Iphone 5 Design Thrills Partners, but Will Cost Users

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The New York Times
Thursday, September 13, 2012

Iphone 5 Design Thrills Partners, but Will Cost Users

By BRIAN X. CHEN

The iPhone 5 has plenty of new features to keep Apple fans happy. But there is one feature Apple unveiled on Wednesday that is likely to annoy many: a new connector on the phone’s base.

The Lightning port, as Apple calls it, is smaller and shaped differently from the old one, instantly rendering obsolete the millions of spare charging cords, docks and iPhone-ready clock radios that its customers have accumulated over the years.

While irritating to some, the Lightning connector could be a boon to the hundreds of companies that sell accessories for iPhones and iPads.

“Apple is testing the patience of its fans,” said Tero Kuittinen, an independent analyst and a vice president of Alekstra, a company that helps customers manage cellphone costs.

“A lot of Apple fans have a lot of different accessories and use the old systems, so this is going to be a fairly expensive shift for a lot of them,” Mr. Kuittinen said. Makers of iPhone accessories are likely to be ecstatic, he added.

Apple, which is selling Lightning cables and $30 adapters that will connect the new phones to many but not all older accessories, is, of course, poised to profit from the design change as well. Apple said the smaller connector allowed it to make the phone thinner and use space inside the device more efficiently.

Accessories for Apple products are already a vast and lucrative business. In the last year, iPad, iPod and iPhone add-ons, including speakers, cases and power chargers, generated $2 billion in sales in the United States alone, according to the NPD Group, a research firm.

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Foxconn Said to Use Forced Student Labor to Make iPhones

The following is an excerpt from an article in:

The New York Times
Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Foxconn Said to Use Forced Student Labor to Make iPhones

By DAVID BARBOZA and CHARLES DUHIGG

SHANGHAI — As Apple prepares to unveil the latest iPhone this week, the company’s manufacturing partner in China, Foxconn Technology, is coming under renewed criticism over labor practices after reports that vocational students were being compelled to work at plants making iPhones and their components.

Foxconn has acknowledged using student “interns” on manufacturing lines, but says they are free to leave at any time. But two worker advocacy groups said Monday that they had spoken with students who said they had been forced by their teachers to assemble iPhones at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, in north-central China.

Additionally, last week Chinese state-run news media reported that several vocational schools in the city of Huai’an, in eastern China, required hundreds of students to work on assembly lines at a Foxconn plant to help ease worker shortages. According to one of the articles, Huai’an students were ordered to manufacture cables for Apple’s new iPhone 5, which is expected to be introduced on Wednesday.

“They said they are forced to work by the teachers,” Li Qiang, founder of China Labor Watch, one of the advocacy organizations and a frequent critic of Foxconn’s labor policies, said in an interview on Monday. Mr. Li said his staff had spoken with multiple workers and students who, as recently as Sunday, said that 10 of 87 workers on an iPhone assembly line were students.

“They don’t want to work there — they want to learn,” said Mr. Li. “But if they don’t work, they are told they will not graduate, because it is a very busy time with the new iPhone coming, and Foxconn does not have enough workers without the students.”

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