137,000 iPhones per day. That’s how many manufacturer Foxconn is reportedly making these days, its chairman tells the press. That’s an amazing figure adding up to 50 million iPhones every single year, even as Apple struggles to keep enough hardware in stock. And the process isn’t easy, either — chairman Terry Gou says that the company found out it needed a certain machining rig usually designed only for prototyping in order to stay in line with Apple’s strict manufacturing standards. Foxconn ended up buying over 1,000 of the machines at $20k each, even while other manufacturing companies are buying just one.
It’s crazy to think about the scale of the operation over there — not just the equipment, but the workers and organization required to churn out that kind of product. And sadly, it appears the pressure is still on for the company, as we’ve seen multiple times before. Apple is setting records over here on this side of the world with the iPhone’s sales numbers, and it’s sometimes easy to forget that behind all of that, there’s an industrial machine churning out product by the millions.
[via HardMac]
TUAWReport: Foxconn making 1.5 iPhones per second originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.