Apple's Automation Drive in iPhone Assembly

TapTechNews on June 25th, The Information, a tech media, released a blog post yesterday (June 24th), introducing that in order to avoid the production suspension turmoil of Foxconn in 2022, Apple has been sparing no effort to promote the deployment of factory automation in recent years, resulting in a sharp reduction of 50% in the number of employees on the iPhone assembly line.

The report stated that Apple has always had a plan to try the iPhone assembly automation project, but it was shelved earlier due to high costs. The production suspension turmoil of Foxconn made Apple determined to implement the automation project, and the Apple iPhone 15 series achieved 'a large amount' of automation, but due to the complexity of production, automation still poses challenges to Apple.

The report pointed out that the biggest problem currently existing in the iPhone assembly automation project is 'the relatively high defect rate', which has led Apple to have to cancel some of the automation processes of the iPhone 16 series. TapTechNews translated some of the content as follows:

According to three people working in Apple's supply chain, Apple continues to deeply cultivate and promote automation technology this year, using machines to install the iPhone's buttons, receivers, speakers and main logic boards into the phone.

However, the three people said that the challenge currently encountered in deploying the machines is that it is difficult to fix them correctly, because these parts must be carefully tightened in place at strange angles.