The editor of Mobile Review, which has no track record on Apple rumors, is claiming Foxconn has just received an order for the next generation of iPhones. Foxconn, as you know, makes the iPhone for Apple, so that's not exactly big news.

Now the question is: Does this mean we are going to see an earlier release of the next iPhone? Or is it going to be June, like always? [Twitter via UberGizmo]

What will they be selling? Oh, you know, Apple products such as the iPhone, iPod and iMac as well as stuff such as the Playstation 3, Vaio notebooks, the Kindle, Nokia phones and the Wii.

Apparently, Foxconn will use the huge retail presence in China to get even more manufacturing business. Get your gear made by Foxconn, the argument will go, and you'll automatically get a foothold in the Chinese retail market.

We'll see how it goes. Let's just hope Foxconn uses all this money they're making to treat their employees a bit better. [ChinaDaily via TechCrunch]

The SIM card tray you see pictured up top is supposedly designed for the Apple Tablet, and is built by Foxconn (the device's rumored manufacturer). It's definitely larger than the current iPhone SIM tray, but it could probably also be used anywhere. Either way, it goes on sale October 23 for $14.05.

[Edited to remove reference to the Bill Keller NYtimes Quote because a) we already know the tablet is coming, b) he was speaking hypothetically. And if not, well, we already know it's coming.—Blam] [Gawker and China On Trade via Engadget]

I say that because so-called smartbooks with ARM-based processors (like Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip) don't support Windows. And there's Nokia with its own Linux-based OS. We've also heard plenty of rumors (since denied) about Nokia looking at Android. We'll have to wait and see. [DigiTimes]

The family now gets $52,600 (up from $44,000) as well as $4,385 every year as long as one of the parents are alive. The Foxconn official that leaked this information to the press spoke anonymously since he wasn't a qualified press-relations employee. [Yahoo]

AppleInsider says that Dow Jones carried the report as well, though it comes from a paper less well-known than say, DigiTimes. The September or October launch date Apple Daily reports is slightly more aggressive and definite in its time table than the Financial Times report that came out this weekend, which simply said that Apple "racing to offer a portable, full-featured, tablet-sized computer in time for the Christmas shopping season."

A morbid thought, but if Foxconn is building the tablet, what if the tablet was the prototype Sun Danyong lost before he was driven to suicide? They wouldn't say he lost the mythical Apple tablet, after all.

AppleInsider still thinks it's coming in 2010, for what it's worth. We still think never trust rumors. [AppleInsider]

More recently, Sun Danyong's alleged iPhone suicide has outed the company's brutal practices.

Now, one employee appears to have written an account of what it's like to be recruited and work for Foxconn (in perpetual overtime, for a grand total of about $220 a month) that was published on China Labor Watch. Needless to say, the experience more closely echoes an internment camp than a dull production line:

I was placed in a dormitory that has ten three-level bunk beds, thus accommodating 30 people. While many people refused to stay there at that time, the management said that it is much better than the other dormitories on site that are shared by hundreds of workers...The training begins immediately on the second day upon our arrival. At first I thought we would be informed of some professional operative skills and knowledge, but instead, we were taught the factory's regulations, culture, and acknowledgment of Foxconn's business concept. By now, I think it is safe to say that the training is a part of Foxconn's brain washing process. A supervisor told us that working at Foxconn requires total obedience; you do not need to be intelligent or highly skilled. After a week of training, we concluded that at Foxconn, we shouldn't treat ourselves as human beings, we are just machines. During the week, we also had a health examination, a very simple blood test, a blood pressure test and a vision test. We did not receive any results afterwards.

To read more on a business culture that will go so far as to fine its employees for uneaten rice in the cafeteria, hit the link. [China Labor Watch via Silicon Alley Insider]

Sun apparently was given not just one, but 16 prototype iPhones on July 9 or 10 to deliver to R&D, and he reported one missing three days later. He committed suicide early in the morning on July 16, after allegedly suffering through brutal interrogations.

Foxconn's China general manager James Lee told the NYT that Sun had a history of disappearing products: "Several times he had some products missing, then he got them back," and that they "don't know who took the product, but it was at his stop."

The NYT closes with an episode that again shows the kind of people Sun had to deal with: Not long after Sun's father finished telling journalists Foxconn treated the family well, a security guard with two men in Foxconn shirts appeared and threatened to beat up a journalist's translator if they kept asking the family questions. Foxconn swears the guard wasn't one of their guys.

I'm sure he had nothing to do with Foxconn, and was just some dude who asked to tag along with the guys in Foxconn shirts. You know, for fun. [NYT]

Maybe some competing company or manufacturer hired someone to lift it. Maybe some kid picked it up off the curb and it's in his toy chest. Maybe it's under someone's couch cushions. Maybe it's lying in the middle of a street, being run over by hundreds of cars an hour, completely unrecognizable. Maybe someone reading this post has it in their hands. Maybe it never existed.

Where do you think the missing prototype is?

"My dear, I'm sorry, go back home tomorrow, something has happened to me, please don't tell my family, don't contact me, this is the first time that I have ever begged you, please agree to that! I am so sorry!"

And in what is reportedly his final online chat—supposedly verified as authentic—Sun tells a friend he never stole the phone, and thinks it was swiped. He also again implies that he was tortured, or at least forcefully detained and interrogated with physical force, clearly contradicting what Foxconn's security chief told a Chinese paper:

"Even at a police station, the law says force must never be used, much less in a corporate office. I was just a suspect, my dear head of security, so what reason and right do you have to confine me and use force?

If Foxconn is directly involved in his death, it and all of its executives could go bankrupt a million times over and that would still not even come to close to justice for Sun Danyong. [The New Yorker]

The latter report is the more interesting of the two, for the glimpse it gives into Foxconn's corporate culture: When Foxconn security manager Gu Qinming interviewed Sun, he says that Sun initially blamed the missing phone on a female colleague, provoking Gu to poke him in the shoulder and ask, "Are you a man?"

According to Gu, it was Sun who suggested that Foxconn search his house, to prove his innocence. Which almost sounds reasonable, insofar as Gu thought Sun was both incompetent and a liar—what else could Sun have done?

Yet, Sun was quoted as saying on a Chinese message board, "Even at a police station, the law says force must never be used, much less in a corporate office. I was just a suspect, my dear head of security, so what reason and right do you have to confine me and use force?"

Keep in mind as well that the latter report is based on the word of the guy who interrogated Sun Danyong before his death and works for a company so secretive it might have driven a man to suicide over a phone. [The New Yorker]

Analysts in the components industry tell DigiTimes that Apple won't switch to a different supplier because "product development involves collaboration on technologies that cannot be easily transferred to other makers."

So, for the same reasons that the stakes are so very high for Foxconn—the forces that essentially killed Sun Danyong—are the same reasons that Foxconn likely won't pay very dearly for their role in the tragedy. From a business perspective, one life is not worth years of secrets, hundreds of millions of dollars.

Which makes his death even more senseless than it already was. He didn't die over a phone, but for something more, and at the same time, far, far less. [DigiTimes]

The accusation that the CEO was under tax evasion investigations came from a former reporter for a Chinese magazine. The accusation was made on her personal blog, and was then denied by Foxconn (whose parent company is Hon Hai) as "a bunch of nonsense." There may be a reason to believe them.

These charges do seem a bit strange when you look at them for more than 10 seconds. The woman claims that the IRS demands the (up to) $1.49 billion worth be paid up, plus a fine of up to three times that amount. And it gets even stranger when you consider that the same reporter was found guilty of blackmailing the CEO for $1 million, and was sentenced to a year and ten months. [Chinapost - Thanks Ben!]

Image credit

First, a recap: Sun Danyong's death came after a case of prototype iPhones he was charged with shipping to Apple's headquarters in Cupertino ended up short by one. Sun couldn't produce the device and claimed not to know what had happened; security officials at Foxconn, the manufacturer of Apple's iPhone and Sun's employer, didn't buy his story. At all.

In the days following the incident, Sun quite possibly went through hell. He confided in his university friends—he had just graduated—that his house had been searched repeatedly and without announcement, that he had been endlessly interrogated, that he'd been held in solitary confinement, and even that he'd been outright tortured by security guards. Soon after, he was found dead at the base of his apartment building, having fallen 14 stories. He died, one way or another, for a phone. Yeah, no, you're right: This is fucking crazy.

A common snap response is that this is just symptomatic of poor labor regulations in China, a sentiment seemingly backed up by Foxconn's tellingly honest statement on the issue:

Regardless of the reason of Sun's suicide, it is to some extent a reflection of Foxconn's internal management deficiencies, especially in how to help young workers cope with the psychological pressures of working life at the company.

They've since suspended one security guard without pay, and turned over the investigation to police. But to put this incident in that broad context isn't useful, either to explain what happened or to know how to deal with it. To a certain extent, Apple does own Sun's death, and it's almost shocking that something like this hadn't already happened.

Apple's history of secrecy is long and storied, but hardly seen as scary by itself. We spend a lot of time trying to crack it for stories, and just as much laughing at how extreme it is—even Apple's office employees in California are constantly monitored by cameras, forced to pass through absurdly complex security gates on a daily basis, carrying prototypes in black cloaks and flipping on warning lights in rooms when the cloaks are removed from the devices of idolatry.

But there's a lot at stake for Apple, so to an extent their paranoia is understandable: keeping a device like the iPhone secret keeps their strategy out of competitors' view, and more importantly ensures an all-out media eruption when it goes public on schedule. There is no more secretive company in tech, and there is no device more important to keep secret than the iPhone.

Apple's also had, since the early days, a punitive attitude towards those who betray them. Stories of Steve Jobs not giving his best friend and early employee Dan Kottke pre-IPO stock because of disagreements, or banning difficult journalists from having access to the company's products or briefings come to mind. (Disclaimer: But not all.) I'm hardly saying that killing is in the character of the company, but there has sometimes been a price to pay for crossing Apple.

This ethos becomes dangerous when combined with billions of dollars and the dubious values at Chinese manufacturing companies like Foxconn, which've placed profit above human rights in the past. —Note: Foxconn is headquartered in Taiwan, but does the vast majority of manufacturing in China—specifically at the 270,000-employee plant in Shenzhen.

Foxconn may be huge, but they're not unique, and if they can't keep Apple's hardware plans quiet, it's easy to imagine another manufacturing conglomerate stealing their contracts worth untold billions. It's a scary and very real threat to a solid business relationship, and a subtly tyrannical one.

But the stakes are much higher at Foxconn's campus (to use a generous word) than at Apple's. If an Apple employee leaks a product, he could lose his job, and Apple would lose what amounts to some free advertising—after all, leaks aren't a bad way to build buzz either. If a Foxconn employee does the same, he endangers thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in contracts and a vital relationship for his company. That's an unrealistically, recklessly high responsibility to ask each employee—Sun and his alleged torturer—to shoulder. Imagine yourself in Sun's shoes: You have just lost a prototype of the world's most coveted gadget, built by the world's most unforgivingly secretive electronics maker. Would you like your life to be hung against the balance of billions of dollars, in a country with lax labor laws and a history of running its citizen over with tanks?

But wait, Apple says, let us be clear:

We are saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee, and we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death. We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect.

They require every last line worker to keep secrets worth billions of dollars; they require Foxconn bosses to make sure these employees keep their mouths shut; they require that suppliers treat their workers well. Of those, requirement they're most willing to talk openly about also sound the most like an afterthought, and to "require" something doesn't necessarily mean you really expect it.

(As an aside, who's to say that the case didn't leave China with all the devices, and through the many handlers in the shipping and airline companies, ahem, lose a little weight during the complicated transit? And why weren't such valuable prototypes delivered by hand? Art museums do this, and they don't even have industrial spies to deal with.)

Rightly or not, Sun was the only guy Foxconn felt it could hold accountable for the mess it found itself in, a judgment which probably cost him his life, and which his employer felt tremendous pressure to make. But this scenario could have easily been foreseen, and the matter of how much human risk Apple calculated it could take before a 25-year-old man ended up dead is at least as important a question as how they respond to it.

[Photo from Southern Metropolis Daily and The Brisbane Times]

It may have been a very special phone, and it may have been a phone that would have cost a company and its shareholders maybe upwards of billions of theoretical dollars if it had leaked out into a competitor's hands, but really, it's a phone. Is it worth a life? No. I think this secrecy thing has gone far enough. Especially since nothing stays unleaked ever anymore!

What caused the death? An overzealous security official who used "interrogation methods" to find the phone. A fucking phone. Going to extremes like putting the worker into solitary confinement, searching his house (illegally? legally?) and possibly beating him isn't the way to go about things. I know, the employer probably put a lot of pressure on the security chief to find that phone—maybe even threatening the chief himself with termination if the missing device wasn't found—but he's a grown man. He can make his own decisions about right and wrong. Torturing a guy over a phone is not right. It's just a job. Is it worth a life? No.

But of course the blame doesn't lie only with the security guard. The company Foxconn and its parent company Hon Hai aren't pillars of the Chinese community when it comes to placing the welfare of its employees above how much yuan they squeeze out of them. Foxconn admitted to breaking Chinese labor laws. CHINESE labor laws. If they don't care about their workers under normal, everyday circumstances, how much do you think they'll value a man's welfare if they think a little roughing up will save a multi-million dollar contract and secure future dealings with Apple? It's just money. Is it worth a life? No.

And was this method of interrogation even such a smart idea in the first place? If you're just so compelled to torture someone (which you shouldn't be) don't do it over shit that would be leaked three months down the road anyhow. Think about the last two years: do you remember any Apple product that hasn't had spy shots leaked beforehand that turned out to be real? It's now become inevitable. The CIA doesn't torture someone to stop the sun from coming up. That's fucking retarded.

As for Apple, are they blameless in this? No, of course not. They know exactly what kind of people they're dealing with. Remember that Chinese labor law story linked above? Apple sent a team to investigate Foxconn before the manufacturer admitted to wrongdoings, yet found nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, you could come to the conclusion that having an insanely locked-down company do your manufacturing is the situation Apple prefers, so they can use fear and intimidation tactics to maintain their culture of secrecy. But really, it's just a product. Is it worth a life? No.

This may have started about a missing phone, but in the end, it all boils down to being about money. Someone was indirectly killed, through a sequence of sad and unfortunate events, over money. You know who kills for money? Criminals. So please, Apple, stop doing business with criminals. And get your own priorities straight. A phone is not worth dying, or killing, over. [iPhone leak suicide coverage @ Giz]

Reports say that 25-year-old Sun Danyong was subjected to brutal treatment—including torture—by Foxconn security after a shipment of prototype iPhones turned up at Apple's door one device short. A few days later, he plummeted 14 stories from his apartment, dying instantly—an event that was apparently caught on camera.

The murder investigation and treatment of the case as an "apparent suicide" is probably just a formality, since the circumstances of the case—which, if they've been accurately represented—haven't changed, but to hear that Chinese official actually have footage of the incident and are still cautious to call it a suicide is strange, to say the least. Foxconn's alleged poor treatment of its workers, and by proxy, Apple's incredible demands for secrecy, are under tremendous scrutiny as—needless to say, if this turns out to be anything worse than what was first reported, it'll be huge. [Register]

"We are saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee and we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death," Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet told CNET on Tuesday. "We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect."

If the allegations of mistreatment do turn up to be true, let's hope Apple drops Foxconn as a supplier, even if it means customers have to pay more for their products. One death is one death too many, and it's not as if Foxconn's mistreatment of workers was a secret before. [CNET]

The rumors and reports, collected and translated by ex-Gizmodian Elaine over at Shanghaist, tell a plausible story: Sun had been handling a shipment of sixteen iPhone prototype devices (though it's not clear when), one of which went missing. In the following days, Sun told his friends that Foxconn's Central Security Division had been incredibly severe, subjecting him to intense interrogations, harassment, and even "laying hands" on the worker. Confiding in his friends was just a prelude—on the 16th of this month, Sun jumped from a 12-story building.

Foxconn has issued a statement on the matter, which, though creditable in its honesty, is chilling. The company is currently investigating a section chief of the Central Security Division for possibly using "inappropriate interrogation methods" in his investigation, including unannounced home searches, solitary confinement and physical violence.

Labor protections in China are minimal, a situation not helped by spotty enforcement and insular company cultures—especially at a manufacturing juggernaut like Foxconn. The company has been dogged by allegations of poor working conditions over the years, such that hearing an employee may have been mistreated doesn't come as much of a surprise, save for the fact that the mistreatment was so severe that it killed him. That Sun killed himself doesn't seem to be in question here, nor does the fact that Foxconn had at least some part in his death. From a company spokeperson:

Regardless of the reason of Sun's suicide, it is to some extent a reflection of Foxconn's internal management deficiencies, especially in how to help young workers cope with the psychological pressures of working life at the company.

If it turns out the these "psychological pressures" include getting your head slammed against the floor, there'd better be consequences for Foxconn, be it from the government, Apple, or both. It goes without saying that Apple can't be held accountable for a tragic one-off event at a different company, but they absolutely should be held accountable for continuing to do business with a company that treats its employees like this. We'll have to see. [Shanghaist—Image from Ars]

Dell has long used their own factories to assemble computers after a consumer places an order—a technique Dell pioneered to cut inventory costs and boost profits. Currently, the company relies on Asian computer parts assembled in Dell US factories—the "two touch" process. The planned transition, which has already been made for some laptops, will move all production to foreign contract manufacturers—something we already see from companies like HP and Apple.

So the only question that remains is whether or not there will be interested buyers in Dell's $2.6 billion in production plants. Because if Dell is backing out of the game, it's gotta be a tough sell to anyone. [WSJ]