LG

"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 second thing LG didn’t know is that a little-known Taiwanese company called Hon Hai Precision was already reverse-engineering LG’s capabilities in building a CRT and was being “brought up” by Apple as a secondary supplier to build the iMac in China. The founder of Hon Hai had heard of LG’s twin fiascoes in Wales and Mexico and called up Apple with a simple message: “I can fix this.” That phone call would have enormous consequences and reverberate for decades, turning Hon Hai Precision into one of the world’s largest companies by revenue and a household name the world over. Most people would know it by its trade name: Foxconn."

"LG was desperate to win the order because the Korean economy had been rocked by the Asian financial crisis, in which currency turmoil in Southeast Asia spread to the rest of the continent and brought South Korea to the brink of default. The Korean currency lost roughly half its value amid the upheaval, with numerous banks facing insolvency because of their high exposure to dollar-denominated debts. One Apple engineer recalls that inside the LG factory was a large banner the workers walked past multiple times per day. It was two feet tall, twelve feet wide, and had just one word in big letters: SURVIVE."

"An Apple engineer recalls telling Foxconn: “If you guys want this business, you have to earn the business. You need to do all the same hard work that LG did to ensure that the tools meet the part quality, interchangeability, and everything, such that the final cosmetic fit and finish is consistent across each and every product, no matter how you mix them or where you ship them across the world.” It was a giant effort."