The design of every new iPhone starts here at Apple's headquarters in
Cupertino, California by a team of industrial designers. But the resources
needed to make this design a reality come from all over the world.
Apple largely depends on outside manufacturers to produce ready-made
components for its devices. The company's supply chain is incredibly complex and
far-reaching. Apple works with suppliers in 43 countries and 6 continents to make
all of its products but tracing the origin of even a single component is
tricky. Take the A12 chips in the newest iPhones for instance.
Jim Morrison, Vice President of Technical Intelligence at Tech Insights, told CNBC "In the Apple A12
Apple designed the chip. There is an Apple logo on the packaging. Apple is
headquartered in California. Apple outsources chip fabrication to TSMC in
Taiwan. Packaging and final tests of A12 may be done by Amkor in the Philippines.
The A12 is then assembled into the iPhone by Foxconn and China or Pegatron in Taiwan.
So which is the country of origin? For the Apple A12, we recognize it
as a USA component because Apple's name is on the chip and Apple is a
california-based company. Each year, Apple publishes a broad list of suppliers but
the company does not specify which components come from which manufacturers
and they will often use more than one supplier for a part on the same model.
One way to get a glimpse into Apple's supply chain has been through tear downs.
A recent tear down by repair firm iFixit shows that Apple's iPhone 10S used
SDRAM memory from Micron. Another teardown by Tech Insights, a firm that
dissects devices in analyzes the parts inside, also found SDRAM from Micron but
also from SK Hynix and Samsung. The outside of the phone is protected by
Gorilla Glass made at Corning's Kentucky Factory. But when you break each
component inside of the phone down into its raw materials, an even more vast global production line appears.
Modern engineered materials are much more complex they were in the past. There are
something like 80 or 82 elements from the periodic table of elements the
materials engineers have at their disposal when designing modern products like a smartphone.
The typical smartphone uses somewhere between 60 and 70 of
those 80 or so elements from the periodic table of elements.
For example, Indium, Tin and Oxygen are used to make a thin electric film on top of the screen
which gives it its touch capabilities. The raw materials that make up your
iPhone come from almost every continent. A phone's processor is mainly made of
Silicon but it also uses Phosphorus, Antimony, Arsenic, Boron, Indium and Gallium to give it better electrical properties.
Meanwhile, the electrical connections that carry all the data are made of Gold, Silver and Copper.
Tantalum is also used for the micro capacitators that regulate electricity flow.
Apple does not disclose exactly where its elements were mined because such
information is extremely difficult to track but data from the U.S. Geological
Survey gives us an idea since it tracks yearly element production by country.
Four minerals that Apple does closely track our Tin, Tungsten, Gold and Tantalum, which are known as conflict mineral.
The U.S. government has determined that the mining and trade of these minerals has helped to finance
armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding regions and contributed to a humanitarian crisis.
Leonardo DiCaprio taught us about blood diamonds but there's blood metals that are that are in our smartphones
because they contribute to internal violence in unstable States. In 2010, Congress passed
the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires all companies publicly traded in the U.S. to
report the source of their conflict minerals. Apple has complied. The company
now maps its supply chain for Tin, Tungsten, Gold, Tantalum, and Cobalt
and requires all of its smelters and refiners to
participate in third party audits to ensure humane extraction of the minerals.
Another set of really important minerals needed to make your phone are what are
known as rare earth metals. The term rare earths refers to 17 chemically similar
elements and rare earths are quite distinct among themselves within that
family but one of the characteristics that they do all share are these
fantastic magnetic and conductive properties.
Ytrium, Europium, Terbium and Gadolinium produced the brilliant colors of a phone screen
and Praseodymium and Neodymium are used for the magnets in the speaker and to help your phone vibrate. (iPhone chimes)
China is by far the largest producer of rare earth metals.
China produces somewhere between 80 and 85% current global supply of rare
earth elements. But mining these elements can be challenging and taxing on the environment.
What happens is frequently, you have a coincidence of rare earth
elements and other radioactive materials and what this does is it creates
alongside your mining operation a radioactive waste management problem.
Apple has launched a number of programs aimed at reducing its environmental footprint.
The company has two working robotic phone dissectors, named Daisy, that are each able to extract 93 kilograms of Tungsten,
42 kilograms of Tin, 1.8 kilograms of Tantalum and .97 kilograms of Gold for every 100,000 iPhone devices.
Last year, Apple even made a commitment to one day use only
recycled materials in its products. We hope to one day eliminate our need to
mine new materials from the earth. Now as you can imagine this is a massive effort.
Apple is already making headway the company now uses 100% recycled Tin in
the logic boards of its newest iPhones. We really need to learn to see the
materiality involved in these technologies. 'Cause it's not something
that you'll just notice by interacting with this technology. It really takes, you
know, education and thinking through the very real implications of the decisions
we make buying every new device in technology. Apple's sold its two billionth iOS device
this year and though it's hard to pinpoint exactly where every component
of an iPhone comes from, one thing is for certain. It's the result of an incredibly
complex supply chain and raw materials that are Ridge innate from all over the
planet. It's a process that transforms the most basic elements into one of the
most advanced pieces of technology that fits in the palm of our hands.