Before an iPhone reaches the pocket of the first consumer, its durability must be checked. On average, around 10,000 units of each model are tested for all memory and color variants, and most end up broken. Apple has a hundred laboratories in the world in which it checks the resistance of its products, which, for obvious reasons, are usually closed to the press, although for the first time it has been opened to the visit of a small group of media and youtubers at the facilities in Cork (Ireland), where there is a company factory.
The Cork centre, opened by Steve Jobs with 60 employees in 1980, was Apple’s first plant outside the United States. Today it specializes in iMac with custom configurations requested by users. It can manufacture 5,000 units per week on an assembly line with a process that is partly robotic, but includes many human workers. Across the Cork centre, which includes the durability laboratory and the Apple Care centre, 6,000 people of 90 nationalities work and a new building is under construction which will house 1,400 more employees by 2025.
Testing of each model ends when it is launched on the market. In Cork they are now testing devices that will be on sale in two or three years. No future products are revealed during this visit. The tests are on known articles. Before an iPhone model is mass produced for sale, it can be subjected to around 50 different tests, whether climate, such as temperature, humidity or ultraviolet rays, with sudden changes in conditions, or resistance to pressure, shocks or the repeated interactions of users in its useful life period.
In the ultraviolet rays, humidity and temperature chambers, the aging of the product is accelerated. Several years in a few days. In another machine they suffer from dust. You put an iMac inside and in a few hours it looks as if it had been abandoned in the attic of the house from a horror movie. In endurance tests, does someone kick a device or viciously throw it to the ground? Sometimes, those responsible admit, although this intuitive – and anti-stress – system is not the most common.
X-rays and electron microscopes are essential in durability laboratories to find hidden problems. In the speaker module of a failing iPhone model, a manufacturing crack was discovered in a copper filament. Here we work with sizes up to a micron, one millionth of a meter.
John Ternus, Apple’s vice president of hardware engineering, is one of the regular presenters of products such as the iPhone or, two weeks ago, the new iPad Pro and Air. In conversation with La Vanguardia, he links this type of tests with environmental commitment. “We feel,” he says, “that it is our promise to the customer to deliver a high-quality product that will last a long time and is better for the environment.”
The consumer electronics industry is often associated with planned obsolescence, but Ternus breaks that image. “We are making smart decisions to build products that will last,” he says. “Even better than recycling,” he observes, “is reuse. We want to see how we have hundreds of millions of iPhones in use that are actually in use by a second or third owner. That is something very powerful and very special.”
The manager affirms that the company is focused on achieving neutrality in carbon emissions by 2030 and, one day, the use only of recycled materials, what he calls “a completely closed loop.” “We’re going to work our way through the hardware to get there,” he says.
