Apple pulled bait-and-switch, forced company into bankruptcy, says GTAT exec. GT Advanced Technologies was formerly known for its role in the once-burgeoning 'sapphire glass' industry, which brought promises of extremely strong, scratch-resistant glass made of synthetic sapphires for consumer goods. Apple expressed significant interest in the technology, even striking a deal with GT Advanced for tentative use in its iPhone 6 line - but that changed when GT Advanced went belly-up and filed for bankruptcy early last month. Now a senior executive of GT Advanced, in an unsealed court affidavit, has detailed the circumstances leading to the company's bankruptcy - including some shady tactics by Apple which he says caused the company to go under.
David Squiller, Chief Operating Officer of GT Advanced, told the court in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing that while Apple had initially offered a quality deal to GT Advanced - the purchase of 2,600 of its furnaces used to grow sapphires for sapphire glass displays - the deal quickly changed. Source: Reuters. Apple Censors Drone War. Message from Rui-Qiang & Jing-Chuan. The letter below was written by Guo Rui-Qiang and Jia Jing-Chuan, and translated from Chinese for SumOfUs.org members. They worked in an Apple factory in Suzhou, China cleaning iPhone touch screens until their nerves were permanently damaged by chemicals used during cleaning.
Dear SumOfUs.org members and friends -You don’t know us but you have seen our work. Until recently, we worked long hours assembling Apple’s iPhone touch screens in Suzhou, China.In early 2010, it was independently confirmed that 137 workers, including us, were poisoned by a chemical called n-hexane which was used to clean iPhone screens. N-hexane is known to cause eye, skin and respiratory tract irritation, and leads to persistant nerve damage. The Untold Story of How My Dad Helped Invent the First Mac | Co. Design. Jef Raskin, my father, (below) helped develop the Macintosh, and I was recently looking at some of his old documents and came across his February 16, 1981 memo detailing the genesis of the Macintosh. It was written in reaction to Steve Jobs taking over managing hardware development. Reading through it, I was struck by a number of the core principals Apple now holds that were set in play three years before the Macintosh was released.
Much of this is particularly important in understanding Apple's culture and why we have the walled-garden experience of the iPhone, iPad, and the App Store. Even better, I found some sometimes snarky comments Jef had made to the memo as part of the Stanford Computer History project. Apple Learns to Own the Entire Experience Reading the memo, we see that Apple was struggling with an explosion of fragmentation with the Apple II: This is the exact problem that Google Android now faces. To combat fragmentation, for the Macintosh: Interesting Sound Bytes Introduction. Lateline - 06/10/2011: Jobs more showman than geek: Daisey. Australian Broadcasting Corporation Broadcast: 06/10/2011 Reporter: Tony Jones Mike Daisey is author of The Agony and Ecstacy of Steve Jobs and says the Apple co-founder was not a classic geek but was intimately involved in everything Apple did.
TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Back to our top story, the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and we're joined from New York by writer and performer Mike Daisey who's been touring the world, including Australia, performing his one man show The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Thanks for being there. MIKE DAISEY: Thanks so much for having me. TONY JONES: Let's start with the ecstasy of Steve Jobs. MIKE DAISEY, WRITER AND PERFORMER: I think it is heartbreaking today, I think we'll never actually know how much we have lost. Steve was devoted to work in a way that few people are. There is no one else with that kind of vision, that kind of leadership.
TONY JONES: Did he really change the world as a lot of people are saying today? MIKE DAISEY: Oh yes. What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs. [www.youtube.com] Just a note on this subject. Jobs obsessed on US manufacturing when the Macintosh and later the NeXT Computers were first announced. He did everything the company could do to make state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in the US. However the competition from the rest of the industry and demand for low-cost devices pushed the company to China where Apple Computer could compete with the rest of the industry.
As for Foxconn, they do not exclusively produce for Apple Computer, those facilities produce products for the following companies: Acer, Amazon(Kindle), Asus, Intel, Cisco, HP, Dell, Nintendo, Nokia, Microsoft, MSI, Motorola(Google), Sony Ericsson and Vizo. Apple Computer increased pressure on their production line partners to improve their conditions and systematically weeded out the ones that failed to improve. For those of you who always complained that Apple Computer products cost too much, this was one of the solutions - ahh the invisible hand of the free market.
Malcolm Locke - Google+ - Meanwhile, on twitter, all the Mac users are tweeting a…