Stand by for hardware shortages
Apple was rumoured to be planning an event this month to launch a new budget iPhone and an updated version of the iPad Pro. Not any more. Huawei, copying Apple, as per, has cancelled its P40 Paris launch event too.
Apple and Huawei aren’t alone with their coronavirus-related cancellations. SXSW, E3, the Game Developers Conference, Facebook’s F8, Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference, Google I/O 2020. None of these events will go ahead this year either.
What does this mean for the technology industry? I wish I knew. On the one hand, it could be argued that these shows don’t have any impact at all.
Take MWC, for example. The Barcelona-based trade show was cancelled last month at the eleventh hour. Technology brands simply launched their products at isolated events and broadcasted them live via YouTube.
Sure, it was a little weird watching Oppo’s head of strategy and product marketing, Michael Tin, walk on to a 30-metre stage and present to an empty room. But he got the job done, and the end result was the same.
What’s more worrying for the technology world is how these new devices will be produced. Or, more specifically, who is going to make them?
Device manufacturing, as you’d expect, is a pretty sophisticated affair. I visited a high-end production line a few years ago to witness a smartphone being constructed from start to finish, and it was like something out of a movie.
There was airport-style security as I entered the factory. I was then instructed to leave my camera and personal electronics in a locker, before joining the local factory workers in donning overalls, gloves and a hard hat. What I saw next blew my mind.
Inside a 1.4-square-kilometre room was line after line of machinery. Microchips, tiny camera lenses, and other phone parts I couldn’t identify, were transferred from large reels onto phone motherboards in a matter of seconds as they moved steadily down a 140-metre-long production line into their boxes.
Interestingly, there were only about 20 staff on each production line. It was a long way away from the sweatshop I had pictured. The process was nearly autonomous. But not fully. Humans
I visited a high-end production line a few years ago . . . What I saw blew my mind.
were still essential.
Now, whenever I hear about companies like Apple, Huawei, Oppo cancelling their launch events, I consider the knock-on effect that has on production lines like the one I visited.
Foxconn, the main assembler of Apple products, forced its employees to down tools back in early February and it’s not expecting to resume normal production until the end of March. And if Foxconn’s manufacturing process is anything like the one I visited, the chances of it manufacturing and quality checking hundreds of millions of Apple products during this time are nil.
Which makes me think we’re about to see a lot of hardware shortages, and delayed product shipping, in the months ahead.