Lost iphone prototype prompts suicide
 

I'm not sure how much I believe what is reported in the Huffington Post, since its focus seems to be on sensationlist news - but it also shows up in Yahoo News and PC World. I am bothered that Apple would contract with a company that encourages such pressure on their employees. My current income prevents me from purchasing Apple products in the first place, but I'm less likely to purchase i-anything in the future after reading of this tragedy.

What do you make of this news?

Apple has nothing to do with this..

The article leads one to believe that Apple is indeed responsible for this matter.

Do share why you think Apple is not involved, Gucci.

How could Apple be responsible for an employee of Foxconn? He is not under Apple's code of conduct.. he's under Foxconn's code.. and has since been suspended and turned into police. If Apple is responsible, then so is Hewlett-Packard, Sony, and Nokia, since they do work for them as well.

Thanks for the names of the other companies that contract with Foxconn. I won't support HP (Compaq), Sony, and Nokia either.

Not to pick a fight, but you've got to be the most illogical person i've come across on the internet today.

Some guy kills himself, a result of psychological issues, obviously. No sane person is going to let his work accident disrespect his mortality and take his own life.

No company, espousing it's goals, no matter how adamant, could be responsible for the actions he took.

What ever happened to personal accountability?

@GG lol, really? Because I work for an outsourcing company that is subcontracted by many major telecommunications companies like sprint, VZ, AT&T etc etc. Apple has nothing to do with this because they simply told Foxconn what it is they wanted. It's up to Foxconn to come up with the means of production. Blame Foxconn, not Apple.

It's like blaming you for drunk driving and killing a pedestrian while you were in a Taxi.

I think a fairer analogy would be you serve alcohol to someone who then leaves and drives home drunk and kills a pedestrian. Are you responsible for the pedestrians death? Some think so some don't think so. Personally I think dram shop laws are stupid and should be eliminated....

The names were in the article.

seriously, how could apple or any other company be responsible for this? unless you subscribe to a conspiracy theory that Steve Jobs wanted this guy dead because his phone was leaked, nobody is responsible for his death except him.. not even Foxconn.

Perhaps it was more of a cultural issue? Decision to die rather than destroy his parents financially?
I'm trying to wrap my mind around it - and why it made such big news if it had nothing to do with losing the iphone.

You just have to separate media sensationalism from the relevant content. People like to slap big names on ordinary events to generate publicity, it's corporate culture at work.


"A man went to a fast food resturaunt, and ate, before his meeting"

is a lot less fancy than

"The CEO of Samsung was spotted ordering a fish sandwich at the local McDonalds, before meeting with his manufacturing partners"

Now, I hate McDonalds, time to boycott Samsung!

hehe

just poking fun :D

Would it make you feel better if Apple felt the same and stopped doing biz with them? Cause if it turns out to be the case that he was indeed detained and beaten, they'll probably loose their licensing.

The issue of beatings and interrogations is the part for which Apple should take some responsibility. This no different than taking Nike or the Gap to task for contracting companies that run sweatshops or use child labour. This is not to suggest that Apple has liability just moral and social responsibility.

Maybe not Steve Jobs, but I don't find it hard to believe in the least that this guy had help "committing suicide". Whether it was of the higher ups in the Foxconn company angry for the shame this will cause, or possibly even someone that he had sold the prototype to, to make sure he didn't turn them in.

what does that have to do with apple though? If it comes out that Foxconn was directly involved in his death then Apple will surely pull the contract.. I don't see how Apple is under any fault in this mans death.

:shrug:

This just seems like an easy way to get the article in front of people's eyes. Nobody knows who Foxconn is, but they damn sure know who Apple is.

The whole notion of the "story" is even bullshit. It's a fucking phone. A piece of plastic that will be obsolete 6 months after it is released.

The question was "What do you make of this news?"

My comment was't specifically about Apple, just that I believe there is a strong possibility that someone else is responsible for the "suicide". But there are two factors that make it very unlikely that the actual truth will ever come out. 1) It's China. 2) It (either directly or indirectly) involves one or more of the largest companies in the world.

---------- Post added at 10:43 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:41 PM ----------

Yeah, but it's a multi million/billion dollar piece of plastic. People have been killed for far less.

that was my fault .. sorry about that.

:)

MrKlixx,

I guess you're right. Kids get gunned down for $100 Nikes in my back yard.

Technology is such a crazy thing. The time line spike is a real needledick.

Just to be clear, my position isn't that Apple is responsible for what Foxcomm does, rather Apple (like Nike in the scenario above) is responsible for continuing to do business with a company that does not "treat workers with dignity and respect."

If Apple is being honest when it says it requires it's contractors to "treat workers with dignity and respect" *and* the reports of beatings and intimidation prove true, then Apple's only course of action is to break ties with Foxcomm.

Uhm... company names aside, I think everyone seems to have failed to notice one glaring item here...

This took place in China!

Do all of you really think that a bad business hiccup in China doesn't come to beatings (or worse) with at least a small amount of regularity? Sure, it's not North Korea, but China isn't exactly known for it's great human rights record.

So... be pissed at Apple makes much less sense than be pissed at China.

Apple fanbois probably stole it and just made it look like a suicide.

I would imagine the fines/jail time for 'losing' a phone would be severe. If it could be linked to corporate espionage or theft by someone else... Even losing your job in the Chinese economy would be a really bad thing right now.

But, the big question is why didn't he have a MobileMe account and use the Find My Phone feature? (I wanted to write this app a long time ago)

the Find My Phone feature is iffy at best. First the phone has to actually be on and in service and secondly it doesn't give an exact location of the phone just that you are close. Then you have to actually find the person who has it. Who knows if it was even available on the prototype.

Asian countries have some of the highest suicide rates in the world, based on cultural differences I would imagine. Japan especially has a lot of problems with this, and not just in the business world.

To boycott a company that makes superconductors which are in ALOT of computers is silly. I know I work on a PC everyday with something made by foxconn, so trying to boycott the whole company means that you basically can't use a computer made by a major manufacturing company (HP, Compaq, Dell). The computer I am writing this entry on has a foxconn manufactured chip that controls my sound. My home computers all have something from foxconn on the motherboard.

Xepherys was right, this happened in CHINA! How can you believe anything coming from the newspapers in that country? Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't alot of the newspapers in China government sponsored? This just seems like another scare tactic to hurt Apple's reputation, which I could care less about defending (I dislike apple).

I don't believe this story at all. It smells really fishy to me.

You members should be applauded.

I am glad that no one hesitated to make harsh comments on my thread. You could have been intimidated to do so because I am a mod. Instead, the conversation moved in a direction that I appreciate. People pointed out to me the flawed logic in the article and advised me not to jump to conclusions based on reading alone.

Now it's my turn to share a bit of my logic.

It is the moral duty of a multinational corporation to investigate thoroughly before jumping into an outsourcing opportunity. If they have the slightest notion that there might be human rights violations in a company, they must not do business with them. If they see human rights violations rampant in a specific country with which they would like to do business, they must make an active choice to not do business with that country. A multinational business can make it widely publicly known through press releases that they are unwilling to do business with a specific company or nation until they address their widespread human rights violations.
This places pressure on the governing body of that nation to address these issues.
I hope that you are willing to jump in and make comments. Feel free to respond to the opening statement. Feel free to let loose - just pick on the statements rather than directing your distain for a viewpoint at the person expressing their views.

GG:
the thing about your statement is that it's impossible to know what's going to happen in the future. Foxconn could have had a perfect record as well as a great price point for Apple. They had no idea an employee was going to commit suicide and be linked with them. If the man was beaten and then threatened, there was still no way for Apple to know this was going to happen unless a track record existed.

I'm an apple fan, but this really has nothing to do with Apple, I think it falls soley on Foxconn and it's operations and if there was anything done wrong. If no wrong doing occurred, then both companies are not at fault and business will continue as usual. China and Japan have pretty high suicide rates, so really this could be nothing more than just putting a well known American company in the article to ensure the paper gets some hits.

as far as the whole "don't deal with nations who have bad track records thing.. well that's pretty much impossible.

I agree with everything guccilvr says, in a world were information is readily available at our fingertips the second it happens, we still don't know EVERYTHING. Did Apple know about this kind of incidents? Most likely not (Tho if you have ever had to talk to Apple's Icare support or went to an Apple Store to get support, I think they know something about human torture). Will they stop doing business with Foxconn? Again, most likely not. We are talking about two major multinational corporations just quitting business together while in the process of developing a mutli-billion dollar product, that does not happen overnight. It will all depend on the press, if it gets lost in the vortex that we call the media, then apple won't care (externally). If it gets alot of press and bad press at that, Apple will do something.

Governments do bad things to people, every single one of them. Some more than others. There is no way around that.

Even on a local level, I'm not going to stop doing business with owners with shady pasts. Right across the street I have one of the BEST pizza joints in the area, I eat there as much as I can. Their pizza and subs are to DIE for. I know for a fact that the two co-owners of the company have ties with the NY Italian Mob. I know the co-owner who works at the pizza shop where I eat at has done beatdowns/hits for the mob in his younger days. I've talked to him about it. I am scared of that man. Will I stop doing business with him because I know he use to be a solider in the mob? Hell no. The pizza is to good. I look at this situation in the same light, I know they have done or still could be doing, bad things to people. That's not going to stop me from getting a pizza from them. Call me inhuman, but I just see that's how business works.

As for Foxconn, I can't stop doing business with them, indirectly as it is. Unless I have a damn good reason (other than this article) my boss will not stop buying products with foxconn chips on them. He does not and will not care about what goes on in China. He knows that foxconn makes good Motherboards/chipsets and that's all he cares about.

I know it's China, but still:

Seppuku: There's an app for that.

Ha ha. You're going to hell :p

Yup - it's a cultural issue.
In China, if someone seriously fucks up a business, he commits suicide or sometimes is even executed.
In the U.S., he collects a multi-million dollar bonus and laughs all the way to the bank.

/gotta admit - hard to type that - still laughing at Crompsin's last post.

The iBlade is only available on the Japanese salaryman special edition iPhone.

What about the iCudgel for Chinese blue collar workers?

If you bother to jailbreak (and really, there's no reason not to except being lazy like me) findmyi - Home - Track stolen iPhones / iTouches, and family members!

Except when you buy the extended warranty and Jailbreaking your phone voids it.

I want to jailbreak my phone, but I also don't want to drop $70 bucks down the toilet to do it. My iphone has been in the shop twice already, it's to expensive to fuck with.

If he lost something that important, there was a pretty good chance he was going to lose his job ... and from what I hear (hearsay it is) in some Asian cultures, a man would prefer to kill himself (and some times his family as well) instead of being alive and not being about to take care of himself and/or his loved ones.
EDIT: Nor would he want to live with the disgrace.

I could just be really off base with that...

But I don't think it's Apple's fault, or anyone else's. It comes down to (if it was not cultural) that he could not deal with the pressure and stress of his job. That lead him to misplacing a valuable object and killing himself.