iPhone SE

The logic of logistics

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iPhone SE. Image: Apple

13 April 2016

Billy MacInnesIf you’re reading this on your iPhone, you might be intrigued to know that the device in your hand has completed a journey of almost 500,000 miles to get there. That’s equivalent to a trip to the moon and back.

I know this because I have been reading (on my computer) a fascinating excerpt from a book entitled Door to Door: The magnificent, maddening, mysterious world of transportation on the Wired website. In the article, author Edward Humes details the miles covered in assembling all the components in the iPhone across three continents and two islands. It’s well worth reading.

What he reveals is that globalised manufacturing and assembly is not a simple process. “The transportation complexity is magnified further,” Humes writes, “because many components do not move in a simple path from supplier to final assembly. Some go on a hopscotching world tour from one country to the next and back again as one piece is joined to another to create an assembly, which is then moved elsewhere in the world for another part to be inserted or attached.”

He uses the analogy of a chef assembling ingredients for a dish that becomes part of another chef’s course which is then incorporated into a large meal: “Ingredients move back and forth from high-tech equivalents of refrigerator, cutting board, stove, and plate.”

While the elaborate supply chain required to bring all the components together in a finished iPhone might make sense in economic terms, looked at dispassionately, it does appear an incredibly complex and elaborate way to construct a phone. According to Humes, the “wonder of this is compounded by the fact that this transportation intensity is a strategy to increase efficiency and lower cost”.

It is a source of amazement that a gadget you can hold in your hand should have a transportation footprint of nearly 500,000 miles (equivalent to voyaging around Earth 20 times). To put it another way, if you have 100 or so iPhones in one place, their transportation footprint is the same as a journey to Mars. And all in the name of efficiency and lower costs.

But if you stop for a minute and think about it, it seems incomprehensible almost to the point of insanity that such a long manufacturing and supply chain can be more efficient and cheaper. How can this be? It truly is mysterious.

The only thing I can think of is that no one has bothered to attach a cost to those miles. By that, I don’t mean the pure transport costs of those miles because that’s something all suppliers do. What I’m interested in is the environmental cost of those miles.

For example, Humes estimates that assembling the components in the iPhone home button involves journeys of 12,000 miles “to get it to the place where the phone is assembled”. And that estimate does not include the “the movement of raw materials for individual components, nor their packaging, nor the movement of energy, water, and workers at the various factories, all of which could easily double or triple the mileage on that little button below the phone’s touch screen”.

So are costs just being displaced as the process of globalisation enables cheaper manufacturing but with massively increased environmental costs? While it might make sense for companies and their costs because they don’t measure the environmental consequences of those journeys, it could end up being much more expensive for the rest of us because the effects on the environment will be global too.

We don’t really know but if you’re reading this on an iPhone, perhaps you could ask Siri what the answer is.

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