I am also familiar with quite a few of the companies on that list, despite the company I work for being a long way from Apple scale. It was particularly fascinating to see some companies that we have rejected for being terrible, and other top quality manufacturers you would expect Apple to use that are missing.
Agreed. I'll some of the reasons that we've rejected manufacturers (for being terrible) disappear when you're buying 10^7+ parts/year. I'm sure Apple has no trouble getting development support or reasonable lead times from Maxim, for example.
Unlike smaller engineering firms, who mostly have to take the parts they can get off the shelf to operate, Apple is at a big enough scale that companies will go way out of the way to make parts that suit their needs. It's a whole different ballgame.
