It's been a roller-coaster ride with the iPhone 4 over the last 3 weeks since it's release. While most of us are still happy to hear about Steve Job's freebies that are soon to be handed out, theres one question that is still bugging some people out there: What's taking so long with the white iPhone 4? Apple has promised us an "end of July" delivery for its latest iDevice but it has yet to specify exactly what the manufacturing difficulty is. According to 21st Century Business Herald, a Chinese newspaper, the problems all stem from a Chinese factory by the name of Lens Technology, which is apparently responsible for transforming fine raw glass into the majority of the iPhone glass panels that are currently out there (no mention of Corning here either).
A rather boring and bland name for a glass manufacturer - Lens Technology isn't exactly a household name to the average gadget consumer. It is the manufacturing company that many top brands such as Huawei, Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and many more have been going to since it's launch in July 1993. The company's set up sever plants all over China and most recently in Liuyang, Hunan that currently houses about 14,000 workers. Although it's still merely a faction of Foxconn's 400,000 employees in Shenzen, Lens' recent intake of about 7,000 "post-90s" workers led to many disciplinary issues. Although this still wasn't the reason for the white iPhone 4 delay.
According to a Len project feasibility report published in 2006, the glass manufacturing process involves the following steps: developing the tooling, cutting the raw material, fine milling using computed numerically controlled machines, sanding the edges, polishing, strengthening, cleaning, coating, screen printing, baking, anti-shatter treatment, assembling, and packaging. A pretty tedious process as you can see. A worker from the Lens' quality control department has allegedly admitted that the company's screen-printing workshop may currently be dealing with some issues with the white iPhone 4 covers. More specifically the factory's still working out the perfect combination of paint thickness and opacity. The prototype white covers acquired previously appeared a bit darker than the iPhone 4 dock, so the company is trying to find a better result for when the white iPhone 4 comes out later this month.
If Apple does somehow manage to deliver the new batch of phones by the promised date, can they meet the potential demand for the product? According to industry sources, Lens' current production capacity only meets half of Apple's demand, thus becoming a major bottleneck for the entire iPhone 4 production pipeline. This could all be trash-talking from competitors who are envying Apple's product success and there is a small chance that other components might be affected as well, but the truth is the handset's currently in short supply. After 3 million units since launch, Apple's online store is still listing a 3-week shipping date for the original (black) iPhone 4. Considering each CNC machine could apparently only cut out three iPhone 4 glass covers eery hour, Lens will need to get its act together on the paint job and use as many machines as possible along with skilled operators to make not only Apple happy but also all the fanboys the company has accumulated.
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