Yea, Motorola was not making like 100 million phones in a quarter that had the complexity iphones do.. the actual crazy thing that I can vouch for is that apple actually has a ludicrous amount of people at many factories that feed into Foxconn that are actually dedicated factories for apple.. each of the sub components such as display, cover lens, metal frame, speakers, batteries, PCB, sensors, and all of the ICs.. it’s truly insane the qty of people and machines in that supply chain.. would not be surprised if it is 10 million people.. plus lots of machines and factories...
Well that is 5 times less then iPhone in Server Years time frame. Complexity is likely multiple times lower, not to mention it was the same RAZR, every iPhone iteration has slightly different manufacturing.
Having said that, I do agree and wonder why hasn't iPhone manufacturing been more automated. One thing i think was on Foxconn and Apple's mind; how Chinese Government think if Foxconn get rid of million of jobs.
Quite a bit of the iPhone production is automated from what I understand. Basically many of the sub components before they get to Foxconn for final assembly have huge chunks automated. Apple uses a lot of automation and people. Their idea is to use the combination of both to hit the highest quality mark they can get. Some companies will basically accept some fall off in quality because they can automate more things and save time and or money, but apple tries to get the best of all worlds. It’s not an accident that when you get your phone it has almost assuredly no defects electrically, mechanically and cosmetically. Of course they aren’t perfect but they do try hard to be close to it.
To be fair they had to make so many because of the incredibly poor quality control and replacement units. I liked my razr a lot.. When I got one that actually worked
