manufacturing

WASHINGTON, D.C.--At Foxconn's plants in the the industrial town of Jundiai, Brazil, there haven't been any explosions.

Employees at the factory, which is ramping up production of Apple iPhones and iPads, never work beyond the 44-hour a week maximum set by Brazilian law. And those workers, when they first start on the factory lines, make twice as much as their Foxconn counterparts in China.

Labor activists point to Foxconn's record in Brazil to show that it and Apple can make products under lawful conditions while paying workers decent wages when the local environment requires it. … Read more

Harvard University has developed a method for churning out coin-size microrobots en masse.

By drawing on the ideas of origami, researchers have engineered a fabrication technique that produces a small flying robot much the way a children's pop-up book creates a structure.

The method can be used for different types of millimeter-scale electromechanical machines, Harvard said yesterday. But researchers developed the system specifically to replace the painstakingly slow process of manually making insect-like flying robots for its RoboBees project.

"You'd take a very fine tungsten wire and dip it in a little bit of superglue," Pratheev … Read more

How far can you get with a 3D printer and a dream?

CNET photographer Sarah Tew and I took a tour of Quirky's new Manhattan offices this morning. As depicted in her frankly great shots in the slideshow below, we got a firsthand look at the inner workings of a serious, professional product development company.

Normally I don't go in for facility tours. The articles that tend to result from such things too often take the appearance of marketing material. It was the promise of the chance to see how a real design company uses a 3D printer that drew me to accept Quirky's invite.… Read more

Nokia plans to cut 4,000 jobs as it moves manufacturing to Asia, the ailing mobile-phone company said today.

The cuts will take place this year at factories in Komarom, Hungary, Reynosa, Mexico and Salo, Finland, though the factories will continue some work.

"Shifting device assembly to Asia is targeted at improving our time to market. By working more closely with our suppliers, we believe that we will be able to introduce innovations into the market more quickly and ultimately be more competitive," Niklas Savander, Nokia's executive vice president of markets, said in a statement.

Asian countries … Read more

Donald Trump jumped into the Apple-China manufacturing debate Tuesday, calling for Apple CEO Tim Cook to make Apple products in the U.S.

After a New York Times article described abject working conditions at China-based Foxconn, Apple is facing increased criticism. Foxconn is Apple's go-to contract manufacturer for iPads and iPhones.

Speaking on Fox News, Trump said Cook should decree that its stuff be made in the U.S.

"Wouldn't it be a great thing if the new leader of Apple said we're going to start building plants in the United States," he said.

Trump … Read more

Two great pieces of journalism on Apple and its place in the manufacturing economy appeared recently: First, there's a series developing in The New York Times that kicked off in the Sunday edition: "How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work." A follow-on piece, "In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad," ran yesterday.

You must read these stories.

Second, listen to the This American Life episode "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory." In this gripping program, monologuist Mike Daisey tells of his trip to the Foxconn plant in China, where … Read more

Apple earnings reach record highs, Xbox rumors ramp up, and Obama tackles energy and tech industry concerns in his State of the Union address.

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

Rumors are a funny thing.

In one instance they create a whole culture of fodder for bloggers and their readers. In another, they cause whole factories to produce cases for products that neither exist, nor have official specifications. Such was the story before the iPhone 4S release and has now returned as the rumored iPad 3 launch looms.

The iPhone 4S launch should have proven to be a great lesson learned as several case manufacturers rushed to create case solutions for the rumored iPhone 5, which turned out to be pure fiction.

So now, according to 9to5Mac, instead of simply … Read more

Besides selling electric cars, Tesla Motors is doing something that hasn't been done in the U.S. in a long, long time: a new American car company is starting production at a new U.S. manufacturing plant.

That is indeed an extremely rare event in the U.S. these days, as a Tesla representative pointed out to me at CES. Especially in California which, for much of the last century, was a manufacturing base for General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. (See list of past U.S. auto factories.)

That Tesla factory, by the way, is the former NUMMI assembly … Read more