Apple will replace iPhone assemblers with robots

Apple will replace a significant number of employees involved in assembling the iPhone with robots. This was reported by The Information.

The report states that the American company’s long-term plans include replacing all low-skilled employees with robots. Back in the fall of 2022, Apple’s senior vice president of operations, Sabih Khan, instructed his managers to plan to cut half of the employees involved in assembling gadgets.

According to experts, Apple was prompted to take this step by the coronavirus pandemic, due to which iPhone production in China stopped for a long time. The company was also hit by riots at the factories of Foxconn, the main manufacturer of gadgets for Apple in China, in November 2022. It is believed that there will be no such problems with robots.

It is also much easier to transport robots to another region and quickly set up a production line than to hire employees in a new location. Journalists from The Information noted that Apple still plans to move production from China to other countries.

Journalists recalled that Apple had previously acquired the company DarwinAI, which specializes in computer vision, and the startup Drishti, whose technologies make it possible to analyze what is happening on assembly lines.

At the beginning of June, it became known that robots at Apple production had stopped disassembling old smartphones into parts. To speed up the process, machines began destroying iPhones and sending them for recycling.