Everybody with a tech blog has spent the last four days writing about iPhone 5 queues, so I'm going to skip that part. You've seen the photos of the line outside the Fifth Avenue store. I stood in a much shorter one at the mall here and got my phone Friday afternoon, its fine, its faster, the taller screen took about a day to stop feeling weird. Thats really all I have to say about that.
What I actually want to write about is a story that broke Monday and that I bet most of the sites doing wall-to-wall iPhone coverage are going to skip, because it doesn't come with a nice product shot. Foxconn confirmed that a brawl broke out late Sunday night at its Taiyuan plant in Shanxi province, involving something like 2,000 workers, and it was bad enough that they shut the whole factory down for the day Monday. Reports are saying it started in a dorm, a fight between some workers and security guards that spiraled into a full-on riot with police called in and a bunch of people hurt. Foxconn is the company that assembles a huge amount of the stuff sitting in our pockets right now, including parts for the phone that just sold five million units in three days.
Apple put that number out this morning too, actually, in the same press release where they admitted "demand for iPhone 5 has exceeded the initial supply." Five million sold opening weekend, more than double what the iPhone 4S did in its first weekend last year. Wall Street apparently wanted something more like eight million and the stock dipped a little on the news, which tells you something about how insane the expectations around this company have gotten. Selling five million of anything in 72 hours used to be an outrageous number. Now its a disappointment.
I bring up the Foxconn thing not to be a downer on launch week, but because the two stories landed on the same day and nobody's connecting them. We spend a week arguing about whether the new Maps app sent someone's GPS pin into a cornfield in Ireland (it did, there's a whole tumblr now, its very funny and also kind of sad) and meanwhile there's a factory floor a few thousand miles away where things got bad enough to need police. I dont think that means anyone reading this needs to feel guilty about their new phone. I bought one. But it's worth remembering that "iPhone 5 launch week" is two completely different stories depending on which side of the assembly line you're standing on, and only one of those stories gets photographed by people waiting outside a Fifth Avenue store with a latte.
For what its worth, this isn't the first time a Foxconn facility has had labor trouble make headlines — there were the suicide clusters back in 2010 that got a lot of press, and various strikes since. Apple's supplier responsibility reports have gotten more detailed over the last couple years, more auditing, published standards, all that. Whether any of it is actually changing conditions on the ground versus just changing what gets disclosed, I genuinely dont know, and I'm suspicious of anyone who tells you they know for sure from the outside.
Small tangent since I'm already off the main topic: I preordered my iPhone 5 at 12:01am on the 14th, the second the Apple Store app let me, and I still got a shipping estimate of "2-3 weeks." I ended up just walking into the store Friday and getting one off the shelf, which felt like cheating somehow. If you preordered day one and you're still waiting, that's apparently a pretty normal experience right now given how tight supply is — Apple straight up said as much in their own release. Small comfort, I know.
Anyway. iOS 6 is a week old, the Maps thing is still a mess (I got sent to a Sears that closed two years ago yesterday trying to find a pharmacy, not exaggerating), and there's a factory in Shanxi that's back up and running today after a very bad Sunday night. Keep half an eye on that story over the next few days. I doubt it gets anywhere near the coverage the phone itself is getting, but it probably should.