What company is the iphone from

Where Is the iPhone Made?

It takes a village to build an iPhone

Anyone who has bought an iPhone or another Apple product has seen the note on the company’s packaging that its products are designed in California, but that doesn’t mean they’re manufactured there. Answering the question of where the iPhone is made isn’t simple.

Assembled vs. Manufactured

When trying to understand where Apple manufactures its devices, there are two key concepts that sound similar but are different: assembling and manufacturing.

Manufacturing is the process of making the components that go into the iPhone. While Apple designs and sells the iPhone, it doesn’t manufacture its components. Instead, Apple uses manufacturers from around the world to deliver individual parts. The manufacturers specialize in particular items—camera specialists manufacture the lens and camera assembly, screen specialists build the display, and so on.

Assembling, on the other hand, is the process of taking all the individual components built by specialist manufacturers and combining them into a finished, working iPhone.

The iPhone’s Component Manufacturers

Because there are hundreds of individual components in every iPhone, it’s not possible to list every manufacturer whose products are found on the phone. It’s also difficult to discern exactly where those components are made because sometimes one company builds the same component at multiple factories.

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Maritsa Patrinos / Lifewire

Some of the suppliers of key or interesting parts for the iPhone 5S, 6, and 6S and where they operate, included:

• Accelerometer: Bosch Sensortech, based in Germany with locations in the U.S., China, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan
• Audio chips: Cirrus Logic, based in the U.S. with locations in the U.K., China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore
• Battery: Samsung, based in South Korea with locations in 80 countries
• Battery: Sunwoda Electronic, based in China
• Camera: Qualcomm, based in the U.S. with locations in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and more than a dozen locations through Europe and Latin America
• Camera: Sony, based in Japan with locations in dozens of countries
• Chips for 3G/4G/LTE networking: Qualcomm
• Compass: AKM Semiconductor, based in Japan with locations in the U.S., France, England, China, South Korea, and Taiwan
• Glass screen: Corning, based in the U.S., with locations in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, The Netherlands, Turkey, the U.K., and the United Arab Emirates
• Gyroscope: STMicroelectronics. Based in Switzerland, with locations in 35 countries
• Flash memory: Toshiba, based in Japan with locations in over 50 countries
• Flash memory: Samsung
• LCD screen: Sharp, based in Japan with locations in 13 countries
• LCD screen: LG, based in South Korea with locations in Poland and China
• A-series processor: Samsung
• A-series processor: TSMC, based in Taiwan with locations in China, Singapore, and the U.S.
• Touch ID: TSMC
• Touch ID: Xintec. Based in Taiwan.
• Touch-screen controller: Broadcom, based in the U.S. with locations in Israel, Greece, the U.K., the Netherlands, Belgium, France, India, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea
• Wi-Fi chip: Murata, based in the U.S. with locations in Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, India, Vietnam, The Netherlands, Spain, the U.K., Germany, Hungary, France, Italy, and Finland

The iPhone’s Assemblers

The components manufactured by those companies all around the world are ultimately sent to just two companies to assemble into iPods, iPhones, and iPads. Those companies are Foxconn and Pegatron, both of which are based in Taiwan.

Technically, Foxconn is the company’s trade name; the firm’s official name is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd. Foxconn is Apple’s longest-running partner in building these devices. It currently assembles the majority of Apple’s iPhones in its Shenzen, China, location, although Foxconn maintains factories in countries across the world, including Thailand, Malaysia, the Czech Republic, South Korea, Singapore, and the Philippines.

Pegatron is a relatively recent addition to the iPhone assembly process. It is estimated that Pegatron built about 30 percent of the iPhone 6 orders in its Chinese plants.

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How & Where iPhone Is Made: Comparison Of Apple’s Manufacturing Process

We call it the iPhone Saga, how Apple has perfected the art of juggling the global supply chain, its nose locked on where on earth to get suppliers that can offer the most efficient and best value parts under Apple’s strict quality benchmark. This infographic comes on the heels of our editorial team’s past effort to follow the iPhone supply chain and what it means to American manufacturing.

The latest story is about the iPhone 6 using glass and not the rumored sapphire crystal. But the story is more than just the material; it’s whether the cover would be made in America or elsewhere.

When GT Advanced, the supplier of TouchID’s sapphire crystal, bumped up its facilities in Mesa, AZ, rumor had it that the iPhone 6 would feature a Made-in-the-USA sapphire crystal cover. It turned out iPhone 6 is still in glass, and it’s likely by Corning, which outsources its fabrication to Asia and France.

It appears that Apple is giving out top secrets and arming our biggest enemies with state-of-the-art technologies that can diminish our competitiveness. Foxconn, Apple’s biggest supplier, which assembles the iPhones mostly in its facilities in China, has installed robots (nicknamed Foxbots) for the first time to meet its iPhone production quotas. How ever can this company invest in advanced robotics if not for the humongous Apple orders?

But, there’s the rub. It’s rumored Apple is exploring ways to scale down costs by trying robots over Chinese workers. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen that before. Our fathers still remember how Japanese robotics booted out many jobs in the American automotive industry. Yes, the China factory is maturing (higher wages and increasing competition from other Asian countries) and it’s inching closer to an American model. I don’t know how things will turn out in the next five years, but that it won’t stay long as it is — America outsources, China receiveth. Who knows, China might one day, under pressure to cut costs, outsource jobs to, well, us?

WHERE ON EARTH IS IPHONE MADE, FOLLOW ITS GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN IN THIS INFOGRAPHIC:

Author: Alex Hillsberg financesonline, an independent journalist specializing in topics about technology, B2B & SaaS solutions and finance in general.

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How and Where iPhone Is Made: A Surprising Report on How Much of Apple’s Top Product is US-manufactured

Are the last chapters of the iPhone saga unfolding? Not by any stretch of imagination, if you ask the Apple faithful. Definitely starting, if you ask the Android challengers.

The world and word war between Android and Apple just keeps escalating to ever greater heights, and has been the most engrossing story in business and software market for quite a number of quarters now. Let’s not even talk courtroom battles and intellectual property clashes here. Very few technologies are completely new. Most owe a debt of gratitude to forebears who laid the foundation for all the awesomeness we carry around in our bags and pockets. Let’s just talk about sales.

The release of iPhone 6 last September 2014 put the focus once more on the Apple supply chain. I pointed out in a recent article tiny “cracks” in the Apple’s Chinese supply chain, notably the introduction of robotics to cut production costs. Will these machines become more engaged in the future and displace Chinese workers, too?

Clearly, Apple has never been as popular as it was in the 2nd quarter of 2013. In the Q3 earnings call, Apple reported thanks to their highly efficient strategies as much as 31.2 million iPhones were sold in that quarter. In fact, 34 million units of iPhone 5 were sold in the first 100 days. This was a quarterly record for Apple. Contrast this with 26 million iPhones sold last year. The company’s flagship product still has firm believers worldwide. That’s not the whole story, however, because incredible as it may seem iPhone 5 sales figures in the last three quarters were lower than what Wall Street expected causing massive fluctuations in the value of Apple’s shares in the stock market.

From the left flank, it looks like the Android charge led by Samsung is gaining ground. In 2012, Apple lost its firm grip on the smartphone market and Android manufacturers were emboldened to match Apple’s products spec for spec and price point for price point. Apple still leads, but not by miles. By the end of July 2013, Android phones have 65% of all smartphone sales in the nine influential smartphone markets in the world (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, USA, Australia, China, Mexico), although as a single model, iPhone still has the biggest slice of the pie – 26.3%.

In the aftermath of Apple’s double whammy release of the premium iPhone 5s and the more price-friendly iPhone 5c, the excitement over has skyrocketed to even greater heights. What fortune awaits the radical plastic-enclosed iPhone 5c? Is Apple running scared or is it just plain smart? Two can play the game, after all. If Android manufacturers are leveling up to Apple’s premium space, why can’t Apple level down to Android’s budget territory? It turns out that the iPhone 5c is not so cheaply priced, after all. It’s still a premium device targeted solidly at the mini versions of the flagship devices of Android rivals Samsung, HTC and Sony.

Fact is, Apple gets even more aggressive than usual. Weeks before the new iPhones were officially released, it implemented a trade-in program that will take hundreds of dollars off the price of the new handset if the customer turns in an older model in perfect working condition.

With sales of 9 million smartphones (combined for the 5s and 5c) reported on just the opening weekend, it looks like Apple has another winner in its hands and safely through with flying colors for the next four quarters, at the very least.

In this infographic we trace a sruprising report on how and where iPhone is made, what’s its supply and manufacturing chain and info on how much of iPhone is actually US-manufactured. We’re providing snippets of information on just who is making the parts that go into the two new iPhones, and where, exactly, these parts are made. Did you know, that the much-touted fingerprint sensor was imagined in Florida, but manufactured in Asia by Taiwanese giant TMSC? How about the M7 motion co-processor? Did you know that it’s the brainchild of NXP, a company in the Netherlands, which has fabrication facilities in Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines?

Still, reports are coming in that US companies involved in the Apple supply chain are beefing up their US production facilities and many of the components that go into the iPhone are actually made Stateside and shipped to China for assembly.

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The Secret History of iPhone

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs put sneaker to stage for what was the most incredible keynote presentations of his life—a life filled with incredible keynote presentations—and in the history of consumer electronics.

The company had been working for over two years on the Purple Experience Project. It had gone from a tablet to a phone. From a dream to reality. And just before he stepped out in front of the crowd, Jobs assembled his team and told them to remember the moment: The moment before iPhone. Because, in the next moment, everything would change.

Watch the video above. Seriously. It’s way better.

During the keynote, Steve Jobs said it was rare enough for a company to revolutionize even one product category. Apple had already revolutionized two: Computers with the Mac and personal music players with the iPod. With the iPhone they’d be going for three.

He set up and knocked down the physical keyboard and the stylus, features that dominated the BlackBerry, Motorola, and Palm smartphones of the day. Then Jobs introduced the multitouch interface that let the iPhone smoothly pinch-to-zoom, the physics-based interactivity that included inertial scrolling and rubberbanding, and the multitasking that let him move seamlessly from music to call to web to email and back.

They were technologies that would one day become commonplace across the industry but back then looked like science-fiction. From Apple:

iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone. We are all born with the ultimate pointing device—our fingers—and iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse.

Technology alone wasn’t enough

The original iPhone, based on the P2 device of the Project Experience Purple (PEP) team, code-named M68 and device number iPhone1,1, had a 3.5-inch LCD screen at 320×480 and 163ppi, a quad-band 2G EDGE data radio, 802.11b.g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, and a 2-megapixel camera.

It was powered by an ARM-based 1176JZ(F)-S processor and PowerVR MBX Lite 3D graphics chip, manufactured by Samsung, with a 1400 mAh battery, and had 128MB of onboard RAM. Two NAND Flash-based storage tiers were available at launch: 4GB or 8GB.

More importantly, iPhone also included several sensors to enhance the experience, like an accelerometer that could automatically rotate the screen to match device orientation, a proximity sensor that could automatically turn off the screen when close to the face, and an ambient light sensor that could automatically adjust brightness.

And it could also be charged—and critically, synced to iTunes—by the same 30-pin Dock connector as Apple’s already exceedingly popular iPod.

What the original iPhone didn’t have was CDMA and EVDO rev A network compatibility. That meant it couldn’t work on two of the U.S.’ big four carriers, Verizon and Sprint. Not that it mattered; the original iPhone was exclusive to AT&T.

It also lacked GPS, or support for faster 3G UTMS/HSPA data speeds. In addition to no hardware keyboard or stylus, the iPhone also didn’t have a removable, user-replaceable battery or SD card support. None of that pleased existing power users of the time. Nor did the absence of an exposed file system, copy and paste or any form of advanced text editing, and, critically to many, support for third-party apps. Likewise, since the iPhone had a real web browser instead of a WAP browser, which was required to display carrier-based multimedia messages, the original iPhone didn’t support MMS either.

All of this was wrapped in bead-blasted aluminum with a black plastic band around the back to allow for RF transparency.

Then there was the price. The iPhone debuted at $499 for the 4GB and $599 for the 8GB model on-contract. Those prices weren’t unheard of at the time—early Motorola RAZR flip phones were incredibly expensive as well—but it meant Apple couldn’t penetrate the mainstream market.

Race to launch

Macworld wasn’t a finish line, it was a shot from the starting pistol. Jony Ive, Richard Howarth, and the industrial design teams’ work had largely been completed already but hardware engineering still faced challenges.

Steve Jobs scratched the pre-release iPhone screen with the keys in his pocket, he asked the team to come up with a better solution. They turned to Corning, which had invented a new, chemically hardened material, but had yet to find a commercial application for it. The team spun on a dime and got Gorilla Glass onto the iPhone.

The software team, under the auspices of Scott Forstall, was still racing as well. Greg Christie, Bas Ording, Mike Matas and others had been working on the human interface and interactivity for a long time already, but things were still being tweaked. Split screen for email, for example, got pulled after Jobs felt it was too crowded on the small screen.

Likewise Henri Lamiraux’s software engineering and frameworks team, including Nitin Ganatra’s native apps team, and Richard’ Williamson’s mobile web team. They had to make sure all the apps and all the features performed not only reliably but delightfully.

They’d already gotten a relatively full version of Safari, based on the same WebKit rendering engine developed by Don Melton and team for the Mac, up and running. They’d also taken Google’s location data and created the best Maps implementation ever seen on mobile, but they were then tasked with adding a YouTube app as well.

On June 6, 2007 Steve Jobs again took to the stage at Moscone West, this time for Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. He announced web 2.0 apps as the development platform but also announced something more: the launch date.

Go for launch

On June 28, 2007, Apple shipped the original iPhone. Lineups had already formed at Apple Stores, especially flagship stores like the glass cube in New York City. People had been waiting outside for days. The lines went around the block. And then around again. Anticipation was stratospheric. Competitors were dismissing it. Media was calling it the Jesus Phone.

And then the doors opened.

The initial reaction was positive. Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret, writing for The Wall Street Journal:

Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.

Ryan Block, writing for Engadget:

It’s easy to see the device is extraordinarily simple to use for such a full-featured phone and media player. Apple makes creating the spartan, simplified UI look oh so easy — but we know it’s not, and the devil’s always in the details when it comes to portables. To date no one’s made a phone that does so much with so little, and despite the numerous foibles of the iPhone’s gesture-based touchscreen interface, the learning curve is surprisingly low. It’s totally clear that with the iPhone, Apple raised the bar not only for the cellphone, but for portable media players and multifunction convergence devices in general.

The novelty and experience were so good, many people simply didn’t care about missing features or high price tags. But the price did prevent iPhone from getting into as many hands and lives as Apple wanted.

So, at the September 5, 2007 «The Beat Goes On» music event, Steve Jobs not only introduced the first iPod touch, he announced they were dropping the 4GB iPhone entirely, and dropping the price of the 8GB iPhone to $399. From Apple:

The surveys are in and iPhone customer satisfaction scores are higher than we’ve ever seen for any Apple product. We’ve clearly got a breakthrough product and we want to make it affordable for even more customers as we enter this holiday season.

On February 5, 2008, Greg Joswiack, then vice president of Worldwide iPod and iPhone Product Marketing, now in charge of all product marketing, announced a 16GB model. From Apple:

For some users, there’s never enough memory. Now people can enjoy even more of their music, photos and videos on the most revolutionary mobile phone and best Wi-Fi mobile device in the world.

There was still no subsidized price, even on contract, but there was movement.

Competitive contempt

The vast majority of smartphones back in 2007 had hardware keyboards and, if they touch screens at all, those screens were almost all resistive and came with a stylus pen to aid in usability. Mobile apps were inconsistent and the mobile web was pretty much limited to WAP browsers.

While the iPhone certainly wasn’t universally adored, the entrenched incumbents in the smartphone space were some of its harshest critics. That was, after all, their jobs.

Ed Coligan, former CEO of Palm:

We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.

Mike Lazaridis, former CEO of RIM (now BlackBerry):

Talk — all I’m [hearing] is talk about [the iPhone’s chances in Enterprise]. I think it’s important that we put this thing in perspective. [. ] Apple’s design-centric approach [will] ultimately limit its appeal by sacrificing needed enterprise functionality. I think over-focus on one blinds you to the value of the other. [. ] Apple’s approach produced devices that inevitably sacrificed advanced features for aesthetics.

Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft:

You can get a Motorola Q for $99. [. ] [Apple] will have the most expensive phone, by far, in the marketplace. There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.

It was a very different world in 2007. Phone were just beginning to hit usable data speeds but bandwidth was still limited and expensive. The appeal of smartphones was also limited primarily to early adopters and enterprise, and hadn’t yet approached mainstream adoption.

Palm and BlackBerry were both wrong. Smartphones would give way to pocket computers and «PC guys»—if they worked for Apple—were absolutely the ones to figure it out. And for consumers, the interface is the feature, so by tackling interface Apple was beginning to make those pocket computers accessible to everyone.

Microsoft, however, was at least half right. The iPhone was too expensive. That was something Apple could and would change.

Google, an original iPhone launch partner, was both more perceptive, and more agile. They’d already bought Danger, the next generation phone platform created by Sidekick mastermind — and former Apple employee — Andy Rubin. They’d originally focused on making a Windows Mobile/BlackBerry-style competitor, determined to make sure Microsoft could never dominate the market and cut them out of the mobile future they so clearly recognized would be the next big thing.

Google’s then-CEO, Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s Board of Director’s—and on stage for the iPhone event. He hadn’t told Rubin what Apple was doing, however, or that Google would be giving the iPhone Maps and YouTube. Rubin was shocked. Collectively they realized Microsoft might not dominate mobile at all. Apple might. So, much to their credit, they spun around and refocused Android at the iPhone.

Changing everything. again

The original iPhone ended up selling over 6 million units in its first year on four carriers in four countries. Now, iPhone sells hundreds of millions a year on almost every carrier in almost every country. It’s also been followed up by iPad, Apple TV and Apple Watch, HomeKit and HeathKit, CarPlay and AirPlay, AirPods and, soon, HomePod. And, with iPhone X, we’ve seen the beginning of what’s next.

Steve Jobs told his team the world would never be the same. How utterly right he was.

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