In 1988, when Jean-Louis Gassée took a close look at Apple’s “highly automated” Macintosh factory in Fremont, Calif., what he saw was not pretty. Mr. Gassée, a French specialist in office automation , had just been promoted to president of Apple’s product division by John Sculley, then Apple’s chief executive, and was responsible for the company’s engineering and manufacturing work . When he first started, Mr. Gassée decided to spend two days learning how the company actually built its products by working on a factory production line. His experience assembling a Macintosh computer display and then stuffing chips into a computer motherboard is an important part of the story behind the artful language on the iPhone box — “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.”

Source: New York Times December 15, 2018 09:56 UTC