Apple and Utopia

Apple Devices Image credit: TechGenie

Call me slow, but until today I hadn't read the two New York Times pieces that have been in the news lately. The first was about Apple's manufacturing getting off-shored and whether medium skill manufacturing jobs (the ones that created the American middle class) will ever return to the US (short answer: No). The second was about Apple's supply chain and worker conditions in factories in China, that are, to put it mildly, inhuman. Workers work 70 hour weeks routinely, make hardly any money, have workplaces and working conditions that would make any Westerner scream and any Indian grimace (is true!), and have alarming suicide rates.


I must ask you, gentle reader, to first read these pieces in full before proceeding. Yeah, I'm a long-form kind of guy. Seriously, off with you... shoo!


So how did the world react to these 'exposes', that to the informed person merely brought a light to bear on what was well known - or at least very well suspected? The first article was met with the usual election year responses over in the US. Some chitchat about manufacturing having left American shores, noises about 'new economy' jobs not filling up the resulting vacuum quick enough, and so on. The second was met with outrage (as well it should), even as the cognoscenti acknowledged that Apple was an industry leader in policing and bringing to light such abuses, and really... unless we want an iPad to cost several hundred dollars more, nothing can be done about it...


What was my reaction? Multi-faceted...