December 12, 2014 - 17:13
Farida and I decided to devote ten weeks to tracking the process of how MacBooks are made and how they are deposed. Over the years, technology has been groundbreaking and having a laptop is essential for every college student. But, researching on how exactly everything happened was shocking. This project required a lot of research because Apple is such a big business. While dealing with big companies, it makes researching twice as difficult because they aren’t as willing to sharing every secret. The questions that we wanted to ask, weren’t any that they would’ve liked to answer either.
- Where are the laptops made?
- Where do the specific piece(s) come from?
- How are they manufactured?
- Where do they go before they are put together to create the specific laptops we each own?
- Who creates them?
- What kind of lives do they lead?
- How can we relate to them?
Our questions related us, as consumers, to the overall contact zone that Apple has created with China. We’ve learned that not only the Macbook Air has a list of 22 parts, but that Apple’s sweatshops break 22 laws in China. We had a lot of reflection to do once we completed the assignment and decided that it wasn’t Apple being the "bad guy", but we, as consumers, are the “bad guy(s)” in a contact zone with China. We’ve established a contact zone years ago, so things like this has been occurring in the Foxconn factories. The poor conditions and late hours were because of our high demands in America to Apple. They’ve only been trying to please us. However, in return, we’ve been in some way hurting China. Although we’ve learned from other projects that sweatshops aren’t extremely bad, they’re not amazing. Some people have actually called them necessary for the people in China since it is so over populated, which makes job offering limited. It still doesn’t make things right. But, we don’t have to be so high maintenance.