Apple's Attempts to Automate Product Assembly Have Met With Limited Success

[JPack]

I agree with you. Innovation in automation would be a way for Apple to become far less reliant on Chinese cheap labor, which is a very good thing for Apple, America and other freedom loving countries generally. There is little moral justification for a company like Apple to be investing so much in China.

It's about the entire electronics supply chain, not to mention China has far more advanced automated manufacturing than America. Automation still relies on engineers and technicians running the factory. Guess which country is providing more education in those areas?

 

[Madhatter32]

It's about the entire electronics supply chain, not to mention China has far more advanced automated manufacturing than America. Automation still relies on engineers and technicians running the factory. Guess which country is providing more education in those areas?

It was not that long ago that such supply chains ran through Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Also, many of these engineers are educated at American universities.

 

[ksec]

I seriously doubt the accuracy of this report. It isn' they can automate those task ( spreading glue with millimetre accuracy.... what? ) or screws with pressure sensor ( What? )

It is simply no machine can do it with the speed that is as fast as a trained human worker with muscle memory, and at a cost that is competitive to replace those human jobs. And it is much cheaper for those worker to adopt to new task than the team and robots to adopt a new job.

You can do a Youtube Search on Chinese Factory Worker Speed and you could see for yourself.

For something that is small, dedicate as Smartphone human still has an upper hand.

 

[iReality85]

I find that extremely surprising (not that I have any reason to doubt the accuracy of this report)

This whole article is BS, lol. We manufacture CPUs that require nanometer-level precision. Or for that matter, printed circuit boards. Do people think some assembly line worker is sitting there with a soldering iron? No, it's all done by machine with rapid pin point accuracy. It's just laughable.

I'll tell you what it's really about: China doesn't want Apple displacing hundreds of thousands of its workers. Workers whose sole jobs are to put a screw here, a dab of glue there. It's factory line work. And the CCP wants to keep its vast lower class / low skill population employed.

 

[Madhatter32]

Most of us don't care whether it is made in America. In fact looking at US politics right now I'd favour products being built somewhere else.

I would say most in America do not base their purchase decisions on anti-Americanism.

 

[Detnator]

Interesting....Tim wants to help mankind, help the vulnerable etc. etc. but his company has been striving to come up with ways to reduce the number of workers. I am confident that the robots will regularly send food packages to the families of the workers who are terminated.

So on the one hand we’re all complaining about how iPhones are assembled by Chinese “slave” labor (slave = work for no compensation).

On the other hand it’s evil if we get robots to do it because that puts all those “slaves” out of work.

Then there’s the complaints that Apple products are too expensive (despite it being proven time and again that Apple’s profit margins aren’t significantly higher than the rest of the industry).

So we should somehow magically pay human workers in USA 2-3x what is actually comfortable Chinese labor wages thus dramatically increasing costs while simultaneously decreasing purchase prices of all Apple’s products and services, and still expect them to stay in business producing high quality products with industry leading customer service and not go bankrupt (like the 90’s).

Someone explain to me how that’s going to work please?

 

[McG2k1]

I’d prefer if they brought the work back here with humans and stopped using borderline slave labor overseas.

 

[JPack]

It was not that long ago that such supply chains ran through Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Also, many of these engineers are educated at American universities.

Manufacturing tends to be in the country with the largest market with the most number of engineers. Those countries were eclipsed once China made manufacturing a strategic priority.

In terms of engineers, there's a reason why Tim Cook is chairman at Tsinghua University. American universities simply don't have links to real manufacturing sites for practical applications.

 

[Detnator]

This is known as the “Luddite Fallacy”

Reducing employment in unskilled assembly positions tends to have the benefit of boosting employment in the service sector, which has been the overall trend in North America for a long time. Service here not meaning just things like fast food and retail, but also including medical care, certain aspects of engineering, etc.

The service sector tends to be fairly protected from automation, as humans value the human to human interaction that comes with most of those positions. It’s not easy to negotiate or relate to a machine, after all.

I love this approach. Maybe if robots can assemble iPhones etc then there are more people and there’s more money available to pay those people so that when I call Apple or any other company I can get a human answering the phone instead of “hello. I’m an automated system to help direct you to the right department...” or “thanks for calling ____. Press 1 for ...” etc.

 

[CarlJ]

well one needs to be perfect every time and the other needs to be faaaaast.

This. I think many people don‘t get the scale and speed - when Apple is selling roughly 50 million phones a quarter, that’s well over 500,000 phones a day. Every day. 500k more tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. That means they need to be building them at the same pace, 500k a day (give or take). That requires huge scale, and highly efficient operations, and a lot of automation of the parts that can be automated, and very fast, skilled, workers doing the parts that can’t be easily automated.

 

[rgbrock1]

Interesting....Tim wants to help mankind, help the vulnerable etc. etc. but his company has been striving to come up with ways to reduce the number of workers. I am confident that the robots will regularly send food packages to the families of the workers who are terminated.

Just part and parcel of Tim Cook's hypocritical, and constant, virtue-signaling.

 

[cmaier]

This whole article is BS, lol. We manufacture CPUs that require nanometer-level precision. It's just laughable.

CPU manufacture does not involve robots placing transistors down. It's a completely different technology. The only precision that is required is mask alignment.
[automerge]1591291189[/automerge]

Just part and parcel of Tim Cook's hypocritical, and constant, virtue-signaling.

You guys get pissed off at when the jobs exist (they are menial! they drive people to suicide!) and get pissed off when they try to get rid of them.

Seems hypocritical to me.

 

[rgbrock1]

Sooner or later products like iPhone will be produced in full automation; if Apple isn't first then somebody else will do it. The system needs to change and provide GOOD alternatives for the people that will be replaced. A universal basic income would be a good start.

Commie, much?

 

[iReality85]

CPU manufacture does not involve robots placing transistors down. It's a completely different technology. The only precision that is required is mask alignment.

Nope, the technology is out there and has been for many years. You're saying machines can't perform precise placement at the millimeter-level? Are you kidding me? How do you think circuit boards are printed, or anything that requires pin point accuracy.

 

[Baymowe335]

Ironic, huh...

Yes, robots aren't good at small precise manufacturing. Not yet. Tactile sense has to get a lot better, and also vision has to dramatically improve. Ironic that we seek to replace humans who are the most advanced and intricate 'machines' in the universe. Maybe acknowledging that and building a society around that is a better idea?

Machines are far more precise in many areas.

Machines and humans both have a place, with machines having far more upside. The obvious goal is to automate everything and let humans use their brains to think of more automation. Using our skills to tighten screws is actually a waste of human potential.

Also, the statement that humans are the most advanced machines in the universe is up for debate.

 

[5105973]

I dunno man, here in Britain I find most shop staff to be perfectly pleasant, but I prefer self-service cos I'm just an antisocial misanthrope. I suppose human rights and true equality for everybody, I just don't want too have to talk to anyone!

Speaking of customer service - I seem to see two extreme and opposite portrayals of American customer service in the media - people are either all big over the top friendliness or they're surly and rude. What's that about? Aren't people just people?

I have only had bad service from cashiers in department stores. I don’t know why but they often act very reluctant to serve. My sister in law worked in a department store for a year and she says she thinks there’s just something about the size and relatively isolated environment that sort of sucks out one’s personality and willingness to do anything but count the hours until it’s time to go home. Honestly, sometimes I feel that way shopping in them, so I can see why they’re dying out.

The clerks in the grocery stores are very professional, even down to the teenagers working part time. The only issues I have with a small fraction of the grocery clerks is that they’re lousy at bagging up the groceries. When possible, we try to do that ourselves so bread doesn’t end up squished by heavier items, for example. But by and large I much prefer having a cashier ring up my purchases than doing it myself.

 

[SeattleMoose]

Get better robots...

 

[cmaier]

Nope, the technology is out there and has been for many years. You're saying machines can't perform precise placement at the millimeter-level? Are you kidding me? How do you think circuit boards are printed, or anything that requires pin point accuracy.

Nice straw-man argument. Where did I say any of what you claim I said?

 

[planteater]

I dunno man, here in Britain I find most shop staff to be perfectly pleasant, but I prefer self-service cos I'm just an antisocial misanthrope. I suppose human rights and true equality for everybody, I just don't want too have to talk to anyone!

Speaking of customer service - I seem to see two extreme and opposite portrayals of American customer service in the media - people are either all big over the top friendliness or they're surly and rude. What's that about? Aren't people just people?

Yes. People just tend to latch onto negative experiences more. Service quality at shops is a grab bag. There are many variables, including what one puts into the interaction.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Also, the statement that humans are the most advanced machines in the universe is up for debate.

😆😆😆 Especially now. Yeah, I would tend to agree, but maybe auto companies need crash test dummies?

 

[justperry]

We can isolate and manipulate individual subatomic particles, are you really saying we don't have the technology to measure torque and pressure at the scale of an iPhone screw? I'm not saying you're wrong, it's just crazily unintuitive. Is it an issue of the technology exists but is too expensive for factory use, or too large, or something?

We can isolate and manipulate individual subatomic particles, are you really saying we don't have the technology to measure torque and pressure at the scale of an iPhone screw? I'm not saying you're wrong, it's just crazily unintuitive. Is it an issue of the technology exists but is too expensive for factory use, or too large, or something?

Just think of it, it's a tiny screw, the angle needs to be near perfect, the smaller the screws the harder it will get, thread is much easier to be damaged, torque needs to be very...VERY low, like milliNewtons/m, the material the thread is in is aluminium, not an easy material, picking and orientating the screws isn't easy either, this all takes time and lots of trial and error AND money, and then the end product is probably much too slow for it to manufacture 100.000s of phones (=many more tiny screws) in a day.

This whole article is BS, lol. We manufacture CPUs that require nanometer-level precision. Or for that matter, printed circuit boards. Do people think some assembly line worker is sitting there with a soldering iron? No, it's all done by machine with rapid pin point accuracy. It's just laughable.

I'll tell you what it's really about: China doesn't want Apple displacing hundreds of thousands of its workers. Workers whose sole jobs are to put a screw here, a dab of glue there. It's factory line work. And the CCP wants to keep its vast lower class / low skill population employed.

A CPU ≠ a screw.
Pick and placing is easier than "installing" a screw.

 

[axboi87]

By your argument we shouldn’t automate any menial jobs.

The reasons Apple want to do this are to improve quality, to be able to do manufacturing in countries without millions of laborers willing to work for a couple dollars a day, and to allow workers to spend time on higher-valued jobs.

Thank you! At the end of the day, it's about society becoming ever more efficient in how we use Human Resources. Imagine a future where so much "menial" work is automated, and the bar for "menial" in the first place keeps rising to the point that 70+% of all jobs are in science / engineering / coding / space. We should work very hard (perhaps even have public funding toward) freeing people from jobs that are probably "beneath us as as species" in the first place. Jobs that don't naturally pay the true cost of living should not be performed by humans, and by removing the human overhead from the "costs of living" we'll actually significantly reduce it in the first place. Imagine a McDonald's that's just a big vending machine. Imagine houses / buildings / cars built entirely by machines. Automated Farming / Harvesting / Shipping / Meal Preperation (no human involvement from farm to table) and how that would lower the cost of feeding the world. I could go on and on. This will likely happen faster in the beginning than we can re-train our populous, so we'll have to figure that out, but ultimately this immensely evolves us as a species so we can use the majority of our human resources on truly groundbreaking things.

 

[compwiz1202]

Sofar it’s seen that even if a new parent industry doesn’t drum up as many jobs as the one it’s replacing, the supporting industries fill the gaps, if not exceeding the original amount. Take airlines for example, not that many people comparatively are pilots, but many people work in tourism, as stewards/stewardess, as support staff at airports, etc.

I would imagine if we could perfect automation to the point that it could assemble anything better than humans, we would indeed all be focused on service industries, or living off of some form of basic income system.

Automating many service sector jobs is hard, and some impossible, as humans need face to face interaction, and generally do not enjoy the rigidity of talking to a machine (How many times have you called a company only to think “please just give me a real human”).

I’m in the civil engineering field myself. I don’t fear automation at all. Sure, you could automate a lot of structural design, and it essentially is already thanks to analysis software, but at the end of the day you need someone who knows what they are doing to make sure the numbers look right and nothing seems out of place.

Re self checkout, that also generates many more jobs then it destroys. Now you’ve got programmers, designers, engineers, tech support, service staff, that all must exist to maintain this industry.

I don't mind automation as long as it can allow every possibility and I have an easy way to pass through to a human if I need instead of pounding 0 20x and screaming representative over and over. Like with ordering food, at least it is going to be my fault and not a clueless cashier if my order is entered wrong.

 

[nt5672]

Have you not been to supermarkets, drug stores, banks etc. recently? They are attempting to force us to use self-service scanning and cash out tills so they can fire millions of people. And for the most part we are bending and happily accommodating their wishes. Not even a discount on our purchases for doing so. We are blindly putting our neighbours on the unemployment line.

For the most part people at that level do not care about their job and do not do it well. In most cases, they deserve to be replaced. Yep, we use the self-checkout for groceries. Why? Because then our damageable food does not get crushed, roughed up, etc. And it is faster. A lot of people in these jobs seem to think that slow poor service is somehow them taking advantage of the system. You know making more salary for doing less. Nope we just use self checkout and make their jobs redundant.

The same thing happens with doctors. Some doctors that we see, but not as much as mentioned above, are just drug dispensers. AI is gong to be better every time. Can't wait. I think in most cases people get what they deserve when it comes to automation.

 

[compwiz1202]

Stop gluing sure, I think a lot of us would like that, but what's the alternative to screwing?

Abstinence.