When a company sends two employees to New Zealand to buy an iPhone and tear it apart, just so that they can report its innards 27 hours before anyone in the US can, it’s worth reading about. Especially when the company specializes in this sort of stuff.
And you know what?
IFixit’s Wiens has been taking apart gadgets for six years, and he said his favorite observation is the inadvertent harmony between rivals such as Apple and Microsoft. The two are fierce competitors, Wiens said, but once you look inside their gadgets, many of them are made by the same people. The Zune HD and the iPhone, for example, were both made by Foxconn, a major manufacturer in China.
“You’ve got these arch nemesis devices, and they’re the culmination of years of effort by Microsoft and Apple,” Wiens said. “But they’re being assembled and shipped out of China by the same company. At the same time you know the product managers at Apple and Microsoft hate each other’s guts.”