Steve Jobs's vision of a world full of iPhones, iPads, and iPods would be impossible without cheap foreign labor





AP

"Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China" is etched into the glossy black of every iPhone. The designer is mourned and deified the world over, but the assemblers are huddled in anonymity. Indeed, the story of Apple's rise over the last decade is as much America's story as it is China's. If Steve Jobs, donned in his uniform of jeans and black pullover, was the general who led the battle for global digital technology supremacy, then it took hundreds of thousands of his troops in factory overalls and static-free scrubs to realize his vision with precision and consistency.

That the foot soldiers of Apple's meteoric ascendancy are Chinese has received nary a mention in the flood of hagiographies on the late industry titan. That's understandable: Jobs was an iconic iconoclast who thrived as a businessman and as the envy of his field. The revolution he ushered in transforming consumer behavior and the portable device frontier deserves to be praised. His was a quintessentially American story of risk-tolerant entrepreneurs who sought the ideal and succeeded to an inimitable degree. Product of an immigrant father and college drop-out, Jobs personified the unique cultural and social milieu of Silicon Valley, one that has spawned endless, though mostly unsuccessful, imitators. He embodied one of the defining narratives of what's best about America writ large, that it is an inventor of the future, time and again. That is how progress is done.