I made your iPhone

[K9]

Some guy's phone arrives with photos of the factory worker who made the phone set as the home screen 

[Merusk]

It's the modern version of "Help, I'm trapped in a Chinese laundry!"

[Teleku]

http://www.iphonegirl.net

 

[Tale]

Marketing ploy.

iPhones: made by chicks with nice smiles. If you're lucky, she'll even include her photo.

edit - thanks for today's avatar

[CharlieMopps]

Yea, Chinese factories are FAR less pleasant than that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_NXFHMm_9U&feature=related

[Teleku]

Yea, Chinese factories are FAR less pleasant than that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_NXFHMm_9U&feature=related

Eh, that (along with the links associated with it) are much more gritty, old school style factory jobs though.  Pressing metal and what not.  This is an electronics factory, which is manufacturing high end electronic equipment.  By it's very nature it's going to be a very different work environment from that.  On top of that, Apple does try to enforce a set of minimum standards on factories that produce there goods (with various levels of success).

[Tannhauser]

I'm visiting supplier factories in India and China next year and I had better see hotties like that. 

[MahrinSkel]

I'm visiting supplier factories in India and China next year and I had better see hotties like that. 

I'm sure if you discretely mention your desires to the factory heads, you won't be disappointed.  You may not even get to the factory.

--Dave

[schild]

That is amazing.

[Quinton]

The cleanroom jackets that the assembly line folks who work for one of our OEM partners wear have these little loops on the arm to hold pens, which I thought was an interesting innovation.  They generally seemed like a cheery bunch, but 12 hour shifts have got to be pretty brutal.

Looks like local media picked it up: http://tech.sina.com.cn/t/2008-08-24/11312410215.shtml

Hopefully she's still got a job -- I wouldn't be surprised if foxconn took a dim view of this sort of thing.

[NiX]

I fail to see why she would lose her job. It's obviously someone else taking the picture.

[Trippy]

It's also apparently standard practice to take pictures with each unit as part of the QC process so even that part is okay. It's the not deleting the images afterwards that's the issue.

[Sky]

Shouldn't there be a panty shot or something? ^^ 

[Lantyssa]

It's good publicity.  She and the photo-taker should get a raise for not deleting a few pictures.

[Oban]

I'm sure if you discretely mention your desires to the factory heads, you won't be disappointed.  You may not even get to the factory.

--Dave

Say yes to karaoke.

[Trippy]

You don't even have to sing.

[Signe]

She's adorable like a tiny little adorable thing!

[schild]

I wonder if she makes as much in a week as Apple gets for ONE iPhone. I bet not. Ignorance is bliss.

[Trippy]

Assuming she's paid minimum wage (which is probably not true now, now that Apple is paying attention to what Foxconn is doing in China after the whole iPod scandal broke 2 years ago) she would make roughly US$145 a month or ~US$34 a week. Considering that AT&T is supposedly paying something like $300 to Apple for each iPhone 3G sold with a contract (but Apple no longer gets a cut of the subscription fees) would you be correct.

Edit: math is hard

[schild]

Sad.

[Rishathra]

That smile alone is worth $34 a week.   

[WindupAtheist]

I'm visiting supplier factories in India and China next year and I had better see hotties like that. 

 

[CharlieMopps]

lol, my fathers company moved factories to Mexico.
The average they paid their US workers was about $80/day + insurance, benefits, etc...
The average they paid their Mexican workers was about $10/day, and no benefits.

After a few years in Mexico they of course started looking at china.
The estimates they were throwing around were between $1 and $2 a day per worker, no insurance at all, no benefits, etc...
They were talking about how much cheaper it would be without safety and environmental laws... etc...

Anyway, thankfully he's left the company. He now makes about 30% less, but the company he works for doesn't ship jobs outside the country.

[Teleku]

The sad thing is that if we are going to outsource labor, we should at least be pushing as much of it to Mexico as we can.  Mexico developing/stabalising is in our best interests.  It would stop our immigration problems, and with the money going out to a country that borders us, has a much bigger chance of actually coming back again.  As opposed to now, where our massive trade imbalance is flowing to China, which generally hostile to us and is much more keen to use that money on China than buy foreign crap to send it back.

[Trippy]

The really sad thing is that China is becoming too expensive now for many of these global companies that are pushing profits at the expense of everything else. For example China is now too expensive for Adidas:

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jKGxlQWF7mTO3L8twylAgjrUe8Lw

even though they were only paying ~US$95 a month per worker:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3646424.ece

[schild]

Well, it's nothing new that global corporations that target places like WalMart and Target are scraping the bottom of the barrel. In other words, fuck them. I hope Laos becomes too expensive.

[Jeff Kelly]

I once read an interview with the CEO of Adidas (The main corporate headquarters is in Herzogenaurach only a few miles from where I live) in the german weekly news magazine "Der Spiegel".

Asked about the cost of manufacturing for the football jerseys of the national football teams (this was around Euro 08) he told the reporter that they pay less than Eur 6 per shirt for production (They sell it for Eur 75 here in germany)

[caladein]

Well, it's nothing new that global corporations that target places like WalMart and Target are scraping the bottom of the barrel. In other words, fuck them. I hope Laos becomes too expensive.

Laos is landlocked and still more-than-nominally Communist so that might take some time.

[Trippy]

Supposedly not fired (yet):

Mystery 'iPhone Girl' generates Internet intrigue

[lamaros]

making victory signs as she poses next to an iPhone.

VICTORY? What happened to peace?

[Trippy]

Then the terrorists win.

[Chenghiz]

I'd like to think she wasn't fired, but then again would a state-run news agency not lie through their teeth about it?