Macintosh Factory

Keep reading. "There are 10 lights-out (fully automated) production lines at some factories, including table one in Chengdu, AIO (all-in-one) PC and LCD monitor lines at a factory in Chongqing, and a CNC line in Zhengzhou. ... Foxconn has deployed more than 40,000 Foxbots, industrial robots developed and produced in house, at factories in China." The Chengdu plant makes iPads.[1] Foxconn refers to "table one" because they usually don't name their contract manufacturing clients. Apple used to have robotic assembly lines in Fremont, CA.[2] Then they switched to cheap outsourced manual labor. [1] [link] [2] [this video]

Auto final assembly lines make about a car a minute. Some run a little faster, some a little slower. About 500 cars per shift. 2 shifts a day, 6 days a week will get you to 6,000. Beyond that, you need another assembly line. Going to 3 production shifts is rare; you need some maintenance downtime. This doesn't work like a growth curve. Once you get it working, an assembly line produces at a constant rate. Tesla's low output indicates serious downtime problems. They've shut down for some line rework, which is probably a good move. There's still no discussion of the Fremont plant's problems from someone who has both access and the knowledge to understand what they're seeing. So everybody is still guessing. There's some CBS video, but it doesn't tell you much.[1] You need to see a video of a full cycle at the stations with problems, and they're careful not to show that. CBS shows 2-second clips of assembly stations but has detailed coverage of Musk's sleeping bag. Robotic precision alignment by force feedback tends to be slow. Here are some DARPA videos of recent work they funded.[2] It's embarrassingly slow. (I look at that and think "ROS", which runs on Linux and is not hard real time, so you have to go slow.) Most of the stuff you see robots doing fast is preprogrammed motion. Sometimes, there's a vision system finding a target followed by preprogrammed motion to reach the target. Apple used to have a highly automated factory in Fremont. Steve Jobs was very proud of it. Produ

The first and most important question of course is to understand that having too much WIP is in fact bad. This is a well-understood concept in factories. Not enough people today have ever been in a factory. It's a classic problem with manufacturing plants that make a large number of different items. There, it's obvious - you have racks or piles or bins of partially finished product sitting around. Yet you can't avoid some of that, because machines have setup and teardown times. So you make a thousand stampings of thing A, which then wait for the next step. If you only made a lot of 100, there would be less work in progress, but more time the stamping machine wasn't running while the dies were changed. If you made a lot of 10,000, the stamping machine's efficiency would be higher but you'd have more work in progress. So, what's the optimal lot size? This is a classic business school problem.[1] There's a whole theory of this, dating back to 1913. Apple is famous for having botched this with their Macintosh factory in Fremont.[2] They centered their factory around an automated storage and retrieval system. This meant they could buffer a lot of work in process without making a visible mess. Wrong approach. [1] [link] [2] [this video]

Steve invested heavily in automation for the Mac and NeXT factories. There are videos of these factories in action: We Are Manufacturing (Apple): [this video] The Machine to Build the Machines (NeXT): [link] Infamously, he caused a ton of issues for both factories when he demanded that the machinery be painted to colours of his liking. > When Jobs took a tour, he ordered that the machines be repainted in the bright colors he wanted. Carter objected; this was precision equipment, and repainting the machines could cause problems. He turned out to be right. One of the most expensive machines, which got painted bright blue, ended up not working properly and was dubbed “Steve’s Folly.” Finally Carter quit. “It took so much energy to fight him, and it was usually over something so pointless that finally I had enough,” he recalled. [0] > Jobs demanded that all the robots in the NeXT manufacturing plant be painted in coordinated shades of gray and black. 2 of his top manufacturing engineers worked through a weekend to paint the assembly line, repeating the process 4 times until they got the finish just right. [1] Ultimately, even that significant automation investment couldn't overcome the core challenges that other commenters have pointed out. I find the culture aspect ironic. Deming was American, yet American manufacturers largely ignored him until the Japanese applied his methods and began outcompeting everyone. [0] [link] [1] [link]