Apple rolls away ... to China

I bought my first Macintosh computer in the bookstore at Sweet Briar College, because it was the only place around to find Apple products. It was a Macintosh IIsi, because even in the early 1990s, Apple loved mixing upper- and lower-case letters.

The computer - a fat little plastic pizza box - cost the same as a used car. But it was worth it.

I'd spent the 1980s struggling with machines based on the IBM PC and its arcane commands. By comparison, the Apple was a revelation: Simple and elegant, as natural to use as a box of microchips can be.

For more than 20 years - several lifetimes in technology - my electronic world has run on successors to that Mac. Today, my music, video, Internet and telephone is all served up by one product or another designed by Apple in Cupertino, Calif.

But none of them is made there. None of them is made anywhere in America.

As exhaustive stories in The New York Times have detailed, Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States. That's terrific, a credit to the company.

But "an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple's other products. But almost none of them work in the United States."

Apple's reasons for manufacturing overseas - like many companies in many industries - began with price. Labor is cheaper in nations with far lower standards of living. If Apple went to China for the same reason that Walmart makes coat-hangers there, its reasons for staying are more complicated, as The Times reported.

Factories on the scale that can build more than 100 million iPhones, iPads and iPods in a single year can be found only in the Far East, primarily in China.

Labor is certainly cheaper in China's repressive city-factories. But labor isn't that big a fraction of a gadget's cost.

More important, as The Times story makes clear, are the sheer size and centralization of the labor force, a fact that makes it fundamentally more flexible and scalable. If Apple wants to change the screen on the iPhone, it can get started the next day and soon be making them by the thousands. And that attracts suppliers from all over the world.

All that is possible because the dictators of China have made it so, because they don't bother with pesky things like freedom or worker protections. Because they throw billions of dollars and millions of people at solving problems without regard for the human, environmental or monetary costs.

Just ask the American companies now being crowded from the green energy business. China wants that industry, and it will devote every person and dollar it needs to get it.

"Last year, [Apple] conducted 229 audits," The Times reported. "There were slight improvements in some categories and the detected rate of core violations declined. However, within 93 facilities, at least half of workers exceeded the 60-hours-a-week work limit. At a similar number, employees worked more than six days a week. There were incidents of discrimination, improper safety precautions, failure to pay required overtime rates and other violations. That year, four employees were killed and 77 injured in workplace explosions."

All so I can have an iPod, and Apple can sock away more than $90 billion in cash.

It may get worse. Because of Apple's size - as well as the business of almost every other high tech company - China's manufacturing gravity is nearly inescapable. If you want to make a high-tech widget, and you want to make a lot of them, China is becoming dangerously close to the only place on Earth.

These are the kind of future-centered jobs that were supposed to allow American workers to ride to the factory in flying cars. Except now the factory is in China.

Several months before he passed away, The Times reported, President Barack Obama asked Apple founder Steve Jobs why all those jobs couldn't be in American factories.

Jobs was unequivocal. Those jobs aren't coming back, he told the president.

It's not clear which is sadder. That one of America's most innovative companies does almost all its manufacturing overseas. Or that one of America's greatest innovators couldn't see a way to change that.

Donald Luzzatto is The Pilot's editorial page editor. Email: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.