Architecturally wise they are vertically integreated with all their in house hardware and software but I dont think anyone can argue that their manufacturing practices dont help that statement.
There used to be a time when Left-leaning people knew some history. Terrible as the worker conditions might have been at the dawn of the Industrial Age, they were a vast improvement compared to the past.
Equally so, unpleasant as Chinese factories may look to a Westerner, they are an improvement over the past. Have people actually asked those workers if they were willing to quit or had better prospects elsewhere?
> There used to be a time when Left-leaning people knew some history.
Everyone tends to view history from an angle that supports their preconceptions. You don't seem to be any exception.
> Terrible as the worker conditions might have been at the dawn of the Industrial Age, they were a vast improvement compared to the past.
How are you defining worker conditions?
A family with a small plot in the countryside could not occupy their full time with cultivating the land. If you travel throughout the deep countryside of countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, China and the poorer parts of Thailand like Isaan, you still see much evidence of this today.
People moved to the cities because they could make more money. It's that simple. In no way were working conditions an improvement if you care about hours, health and safety. The ready availability of jobs for unskilled labor also created perverse incentives for parents to send their children to work at the factories. That was true in late 18th and early 19th century Europe, and it is still true today in the poorer emerging economies.
I suppose, said or insinuated no such thing. What a childish comeback.
Of course it isn't evil. If you're starving then making money is not only not evil but a necessity. Beyond meeting your immediate needs, working endless hours at a repetitive, unhealthy job to support your family or further your children's future is commendable.
That does not mean worker conditions improved with industrialization as compared to working on your own farm or as a day laborer.
A standard of living is not made by just the raw hours of leisure. Industrialization also brought security from famine and allowed for hygiene, sewage and medicine. It also allows people to chose to work very little, just to support their bare necessities (although very few chose to).
In many cases it wasn't really a voluntary choice to change lifestyle in order to make more money; a lot of the mass-urbanization periods happened when previous ways of making money collapsed. In the U.S., two big periods of rural flight were the late 19th century, when industrialization of farming lowered prices enough that family farmers were no longer competitive; and the 1930s, when the dust-bowl put another large cohort of family farmers out of business.
You could argue they ended up better off anyway, but it wasn't as if millions of people sat down and voluntarily decided, "well, I could stay and farm, but I'd rather go to the city and work in a factory". The collapse of family farming as a viable occupation sort of made the choice for them.
The industrialists were not responsible for the conditions of late medieval agriculture. Again, would the rural folk have been better off without the factories altogether?
An alternative way to look at things was that industrialism saved Europe (and later the rest of the world) from waves of famine. It allowed, for the first time since centuries, the possibility for ordinary people to travel to work and to move up in society. Conditions were not agreeable to a modern eye, but compared to the past were a great improvement.
But in spite of the fact that they outsource manufacturing, they have their own OS, hardware they've designed for the external (such as the chassis), and components they've designed internally (like the A4) - they're still far more vertically integrated than any competitor.
Do you have any more vertically integrated player in the market that has yet to be discussed? The rest of the companies use off-the-shelf parts and an OS they haven't designed. They all are far less vertically integrated.
Certainly Apple is not completely integrated vertically, but that doesn't mean they aren't more so than any of their competitors.
Samsung designs and builds chips (the A4 with another name basically), AMOLED screens, RAM, flash, chassis and OS (Bada) for some of its smartphones. Probably even more so for its dumbphones. I'm guessing Nokia is also more "vertical" than Apple. And that's just immediate rivals in this industry, I'm sure there's better examples if you only limit it to "in the world".
Is having one's fingers in a lot of pies quite the same thing as vertical integration? If a team making a Samsung phone needs a chip made by another arm of Samsung, do they get special pricing or do they have to bid against other chip customers?
I struggle to see how that statement could be true for a company that outsources all of its manufacturing.