Sounds a little farfetched. These employees know they're completely burned in the industry if Apple / Foxconn finds out who they are, and they still send the Reddit mods verifying documents? That's career suicide.
Both the leakers and subreddit mods are just begging for some administrative subpoenas to Reddit to dump their accounts for industrial espionage or trade secret charges. Speaking from personal experience here, Reddit can't and won't defend your information.
I believe the leakers stated that they are not current employees of Foxconn, perhaps they are former employees, but they have access to multiple sources and sell the information they obtain to market analysts.
I had no pressing need to upgrade to the new MacBook Pro and I'm glad I've waited but the reintroduction of the magsafe charger would be pretty awesome. As much as I want that I don't know if I can see Apple backtracking on that, but I'd love to be wrong. Also no USB-C on the new iPhone is slightly disappointing even if it does mean I don't have to buy all new cables.
Assume my question hasn't been answered unless there's a comment underneath here saying it has. (I'm about to go to bed, anyone else is free to update.)
I think they could "backtrack" to MagSafe and save face by framing it as an enhancement to USB-C. "We're embracing standards, but we also designed an elegant MagSafe connector for USB-C."
As for return of a dedicated headphone jack on iPhones, I think that is highly unlikely as it was fundamental to their ideas about "wireless future." MagSafe they can return to ideologically.
This honestly seems like the most likely way to reintroduce MagSafe. Reintroducing the non-USB-C connector would be even more infuriating that its removal for those that have already purchased the newer MacBook Pros.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but removing the headphone jack completely pushed me away from the iPhone. It also really put into perspective the rest of their product line and how I could probably do better
Me too. I'm switching to Android because of the removal of that headphone jack. It was the final straw that pushed me off iPhone. When my 2012 MBP dies I'll buy an Asus.
If true, I'm a bit bummed that the full iMac redesign is coming in 2018 instead of at the end of this year. I have a 2011 MBA that is starting to show it's age. I was thinking a new iMac would be it's replacement.
Also, it would also be amazing for Apple to add Mag Safe connectors back to their laptops. Certainly, there must have been a sharp rise in destroyed laptops at coffee shops for them to backtrack?
I'm quite happy with the current iMac myself, I just bought a refurbished 27" at the end of April and don't have many complaints. If there was one, it would be how ludicrously expensive SSD's are from Apple compared to the cost of standard NVME drives, I ended up deciding the fusion drive in the refurb model I bought was "good enough" since I didn't want to spend the extra money buying a new machine plus another $200 or so to upgrade to a 512GB SSD.
I'm betting they always planned to bring it back. It's a unique product differentiator, and they probably only dropped it because of difficulties adapting it to USB-C quickly enough for the last launch.
From the wording of the announcement it sounded like it was a project <3 months old at the time. They specifically said it wouldn't be this year too.
Honestly for well over a year now it felt like the Pro was officially canned and ATP podcast reported from an insider that literally no one was working on it as soon as Q4 2016.
My thinking is there was a change of direction internally and a decision the future of Apple still required the talent and community of pro users rather than just embracing the mainstream full on and hoping that pros will be happy with iPads.
I don't wish to make light of any suicides or potential worker mistreatment at Foxconn, but it's important to keep in mind that when the Foxconn suicide nets made the news there were 14 reported suicides that year. Foxconn has something around one million employees. It's possible that the number of suicides was under reported but it's important to keep in mind that China's suicide rate is somewhere around 22 per 100k residents and the US's hovers somewhere around 10-13 per 100k residents.
14 suicides for a company of Foxconn's size doesn't seem particularly unusual, except for maybe being below national average.
I'm not an expert on suicides so I'm going to take your word for that as it seems logical to me. You've piqued my interest though and I'd love to learn where most suicides take place, I would assume at home.
With that being said, and to make clear I'm not an expert on Foxconn's corporate workings, but doesn't Foxconn offer housing at many of their campuses? It was my understanding that their larger factories are basically Foxconn cities where employees both live and work. I would assume many of these suicides took place at Foxconn facilities but not while actually working.
I stand corrected then. Just to be clear, I wasn't meaning to blindly come to the defense of Foxconn, I don't know enough about them to form an educated opinion, although if I'm being honest it would not surprise me if they have some rather horrid working conditions, but I see the Foxconn suicide stats thrown around often without any context of wider suicide rates.
I'm totally with you - I saw the Foxconn suicide rates at the time and thought both "That sounds very troubling" and then "How many employees do they have? Actually that sounds quite low, perhaps this is a bit of a storm in a teacup", and then I did a bit of googling and concluded that people throwing themselves off the roof of their workplace, probably in protest over the working conditions, ought to be considered a different sort of suicide from the ones that normally make up national suicide rates.
On the other hand, employing north of a million people to do assembly work probably comes with all sorts of challenges.
When reading suicide statistics please remember that what counts as a death by suicide can be tricky to define, and that makes comparing statistics really difficult.
This is especially the case in China where official stats are of variable quality.
In general we think China has a very high rate of death by suicide.
> Statistics are somewhat controversial in that independent studies often produce estimates that are greatly at odds with official statistics provided by the country's government. On the basis of data gathered in 1999, the government estimated an overall rate of 13.9 per 100,000 people,[4] much lower than in the total rate in other East Asian countries: Japan (18.5) and South Korea (28.9).
> The most recent government data provides statistics more inline with external estimations. According to a 2011 Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report, China's suicide rate is 22.23 people out of every 100,000.[5] This rate places the country among the countries with the highest suicide per capita in the world. For 2009–2011, 44% of all suicides occurred among those aged 65 or above and 79% among rural residents.[6] However, a 2014 study conducted by the Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong reported that China's suicide rate has dropped significantly, among the lowest levels [7] in the world. An average annual rate of about 9.8 people out of every 100,000 died by suicide as of 2009 to 2011, a 58% drop, largely as a result of population migration from rural areas and urbanization of middle class. Paul Yip, a co-author of the recent study and professor at the University of Hong Kong, said "no country has ever achieved such a rapid decline in suicides".[8]
If you look at photos from for example Tim Cook's visit to Foxconn you'll see that the factory is extremely clean and give the impression of having excellent working conditions.
The problem is how work is regimented: employees are not allowed to talk to each other while on a shift, and they get moved to New dorms randomly where they know no one, and may never see because they're on different shifts. It's a lack of human contact, a very different type of working condition.
People do not "usually" kill themselves at work or at home or on bridges. But in unusual situations, some do.
Let's put it another way: Chinese people who work at Foxconn are less likely to commit suicide than Chinese people who do not work at Foxconn. (And meanwhile, this controversy is continually discussed as if Foxconn only made products for Apple... I wonder how many people suicided to make your Xbox.)
