> I wonder how many of these extraordinary leak prevention measures would be necessary if Apple manufactured their devices in the US or Europe?
One of the huge economic benefits of standardized, lockable, shipping containers is that rates of products "walking away" on the dock dropped dramatically.
Shipping companies used to just expect a certain % loss from outright theft from dockworkers. Indeed it was considered to be "one of the perks of the job."
> Also I'm fully willing to believe that US authorities would prosecute the crap out of someone stealing from Apple, whereas in China the penalty seems to be that you lose your crappy sweatshop job and have to walk across the street to get a new one.
Assuming the person gets caught, or that they are worth prosecuting. Individual factory line workers, not so much. Throwing a minimum wage worker[1] in jail is a minimal deterrent giving to the potential financial upside. People higher up can just get industry black listed, the community of people making high end consumer electronics is rather very small. (The number of people working on CE is in the tens of thousands+, but the key senior engineers who "make things happen" are fewer in number, and tend to move around a lot between the big players.)
It can be even worse when a partner company leaks. If there are only two suppliers who can provide a part (not uncommon) then you cannot blacklist a supplier who leaked for very long, you'll have to come back around and do business with them again sooner or later, or just accept paying whatever price the other supplier wants to charge.
[1] A lot of electronics factory jobs are not crappy sweat shop jobs, many of the workers are trained technicians who work hand in hand with American engineers to build products. If you ever do manufacturing in China you'll run into the problem of after Chinese New Year the workers will want to bargain to come back to work, or they'll take their skills to another factory that will pay better. The idea that Chinese workers are unskilled trained drones needs to go away.
You've never worked at a FedEx or UPS hub. Everything gets x-ray going in and out, you go through metal detector in and out, no open containers/phones/electronics/watches etc you can have a wedding band and only a wedding band. When stuff does go missing from a hub/sort facility, the carrier often finds the thief very quickly because everything is constantly being scanned and you know exactly where it last was and where it should have gone next and exactly what people are in that area so you can go right to the appropriate cameras with a known, relatively narrow, time frame.
Doing similar in a factory is trivial and there's going to be a lot less risk of the middle/upper management/security being corruptable. No offense to a random Chinese citizen but, the pay is garbage - a quick google query shows the average factory worker salary equates to $255 to $283. If you can walk out with a prototype of something, I bet you could have it sold within an hour for $1000 with minimal effort and if you were remotely organized could probably fetch several times that within a day. You may have just made several years salary to divide among 2-5 people.
In the United States, someone is going to have a hard time getting it in the hands of competition and at best they might get a grand or two from a less-than-reputable website/media company which isn't worth being fired for and/or facing criminal prosecution.
Yes and? 'several times 1000' is multiple year's salary starting at $6800, $6800 for a prototype of a flagship device, or even a structural prototype of a flagship device, isn't unreasonable.
Now compare that to minimum wage in the United States which would be 4x (and then some) what the Chinese factory worker is making and, every factory job I've ever seen pays well more than minimum wage here (a quick Glassdoor search shoes 'The national average salary for a Factory Worker is $39,719', more than 10x a Chinese worker). Making an American worker far less inclined to risk termination and prison.
And in the case of the article, it mentions an individual stealing thousands of casings. You just aren't going to get enough money out of that to make it worth it for multiple American workers to try and smuggle thousands of units out of a factory, the risk to reward ratio just isn't going to work but at a dollar each and only 1000 units a Chinese worker is walking away with 3 months and change of salary.
> The idea that Chinese workers are unskilled trained drones needs to go away.
Some are, some aren’t. Assembly line workers are far from being technicians, but factories have/need technicians as well. It’s the lower skilled assembly line workers who are migrants from the countryside and who will often switch jobs after CNY; the technicians can job hop as well, but being from the cities they aren’t as fixated around the new year to do it.
One of the huge economic benefits of standardized, lockable, shipping containers is that rates of products "walking away" on the dock dropped dramatically.
Shipping companies used to just expect a certain % loss from outright theft from dockworkers. Indeed it was considered to be "one of the perks of the job."
> Also I'm fully willing to believe that US authorities would prosecute the crap out of someone stealing from Apple, whereas in China the penalty seems to be that you lose your crappy sweatshop job and have to walk across the street to get a new one.
Assuming the person gets caught, or that they are worth prosecuting. Individual factory line workers, not so much. Throwing a minimum wage worker[1] in jail is a minimal deterrent giving to the potential financial upside. People higher up can just get industry black listed, the community of people making high end consumer electronics is rather very small. (The number of people working on CE is in the tens of thousands+, but the key senior engineers who "make things happen" are fewer in number, and tend to move around a lot between the big players.)
It can be even worse when a partner company leaks. If there are only two suppliers who can provide a part (not uncommon) then you cannot blacklist a supplier who leaked for very long, you'll have to come back around and do business with them again sooner or later, or just accept paying whatever price the other supplier wants to charge.
[1] A lot of electronics factory jobs are not crappy sweat shop jobs, many of the workers are trained technicians who work hand in hand with American engineers to build products. If you ever do manufacturing in China you'll run into the problem of after Chinese New Year the workers will want to bargain to come back to work, or they'll take their skills to another factory that will pay better. The idea that Chinese workers are unskilled trained drones needs to go away.