during a shift change one day, when tens of thousands of people were exiting the factory and heading back to the dorms. “It would take you forty-five minutes or an hour just to go less than a kilometer,” this person says."

"those who want to be first, must take a chance and order when no one else dares. John Fredriksen did so. The shipyards in Korea and Japan had empty order books from 1991 onwards and were pressured into lowering prices."