“In terms of scheduling, in terms of promotion—people who had been there for years and years and years—being overlooked for full-time status, being overlooked for role changes. From being a Specialist to being a Genius. It was incredibly difficult. It felt like there was a lot of favoritism, when it comes to being looked at for a promotion, you’ve got to be friends with management team, you’ve got to be buddy-buddy.”
Many of Moll’s peers felt the same way. “Working stressful hours, you don’t really know two weeks out from next when you’re going to be working. And then if there’s a launch event, that throws everything off.” After Ron Johnson, whom many retail employees saw as the father of Apple retail, left to join JC Penney in 2011 and was replaced by Jon Browett, who brought a colder, outsider style, those tensions started to boil over.
“Not a single person I knew liked the direction he was taking it,” Moll says. He began to grow interested in the idea of organizing, though he wasn’t sure how to do it yet. But he started discussing the possibility with his peers.
“The conversations I had with people on the inside, they varied, of course,” Moll recalls. “Some people were excited about it, and there were people who were afraid of it. I didn’t really position it as wanting an official union. I really positioned it as us getting together, and whatever that looked like—we could figure that bit later on. I was really just focused on building a voice.”
It quickly became apparent that it would be difficult to discuss, much less organize, around the bustling Apple Store, so Moll turned to Twitter—he started reaching out to employees and organizing support over the social network. After he figured he’d received a show of solidarity from “a couple hundred” local and national Apple retail workers, he crafted a press release and blasted it out to the tech press. He set up a website, AppleRetailUnion.com, and met with established unions that were interested in helping them organize. Eventually Moll made himself known as the driving force behind the effort and did interviews with the likes of CNET, the Times, and Reuters. And he set up an electronic form that would allow Apple retail workers to submit grievances to him, and he would forward them on to corporate—he got hundreds of complaints that way.
Apple, of course, responded in kind. The company disseminated “union training materials” to its stores, which were largely interpreted as tools to help management quell union activity. Shortly after, however, it announced that it would be awarding raises early, offering more training opportunities to part-time staff, and extending benefit packages to part-time workers.
Those raises did in fact materialize. Moll says his pay was bumped up by $2.42 an hour, a much bigger increase than usual, and most workers saw increases of that size too. It was, undeniably, a victory for the thousands of iPhone sellers who helped Apple turn immense profits. “I know going public with what we want to have happen definitely lit a fire under their butts and said, ‘Hey, we really need to reconsider how valuable these people are to this company.’”
It also, however, deflated interest in the unionization drive. After five and a half years at Apple, Moll decided it was time for a change, and he left the company.
Even though Moll’s drive didn’t result in a recognized union, the effort did improve the quality of life for thousands then and to come. “I think that it did serve its purpose,” Moll says, adding that employees should continue to stand up if the times demand it. “It’s a scary thing to do,” he says, but “they should feel empowered to speak out when they feel that other avenues become closed or seem closed.”
They might have to; since his effort, more revelations of worker dissatisfaction at retail stores have surfaced. In 2014, attorneys, on behalf of retail workers, filed a class-action lawsuit that they said affected twenty thousand employees, alleging they were routinely denied meals during longer shifts and breaks on shorter ones, that they received payments late, and that there were other violations of California labor laws. In 2016, a court ruled in the workers’ favor, ordering Apple to pay them $2 million.
At the Beijing Apple Store, Specialists complained of being treated like “criminals,” being forced through daily screenings, which they had to wait in line for on their own unpaid time. But generally, worker satisfaction seems high; GlassDoor, the app that workers use to rate workplace satisfaction, shows Apple with high marks. In fact, Apple retail jobs are rated higher than jobs at the company’s HQ.
To get a sense of how things might stand for the iPhone salespeople of 2016, I talked to as many as I could. I visited Apple Stores in New York (the flagship glass cube on Fifth Avenue), in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Paris (at the Louvre), in Shanghai, and in Cupertino, at Apple’s headquarters.
I spoke with dozens of Specialists and Geniuses, none of whom would agree to be quoted by name—Apple’s policy of secrecy stretches all the way to the showroom floor.
Generally, people were satisfied with the job; few loved it, few hated it. There was much less of the “cultishness” that critics denounced during the height of i-mania in the mid-to late aughts. Some complained about the lack of flexibility, others hailed the solid benefits. Typical stuff. Perhaps as die-hard enthusiasm—and the once-total secrecy—recedes, along with the shadow of Jobs, that millennial enthusiasm that fueled its once die-hard-loyal workforce will too. But it was an interesting, diverse lot, and I enjoyed chatting with them. I met immigrant jazz musicians and young firefighter trainees and, of course, software developers and part-time repairmen.
There’s an Apple Store at Apple HQ, and I popped by after my chat with Apple’s PR rep. It’s right next to 1 Infinite Loop and one building away from 2 Infinite Loop, which houses the Industrial Design studio, where the very first experiments that would mature into the iPhone were carried out.
Each of the iPhones on the shelf here was designed next door, a couple hundred feet away; the designs were then sent to China, where workers manufactured phones on a massive assembly line and then loaded them onto cargo planes; they were flown to San Francisco and shipped here, to Apple HQ.
As I left the small store, I ran into a small group of Chinese tourists, one of whom asked me to take a photo of them in front of 1 Infinite Loop, which the store abuts.
I snapped the pic and asked the woman who’d handed me the camera why they were here. She flashed a smile and responded immediately.
“We love the iPhone,” she said.
CHAPTER 14
Black Market
The afterlife of the one device
You can build anything in Shenzhen from the screws up. It’s Silicon Valley’s go-to hardware garage. Chips, circuit boards, sensors, casings, cameras, even raw plastics and metals—it’s all here.
And if you want to prototype a new product, Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei electronics market is the place to come. I’d heard that you could build a whole iPhone from scratch there, and I wanted to try.
Huaqiangbei is a bustling downtown bazaar: crowded streets, neon lights, sidewalk vendors, and chain smokers. My fixer Wang and I wander into SEG Electronics Plaza, a series of gadget markets surrounding a towering ten-story Best-Buy-on-acid on Huaqiangbei Road. Drones whir, high-end gaming consoles flash, and customers inspect cases of chips. Someone bumbles by on a Hoverboard. A couple shops over, a cluster of kiosks hock knockoff smartphones at deep discount. One saleswoman tries to sell me on an iPhone 6 that’s running Google’s Android operating system. Another pitches a shiny Huawei phone for about twenty dollars.
I head for a stall manned by a young, shy-looking repairman at work on a gutted iPhone using just a screwdriver and his fingernails, each of which are approximately the length of a guitar pick. I ask him if he knows where to get spare iPhone parts. Without looking up, he nods.
“Can you build me one?”
“Yes,” he says. “I think so. But what do you want?” I tell him my model would do; I’m mostly interested in seeing the process.
“It’d be easier to buy the whole thing used,” he says. I tell him I’d like
to start with the most basic components we can—can we buy the camera sensors, the battery, the boards, and so on individually and put it together, bit by bit? He nods again.
He can make me a 4s for three hundred and fifty renminbi, he says. That’s about fifty dollars. And it’d work?
“Of course,” he says. I ask if I can record the process, take some photos and video. He calls me crazy, and then, with a hint of trepidation, says sure. He’ll throw in a SIM card. Deal, I say.
Without warning, he stands up and takes off. He’s cruising—out to the street onto Huaqiangbei Market Road, below an underpass, up across the street, past an upscale-looking McDonald’s, down a side street, and into a giant shop space, the insides of which look like an iPhone factory has thrown up all over itself.
In downtown Shenzhen, a couple blocks from the famed electronics market, this smoky four-story building the size of a suburban minimall is an emporium for refurbished, reused, and black-market iPhones. You have to see it to believe it. I’ve never seen so many iPhones in one place—not at an Apple Store, not raised by the crowd at a rock concert, not at CES. This is just piles and piles of iPhones of every color, model, and stripe.
Some booths are tricked-out repair stalls where young men and women examine iPhones with magnifying lenses and disassemble them with an array of tiny tools. There are entire stalls filled with what must be thousands of tiny little camera lenses. Others advertise custom casings—I’d come back later and buy, for about ten dollars, a “Limited Edition, 1/250, 24 carat gold” iPhone 5 back, complete with the screws I’d need to assemble it. Another table has a huge pile of silver bitten-Apple logos that a man is separating and meting out. And it’s packed full of shoppers, buyers, repair people, all talking and smoking and poring over iPhone paraphernalia.
Our new friend doesn’t waste time. He swings by a stall filled with Apple logoed batteries and buys one for fifteen renminbi, about two dollars, and bounds onward. We follow him from stall to stall, watching as he snags a camera module, a black casing, a glass display. We go to a booth with three young women sitting behind it, each staring into their own phones. One wears a white T-shirt with CASH printed on it in block letters. He points to the motherboards below—“That’s the whole board,” he says. It really is true, you could buy every piece of every going iPhone here.
But I agree to expedite the process and buy a fully stocked iPhone 4s motherboard instead of all the component parts, mostly because he looks a little nervous as I snap photos. Jumble of iPhone innards in hand, we make our exit back to his repair desk at SEG Plaza. He spreads the parts out and sets to work, cradling the device’s body in his long fingernails, inserting the battery and the board, and screwing them into place with a custom screwdriver.
Jack, as he tells us to call him, is from a small town near Guiyu, a city built on taking electronics apart. He’d taught himself to repair electronics when he was young, at first as a hobby, just for himself. Then he started to do it for work, and when he moved to Shenzhen, with its massive gadget economy, repairing handsets and tablets made for a good fit.
It’s incredible to watch him work—I’d seen the repair pros at iFixit tackle a gadget, and they were impressive. But Jack uses mostly a screwdriver and his bare hands. He is nimble, intuitive, and assured. He assembles the iPhone and all of its components and tests it in about fifteen minutes, and then he hands me my brand-newish, only slightly scuffed iPhone 4s, complete with a SIM card that will let me make calls in China. It feels a little slow next to the 6 I’d been using; otherwise, it works perfectly well.
We celebrate, of course, with a selfie.
New iPhone in hand, we head back to the crowded minimart. There are so many people in the cramped space that standard-decibel conversation fills the room with a roar. When we try to talk to anyone, however, it’s suddenly hush-hush—none of them would tell us anything about where they got their iPhones or parts or where they went from here. Some phones are clearly for sale, but many others aren’t—vendors wave us off when we ask questions, even about prices. They tell us they aren’t for sale—not to us, anyway.
Looks like I’ll have to come back and try again. Maybe with an expert.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Adam Minter when we return to the iWarehouse a couple days later. Minter is an e-waste expert whose book Junkyard Planet examines the wide world of tossed, scrapped, and discarded stuff. By luck, we’d both happened to be in Shenzhen at the same time; he was in town to speak at a waste conference.
We wander around the floors, and Wang asks more questions. Most vendors still refuse to talk, but one thing becomes clear: some of the tables don’t sell iPhones to individuals—they’re there for wholesale buyers to inspect only.
“Most of these phones are likely headed to Taogao, the Chinese eBay, or eBay, the American eBay.” Minter laughs, shaking his head. “Whenever you buy a phone on eBay, you should be wary—it may be coming from here.”
Secondhand markets, online or otherwise, are loaded with used iPhones, especially in developing economies like China. It can be big business. But many Americans still think of online markets like eBay and Craigslist as outlets for hand-me-downs. But, as component bazaars like this suggest, it might be part of a larger black—or at least gray—market.
“You know, this makes more sense now,” Minter says. A while back, he received a tip about black-market iPhone factories and was able to arrange a visit to one of them. No one would tell him where the parts were coming from. “This, he says, is the missing link.” A mass market for every part an operation like that would need to feed an assembly line of recycled iPhones.
Shenzhen has long been known for manufacturing cheap iPhone knockoffs with names like Goophone or Cool999 that mimic the look of the iconic device but could hardly pass as the real thing. But the phones here are identical to any you’d find in an Apple Store, just used.
In 2015, China shut down a counterfeit iPhone factory in Shenzhen, believed to have made some forty-one thousand phones out of secondhand parts. And you might read headlines about counterfeit iPhone rings being busted up in the United States too, from time to time. In 2016, eleven thousand counterfeit iPhones and Samsung phones worth an estimated eight million dollars were seized in an NYPD raid. In 2013, border security agents seized two hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of counterfeit iPhones from a Miami shop owner who says he sourced his parts legitimately.
And therein lies the question: What constitutes a counterfeit or black-market iPhone, anyway? The immense popularity of the iPhone, as we’ve seen, has rippled around the globe, inspiring clones and imitators as well as expansive secondhand markets that buyers turn to in order to get the real thing. Shenzhen’s used-iPhone emporium gives us a prime opportunity to consider what makes an iPhone an iPhone—and what happens when we’re done with them. There’s a reason there’s a four-story building in Shenzhen stacked to the ceiling with variations of a single product.
It’s one thing if a rogue factory tries to imitate the look and shape of an iPhone and pass it off to unknowing consumers who get home to find out that their phones won’t sync to iTunes or that the software is glitchy. But it’s really hard to seriously copy an iPhone without, well, iPhone parts. The trademark software and hardware are so tightly integrated, most knowledgeable users would immediately recognize a full-on fake. So, in a sense, any convincing counterfeit iPhone is probably, as far as the user is concerned, an iPhone.
If an iPhone has had its battery replaced, is it not still an iPhone? Or what if the screen isn’t made of Gorilla Glass? What if it had extra RAM? Shenzhen phone hackers can jack a phone’s memory to twice the amount in standard iPhones. These are all just tweaked, refurbished iPhones, but are apt to be called “counterfeit” by the media. Recall back to the very beginning of our voyage, back in the iFixit lab, how Apple discourages consumers from getting inside its gadgets. Apple uses proprietary screws to prevent tampering, it issues takedown requests on grounds of copyrig
ht to blogs that post its repair manuals, and it voids warranties if anyone attempts self- or unlicensed third-party repair. This is probably partly because Apple’s repair program nets it an estimated one billion dollars a year, partly because discouraging repairs encourages consumers to buy new, and partly because it prevents the brand from being associated with substandard phones.
Apple does not sell any replacement parts for the iPhone—consumers must pay to have Apple replace things like screens and batteries for them, often at considerable markup. Even aboveboard repairmen can be driven to source parts from used phones, eBay, and places like Shenzhen’s black markets. This is why groups like iFixit are pushing Apple and other device makers to ease up on repairers. The issue grew acute enough that in 2016, lawmakers moved to introduce so-called Right to Repair legislation in five states.
Right now, the vast, vast majority of us are not fixing our phones ourselves. When one dies, we slide it into a drawer and buy a new one. Some people throw it out. Others take it into a recycling program.
If your iPhone is still working when you want to upgrade, you have more options. Apple determined that offering trade-in programs would encourage more frequent upgrading, so it launched a Renew program through a wireless distribution contractor, Brightstar. It allows customers to turn in old iPhones for discounts on new ones or for Apple gift cards. eBay makes it easy to resell iPhones, since they retain their value fairly well. And a number of trade-in companies, like Gazelle, have cropped up to solicit old phones for cash.
But what happens once your phone reaches a recycler?
Gazelle and its competitors will first determine if the phones are resalable. If they’re in good shape, they might just put them up for sale online. For high-demand items like the iPhone, they might sell in bulk to resellers “around the globe”—for instance, to Chinese companies in Shenzhen that might be able to turn a profit on your two-generations-old iPhone. Since nobody at the Shenzhen market would talk, we can’t confirm that. But just as iPhones begin their lives as base elements mined from the earth, often by freelance laborers in barely regulated climates, and are passed upstream through a web of various actors until they end up in Apple’s supply chain, they end their lives outside of that network, traded off into increasingly opaque markets. It’s just phones and phones and phones. At the black market, it really is.
The One Device Page 33