Where IPad is Built

Should you care where your shiny iPad was built?

Wired Magazine's cover story was the string of worker suicides in an Taiwan company's plants in the Mainland. A dozen of Foxconn workers jumped over buildings in a year. The author questioned US consumers' sense of guilty and implied they should boycott the iPhone, iPad, etc. to help those poor workers in slave camps.

That judgment could only came from a disconnected ignorance and unfounded entitlement of supremacy. Foxconn, with its one million workers, is not a small town sweat factory. One dozen suicides in city with one million population in a year is a tragedy, but not as news worthy. To put it into context, No. 12 largest city in the US, San Francisco has a population of 0.8 million, and No. 8 Dallas, TX 1.3 million. The majority workers in Foxconn plants came from rural areas, probably had never taken a train before. Placing people in modern industry with inherited high pressure from the production line comes with inevitable risk.