While custom configurations usually take more time to ship than standard configurations, current delivery estimates are even lengthier than usual. The reason for the delay is unknown, but on a speculative basis, it could be related to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak in China that has forced many of Apple's suppliers to temporarily close their factories and suspend production.
Manufacturing partners have imposed quarantines on workers returning from China’s Lunar New Year holiday, prolonging the idling of Apple device assembly operations for as long as a month. While some analysts say it’s too early to fully assess the toll on the Cupertino, California-based company, pessimism is creeping into their outlooks.
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“Apple’s supply chain typically has about a week or two of buffer inventory during the Lunar New Year holiday and as such any major extensions of the quarantine beyond Feb. 10 increase the risks of impacting the supply chain,” Krish Sankar and other analysts at Cowen Inc. wrote in a note to investors on Friday.
Public health experts in Shenzhen informed Foxconn, which trades as Hon Hai Precision Industry, that its factories there face "high risks of coronavirus infection" after conducting on-site inspections and therefore are not suitable to restart work, four people familiar with the matter told Nikkei.
"Violation of epidemic prevention and control could potentially face the death penalty," the internal meeting memo seen by the Nikkei Asian Review said.
My argument is not that work shouldn’t be meaningful, or that pleasure cannot be found in work; my point is that we should think carefully before accepting managerial ideas of fulfilment through work, because they risk detracting from the economic and social structures that govern work. Work is work – no matter how many beer fridges or meditation seminars modern workplaces offer, and no matter how many well-intentioned trainers show slides of pyramids.
At Apple Regent Street in London, groups of young women are gathering together to equip themselves with creativity and confidence. These women are part of Black Girl Fest Academy, a new program developed in association with Today at Apple and supported by mayor of London Sadiq Khan. The academy kicked off in late January and runs for seven months.
Over the next few years, you can see Jobs’s simplification of the Mac line, as the iMac and iBook debut, along with new Power Macs and PowerBooks—but never too many variations. In later years Apple has kept the total number of models fairly small. The spikes you see are generally when Apple refreshed a product line twice in the same year—for example, in 2009 Apple revised the Mac mini and iMac twice.
When Steve Jobs was the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook was credited as the supply chain expert that did wonders to the production of Apple hardware products. Now that Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple, I doubt that he has the time to fully immersed himself in such operational details.
Now that the supply chain side of the business was greatly challenged. I wonder how Tim Cook feel. Does he decides to roll up his sleeves and get himself more involved in this side of the business, or does he not micro-managed his directors and managers but secretly wishes he can get himself more involved?
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