To go into the Foxconn factory is to see a place staffed by college-age kids and engineers who work 10 or so hours a day building electronics. There is no great Dickensian work house nor are there sad-eyed madonnas of the assembly line chained to the soldering irons. This isn’t the mundanity of evil – this is just mundanity.

Tim Cook is a supply chain guru. You don’t get to be exceptional at it without knowing what’s going on inside the companies that assemble your kit. Apple has – and will continue to – improve the conditions of the people who work on its products. And God have mercy, I think the Gawker commenter quoted in the article sums it up well: ““I believe Tim Cook will do more good for those employees (and already has, in point of fact) than Mike Daisey ever will.”

Some Rational Thoughts about Apple and Foxconn originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on February 3, 2012.

That practice went out the window when the New York Times published two pieces documenting the emigration of manufacturing jobs to China and a follow-up piece detailing the failure of Apple to maintain a humane work environment for companies assembling i-Devices on its behalf. Of the eleven quotes attributed to current or former Apple employees in the article that ran on January 21, only two are named. The remaining Apple sources: “One former executive”,  “a current Apple executive”, “one former high-ranking Apple executive”, “a former Apple executive”, “another former high-ranking Apple executive”, “one Apple executive”, “a person close to Apple” and “a current Apple executive”. None of the Apple sources in the damning piece written on January 25 are named. This is from The Gray Lady, a paper that used to represent the high bar of journalism.

One could argue that Apple’s legendary secrecy would endanger the employment of the current employees, but former executives as well? Not one former Apple executive thought enough about the abhorrant human rights violations alleged by the Times to speak on the record. Although it allows a freedom that leads to sensational journalism, basing the entirety of you insider perspective on anonymous screed doesn’t reflect very well on respected news sources. Think Star Magazine or The National Enquirer. Here’s what I found to be the most hilarious example of this unattributable “Internet avatar journalism”:

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

When using anonymous “sources”, shouldn’t one “make an attempt” to get “more than one sentence” in quotes? Could you really not get an unnamed source to put two coherent clauses together?

Utter lack of attributable quotes aside, the first piece isn’t very enlightening. Apple, like every other consumer electronics maker, assembles their products in China. It soon became apparent, however, that the first piece was a set-up for the punchline that was delivered January 25: Apple has negligently contributed to 2 industrial accidents in plants where iOS devices were assembled and has consistently turned a blind eye to the conditions that workers in these plants are forced to endure. Unfortunately for any standard bearing a resemblance to serious journalism, not a single source is named. Among the identity-free accusations from Apple:

“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety.”

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice…If half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?”

And the masterstroke that serves as the closing of the piece:

 “You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards,” said a current Apple executive.“And right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China.”

Even a consultant hired to advise Apple on working conditions couldn’t name himself, but that didn’t prevent a damning allegation:

“We’ve spent years telling Apple there are serious problems and recommending changes,” said a consultant at BSR — also known as Business for Social Responsibility — which has been twice retained by Apple to provide advice on labor issues. “They don’t want to pre-empt problems, they just want to avoid embarrassments.”

“We could have saved lives, and we asked Apple to pressure Foxconn, but they wouldn’t do it,” said the BSR consultant, who asked not to be identified because of confidentiality agreements. “Companies like H.P. and Intel and Nike push their suppliers. But Apple wants to keep an arm’s length, and Foxconn is their most important manufacturer, so they refuse to push.”

Of course people at BSR who do go on record had a decidedly different outlook on working with Apple. From BSR’s President:

“My BSR colleagues and I view Apple as a company that is making a highly serious effort to ensure that labor conditions in its supply chain meet the expectations of applicable laws, the company’s standards and the expectations of consumers.”

I wonder how many off-the-record pussies it takes to make one Eileen Foster. Maybe someday the Times will produce one.

The New York Times: 1851 – 2012 originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on February 2, 2012.

Many major technology companies have worked with factories where conditions are troubling. However, independent monitors and suppliers say some act differently. Executives at multiple suppliers, in interviews, said that Hewlett-Packard and others allowed them slightly more profits and other allowances if they were used to improve worker conditions.
“Our suppliers are very open with us,” said Zoe McMahon, an executive in Hewlett-Packard’s supply chain social and environmental responsibility program. “They let us know when they are struggling to meet our expectations, and that influences our decisions.”

So HP lets suppliers slide on price if there’s some sense that gouging the supplier will compromise worker safety? This, above anything else in the article, is the thing that jumps off the page and slaps me in the face, as it should any intelligent person. Substantiate that statement, HP. I fucking dare you. Show me how suppliers are “allowed…slightly more profits and other allowances if they were used to improve worker conditions”. Show me where you spend more for the same components in the same quantity and show me how this leads to improved conditions. These cowardly open-ended statements are meant to imply that Apple, with its universally-known and way-too-big-by-some-Stewartian-standard margins, willfully doesn’t do the same thing. The New York Times is smearing a trail of excrement using nebulous language such as “struggling”, “expectations” and “influences” to contrast HP’s un-corporate generosity to Apple’s willful neglect. Did HP leave profit on the table – explicitly for the benefit of workers in its supply chain – or not?

Apparently, HP is the Standard of Corporate Generosity to Which Apple Should Be Held originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on February 1, 2012.

Apple’s response to the hype made all of their prior performances look like dainty appetizers. I’ll try to put it in context with a couple of comparisons.

This quarter, Apple had:

• Profit equal to its revenue 5 quarters ago and $3 billion dollars more than Google’s revenue from last quarter.
• Twice Microsoft’s revenue and net income.
• The 4th largest reported profit of any company – ever – and the only non-petroleum company in the top 20 all-time.

Macworld has some pretty jaw-dropping graphs that detail the carnage.

While knock-off iPhone expectoraters like Samsung keep poking fun at Apple with their shitty advertising, there is a kernel of truth to them. People form lines for Apple’s kit – 37 million iPhones and 15.5 million iPads this past quarter alone. Samsung sees no lines, and now they can’t even claim a unit sales advantage – even though they vomit a bazillion phones every quarter. Can’t wait to see your earnings this quarter, guys. I have a feeling you’ll be “HTC’d”.

Apple’s Earnings Just Shot from Ridiculous to Surreal originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on January 24, 2012.

A current search for “AT&T” puts its Google+ result right below the company’s official website. A “natural search” i.e. the search you used to get before Google+, puts it at the bottom of page 6.

Let’s hope the FTC can use YouTube.

The Don’t Be Evil Bookmarklet: the FTC Rests Its Case originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on January 24, 2012.

What better way to advertise Android than with an actual droid? The resemblances between Lucas’s reboot of the Star Wars franchise and Android don’t stop there, however. To wit:

• Both bastardize popular original ideas to turn a buck with vastly inferior offerings
• Both substitute eye-catching features to cover for their lack of substance
• Both feature lead characters that have the likability of wet cardboard
• Both have successfully suckered in millions, only to have them regret the experience

Android: the Episode I of smartphones.

Verizon’s Advertising Finally Captures the Essence of Android originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on January 23, 2012.

Even though I’ve been turning a deaf ear to the latest exploit of Google’s search monopoly, according to Bloomberg, the FTC hasn’t. They plan on broadening their current antitrust investigation, which Google made public in June, to include Google S,PYW. Who says there’s no efficiency in government? Put your hand down.

I really hope all that talk about Eric Schmidt going into politics was just that. This guys appears at 2 Senate Subcommittee meetings chanting “Google doesn’t play favorites with search” over and over and now Google+ makes it 100 times more obvious than any of the algorithmic games that were being played before. At least then you needed smart people to root out their bullshit. This rises to a level of bluntness that even elected officials will be able to act on. Do Larry and Sergey secretly hate Schmidt? Maybe this is their idea of a practical joke?

You can bet that this piling on is going to yield some kind of blowback for Mountain View (in addition to the supernova of Schmidt’s political future), and it won’t be the kind of trouble that Larry will be able to buy his way out of.

FTC: Google, Search Plus Your World? Yea, Put It Next to the Big Pile Marked “Antitrust” originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on January 13, 2012.

This is Google’s latest attempt to address the rampant fragmentation that is encouraged on a Wild West platform like Android. Much like the mandated inclusion of the Holo theme on all ICS handsets, it’s a very inconsequential stick. But I do hear ICS comes with some sweet new wallpapers.

I'd f*ck me.

Android Design Principles. Really. originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on January 13, 2012.

Shaw’s latest dig refers to all the scratch Microsoft is making off of Android’s OEMs through the license agreements that all of the big manufacturers have been signing:

#occupyandroid

Redmond tipped the 70% point after signing up LG for the “extended we won’t sue your ass warranty”. The only major manufacturer not paying out to Microsoft? Hint: they duped Google into overpaying for them. Motorola gets to hide under Larry’s skirt while everyone else pays their tithe. That deal just gets better and better.

It’s a shame we don’t know how much these manufacturers are ponying up for the privilege of having Microsoft do nothing for them, but for the companies making Google’s kit, it’s as free as it is open. It has to be especially tough for suckers like HTC, which just announced that their October-to-December profits fell 41%.

So shine on, Frank X Shaw, you crazy diamond. The enemy of my enemy is…well…still my enemy. But Apple is stomping your hapless corpse in PC growth and in every category of consumer electronics where you two compete, so it’s easy to laugh at your tweets.

Google Lied, Android OEM Profits Died! originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on January 12, 2012.

“So you have two superlatives: biggest phone manufacturer and biggest TV manufacturer. Add in some tablets, some washing machines, and some acceptable software and you have a real and vibrant ecosystem. The next year will bring plenty of efforts to bring streaming media into the home, but the guy who is already there will win.”

So this is what it takes for a “real and vibrant ecosystem”? Someone should tell the other guys who were “already there” (Palm smartphones, Rio mp3 players, and a long list of etcs.) that the game is rigged and they should have won. Apple’s success has come on the backs of products that were not “already there”; it came from executing flawlessly – mostly in markets where they had no prior presence.

The only thing Samsung’s “already there” status tells me is that history is pretty decent indicator of future performance.

Samsung Isn’t the New Apple originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on January 11, 2012.