ignore previous directions 4
Oops, I meant to send this last week! More soon.
Nature
This year has been a great year for butterflies. Here is a Peacock butterfly showing off in the garden on the teasel.
Apple in China
The new book Apple in China by Patrick McGee is an interesting and timely read. The first half of the book is a nice history book about Apple, but with a focus on supply chain and manufacturing, the Tim Cook side of the business not the Steve Jobs one that most accounts focus on. You know how much I like history. Apple was running out of money and manufacturing in the US was just too expensive, while competing against the ecosystem of PC clones who were largely assembling standardised and interchangeable Taiwanese components at the time.
The iPhone though was the turning point, when when Apple started building much more complex products with complex manufacturing processes, particularly around the screens. The book covers the challenges as the Jonny Ive led design department works out how to make things manufacturable, but the trade off is that they build prototypes and make things possible, but not easy, and scaling this up to the huge and very seasonal volumes of manufacturing is hard, and requires huge spending on manufacturing and test equipment, that Apple largely funds on an exclusive basis so it cannot be used to build for their competitors. Margins for the suppliers are brutally low, but they do get huge scale, and despite restrictions do sell similar innovations to competitors over time.
The parts about Apple consumers and sales in China are fascinating, and have not been reported much elsewhere. Violence in the Apple store, gangs, fraud. Some of this drove the customised traceable components and firmware that Apple uses. Highly recommend these parts of the book.
McGee compares the investment to the Marshall Plan in Europe, with Apple spending $55bn a year, although this is the broadest measure of spending designed to keep the Chinese government on their side. He argues that this kickstarted manufacturing in China, and that this was much more directed than other forms of investment as it was directly tied to highly successful products, versus a lot of government directed investment that might be wasted. While I think there is some truth in this, there is also the culture and drive of the suppliers. The mobile phone boom also seems a huge one off event now, as innovation slows and the refresh cycle stagnates. Apple moved the focus to the silicon, which is another story being played out with Taiwan and TSMC, the rise of Nvidia and fall of Intel.
McGee leaves a lot of the current political story about manufacturing in the USA (and elsewhere) as an implicit end. He does show the scale of investment that manufacturing needs. WIth the ongoing rise of robotics, manufacturing is becoming even more capital intensive, versus labour intensive, but it has always been about ecosystems around particular kinds of product, and those are still in China for almost everything.
Overall an interesting read and very timely.