A Visit To Apple HQ
Posted by elpabl0 on 11th October 2010
Two members of the pebble.it team were excited recently to receive an invite to the Apple European Headquarters in Cork, Ireland. As members of the Apple Consultant Network, we were asked to come to the Apple Campus and participate in a day of meetings with various members of the Apple sales and Solutions teams as well as other ACN members. All in all, a very positive trip and a great opportunity to strengthen our connection with Apple and to network with others in our industry.
Perhaps the highlight of the visit was the tour of the Apple production facility: a rare chance to see the iMac and Mac Pro assembly line, something that many of the Apple staff that were with us had never seen themselves.
We were told to turn off our phones and attach an anti-static cord to our footwear, and then ushered into the large warehouse where hundreds of workers were building, testing and packaging computers. Whilst we would love to have taken some photos it was made quite clear that this was forbidden, but here’s some key facts we learned on our tour:
- The majority of the factory is open - not a ‘clean room’ as you’d expect. The only sealed environment we saw was where the glass was inserted into the face of the iMacs.
- Custom Macs (i.e. where a customer has requested more RAM, or a larger hard drive) are built on the same production line - a quick scan of a barcode on the case will tell the assembly line workers which components to install.
- We spotted a few Windows devices around - one was being used to pair bluetooth keyboards and mice, another was seen near the testing bays. There was also a fair number of old Macs lying around, such the original CRT iMacs, and seemingly still in use!
- Every device produced undergoes automated testing for a minimum of 16 hours, and going up to as much as 72 hours, depending on the configuration. 6.25% of the line’s output go on to further manual testing, where an engineer will test all of the software, hardware and burn a DVD (containing a video of a snowman).
- The 4 lines put together 520 iMacs every 10 hour shift. The output is constantly measured, with large screens suspended from the ceiling showing current speed and deviation from the expected pace.
Sadly, this was no Cadburys Factory tour - there were no free samples at the end. Nevertheless, a great experience, and an real eye opener.
Digg: Dead or Alive?
Posted by thatsinthebook on 6th October 2010
We are liking the new Digg layout, but is it too late or is digg still a go to place for information?
