The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant

“And it’s significantly harder to get malware on those because they’re not general purpose.

General-purpose computers are taking less of a primary role in our lives, and it’s going to pay off tr...

Even the best-secured devices aren’t perfect, and locked-down, single-purpose devices are definitely vulnerable to attacks, especially since they are al...

“Wi-Fi attacks have strangely not...

Basically, these rules apply whenever you use public Wi-Fi—don’t enter any sensitive data over public networks and log in to only those networks that you trust. Update your phone when prompted.

It’s less likely to be done by loose-knit hackers out for the lulz or to earn a few bucks;

it’s more likely to come from a government agency or a well-paid firm that does business with government agencies.

There may need to be a mechanism for law enforcement to access this stuff, but how we do that in the age of the Secure Enclave is an open question.

For Apple, security is a question of product too. As it moves to promote Apple Pay, internet-of-things apps, and HealthKit, consumers must be confident their data can be kept safe.

the message is clear: You won’t find a more secur...

Foxconn’s enormous Longhua plant is a major manufacturer of Apple products; it might be the best-known factory in the world. It might also might be among the most secretive and sealed-off.

Apple’s inclusion of the designed by phrase renders the statement uniquely illustrative of one of the planet’s starkest economic divides.

The cutting edge is conceived and designed in Silicon Valley, but it is assembled by hand in China.

The vast majority of plants that produce the iPhone’s component parts and carry out the device’s final assembly are based here, in the People’s Republic, where low labor costs and a massive, highly skilled workforce have made the nation the ideal...

as of 2009 there were ninety-nine million factory workers in China—has

Foxconn is the single largest employer on mainland China; there are 1.3 million people on its payroll.

Worldwide, among corporations, only Walmart and McDonald’s employ more.

An investigation revealed that workers were routinely logging hundred-hour workweeks and toiling as many as eighteen days in a row,

We interview as many workers as we can and begin to confirm a picture of a high-stress workplace marked by long hours and repetitive tasks, a factory where most hires last only about a year before quitting.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the iPhone has transformed China. On top of physically building the device, China is now one of the world’s top consumer markets too.

it pulled off the feat in part by becoming the world’s gadget factory.

An estimated 90 percent of the world’s consumer electronics pass through Shenzhen.

this. In China, we always want to improve. There is a fear that if we do not, we will have to go back to nothing, back to farming the land for food,” he says. “China is all about work. Work and money. We do not take vacations.”

They paint a bleak picture of a high-pressure working environment where exploitation is routine, and where depression and suicide have become normalized.

“It wouldn’t be Foxconn without people dying,”

The vision of life inside an iPhone factory that emerged was varied—some found the work tolerable, others were scathing in their criticisms, some personally experienced the despair Foxconn was known for,

Most knew of the reports of poor conditions before joining, but they either needed the work or it didn’t bother them.

Almost everywhere, people said the workforce was young, and...

the pace of work is widely agreed to be relentless, and the management culture was often described as cruel.

Since the iPhone is such a compact, complex machine, putting one together correctly requires sprawling assembly lines of hundreds of people who build inspect, test, and package each device.

Failing to meet quota or making a mistake can draw a public condemnation from superiors. Workers are often expected to stay silent and may draw rebukes from their bosses for asking to use the restroom.

“Everyone has the idea of working in Foxconn for one year and getting out of the factory and going to work for Huawei.”

Foxconn would shirk on social insurance and be late or fail to pay bonuses. And many workers sign contracts that subtract a hefty penalty from their paychecks if they quit before a three-month introductory period.

On top of all that, the work is grueling.

In certain cases, if a manager decides that a worker has made an especially costly mistake, the worker has to prepare a formal apology.

This culture of high-stress work, anxiety, and humiliation contributes to widespread depression.

a lot of factories skew dystopian; they are, after all, places constructed with the sole purpose of maximizing the efficiency of human and machine labor.

But Longhua is different by virtue of its sheer expanse alone—it

It is factories all the way down, a million consumer electronics being threaded together in ...

It’s factories as far as you can see; there is simply nothing beautiful in sight.

Foxconn City is a culmination of one of the very earliest human innovations—mass production.

Even though Ford has been lionized as a hero of American industry, it’s still easy to underappreciate the impact of the assembly line,

an innovation perhaps more revolutionary than the iPhone or the Model T it now churns out at scale.

Ford’s biggest innovation, probably, was the supreme maximizing of efficiency.

The distributed, station-based mode of production, in which each worker performs one specialized task ad infinitum, is what made complex machines like the automobile affordable and what makes the iPhone relatively affordable today.

And that, basically, is what’s happening in China today, albeit with an even bigger labor force and an even more intricate, fine-tuned, and exhaustive labor operation.

Consider this: Apple sold forty-eight million iPhones in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Each and every one of those phones was assembled by hand, by a human being. Or, rather, by...

As of 2012, each iPhone required 141 steps and 24 labor hours to manufacture. It has...

In our interviews, the magic number we kept hearing was seventeen hundred—laborers charged with manning a machine stamp or checking the screens for quality said that’s how many they were expected to oversee on a given workday, which averaged twelve hours.