Welcome back, gentle reader, to the second installment of Hitting the Books Quarterly. This time around we’ve got a seven-layer dip of delicious literature for you, starting with a harrowing investigation into the heart of California’s firestorms, followed by some sage advice for best burning your Facebook bridges, and then a chance to wave goodbye to Earth’s billionaire class as they race off for the stars, hopefully never to return. But that’s not all, we’ve got some stellar sci-fi titles to share too, as well as The Dawn of Everything which Engadget Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar describes as “dense, but worth a read for sure.”

California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric—and What It Means for America's Power Grid - Katherine Blunt (Amazon)

California wildfires caused an estimated $80 billion in property damage in 2021 alone, they’re only getting worse, and the state’s utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric, seems to be doing anything but helping. Following years of neglected maintenance, PG&E’s infrastructure has started numerous deadly blazes in recent years, exacerbating an already existential climate crisis. In California Burning, Pulitzer-nominated WSJ journalist Katherine Blunt dives into the utility’s sordid history of putting profits over public safety. Decades of mismanagement have led California to this point, Blunt’s deeply researched narrative explains why. I had originally looked at this title for the regular excerpt column but the dang thing reads like a Grisham novel. Make sure you block off an afternoon because you won’t be able to put this one down.

James Acaster's Guide to Quitting Social Media - James Acaster (Amazon)

With the general level of suck in the world today, we could all probably do with a laugh and to get off the internet for a while — touching grass and whatnot. Comedian James Acaster’s newest book, James Acaster's Guide to Quitting Social Media, Being the Best You You Can Be and Saving Yourself from Loneliness Vol 1, does both. You will laugh (probably) and get off the internet because you will be reading a book about how he quit social media in 2019 and how you can do the same while still saving yourself from loneliness. Brilliant.

Everything I Need I Get from You - Kaitlyn Tiffany (Amazon)

Fans, stans, and boybands, oh my. Everything I Need I Get from You is a fascinating look at the superfan subculture surrounding modern pop music acts from Atlantic staff writer Kaitlyn Tiffany. Fanclubs have been around since the Roman era but the advent of social media has enabled fandom to a startlingly granular degree. Today’s superfans know what foods the Jonas brothers are allergic to, have lore and inside jokes that only other members of the BTS ARMY will understand, and routinely engage in light subterfuge to game play charts into featuring their favorite stars. Tiffany also explores the influence that these hyper-connected cadres of vivaciously like-minded people have on internet culture as a whole, like why we spent weeks looking for Becky with the good hair.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires - Douglas Rushkoff (Amazon)

Let’s not kid ourselves. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk aren’t developing space flight for the good of humanity, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t pushing his vision of a metaverse for anything resembling altruistic intent. They just want a bolt hole for when things really start going downhill, argues theorist Douglas Rushkoff. In his new book, Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff examines what he dubs “the Mindset,” wherein the world’s ultra-wealthy believe that they and theirs will somehow be able to spend their way out of the coming climate crisis — we plebes be damned — as well as discusses what the rest of us can do while the people with the power to avert it are busy eying the exits.

You Sexy Thing - Cat Rambo (Amazon)

I believe in miracles and you will too with this raucous space opera from sci-fi luminary Cat Rambo. Billed as “Farscape meets The Great British Bake Off,” You Sexy Thing follows the exploits of Niko Larson, the Holy Hive Mind’s disgraced “10-Minute Admiral” as she scrambles to keep her crew of retired-soldiers-turned-kitchen-and-wait-staff safe, together, alive and out of the Hive Mind’s brain jar collective, even as space stations explode around them, sentient bio-ships kidnap them, and vicious space pirates from Larson’s past seek their revenge. Easily some of the best sci-fi I’ve read this year — tightly written with characters you can identify with and a pilot that immediately grabs you by the shorthairs and doesn’t let up. Plus, there are werelions.

Azura Ghost - Essa Hansen (Amazon)

Emma Hansen just won’t stop writing absolute bangers. Following her phenomenal 2020 debut, the heart-wrenching space opera, Nophek Gloss (which was shortlisted for a Stabby that year), Hansen returns to the Graven multiverse with Azura Ghost. Her sophomore effort catches up a decade after the events of the first book where our protagonist Caiden finds himself, and his sentient starship, still hunted across the stars by the Threi — as is wont to happen when one imprisons the the group’s leadership in an impenetrable pocket universe for 10 years. As the plot unfolds and events push his two greatest enemies into possible alliance, Caiden must reunite with family of his own, and a long-lost friend who probably shouldn’t be trusted, to make his escape.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity - David Graeber and David Wengrow (Amazon)

Long-held views of early civilizations as either gullible hippies or hulking brutes offer only a monochromatic and shallow understanding of history — one which arose out of an 18th century conservative backlash against brown people asking questions, no less — argue David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything. They then apparently spend the next 700 or so pages laying out their exhaustive list of evidence drawn from their respective fields of archaeology and anthropology in support of this position.

In 2018, fledgling EV maker Arrival partnered with UPS to build a new generation of electric delivery vans, beginning with a pilot fleet of 35 vehicles, for use in both the US and Europe. The company quickly expanded its scope from there, working on plans for an electrified bus, an EV rideshare vehicle for Uber and an $11.5 million battery plant. However, on Thursday the company abruptly announced that it has decided to shutter its bus and automotive projects to instead "refocus its resources on the US market while further advancing its enabling technologies."

In a press release Thursday, the company stated that "scaling production in the Bicester [UK] microfactory requires significant further investment in hard tooling and working capital and the Company has determined that the benefits of such an investment would be best directed to the US market." As such, the company will restructure and focus its efforts on the Van and the underlying tech that makes it run.

Arrival cites the US EV tax credit as a major influence on its decision, noting that the Inflation Reduction Act is, "expected to offer between $7,500 to $40,000 for commercial vehicles, [a] large addressable market size, and substantially better margins." Unfortunately, the company will have to (ugh, their words) "right size" the UK workforce, as in layoffs. 

The office of Texas State Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Thursday that it has filed a lawsuit against Google over the company's alleged years-long practices to capture and use of biometric data from, "millions of Texans without properly obtaining their informed consent to do so." This is allegedly a violation of the state's Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act of 2009. 

The AG argues that Google used features in its Photos and Assistant apps, as well as through Nest Hub Max hardware, to scan and store the facial and voice data without first acquiring user consent. Furthermore, Paxton alleges, Google then leveraged that data for commercial gain by using it to train the company's machine learning algorithms.

“Google’s indiscriminate collection of the personal information of Texans, including very sensitive information like biometric identifiers, will not be tolerated,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in the Thursday press release. “I will continue to fight Big Tech to ensure the privacy and security of all Texans.”

This is far from the first time that Paxton, who is up for re-election in November, has targeted Alphabet and its subsidiaries. His office filed a suit in January, "for engaging in false and misleading practices in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices—Consumer Protection Act," and then again less than a week later for, "systematically misleading and deceiving Texas consumers in violation of Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act."

Paxton's office is asking the court for a permanent injunction in the case. This would prohibit Google from "capturing, maintaining, or using in any way the biometric identifiers captured in Texas" or "performing voice or facial recognition in Texas" without the informed consent of the relevant individual as well as invoke a $25,000-per-infraction fine against the search company. 

Tesla faced increasing transportation costs paired with "raw material cost inflation," continued component shortages and a strengthening dollar in Q3, all of which which ate into its quarterly revenue ($21.45 billion vs $21.96 billion expected). Yet the EV automaker still managed to set production records at each of its factories. According to the company's quarterly production report published at the start of the month, Tesla built 365,923 vehicles in Q3 and delivered just 343,830. 

Revenue from automotive sales reached $18.69 billion this past quarter, a 55 percent increase year-over-year. Values in Tesla stock have dropped more than 17 percent since that report's publication, CNBC reports, and have fallen more than 5 percent since the close of market Wednesday when Tesla's earnings were released. Despite these most recent losses, Tesla did see its profits double over the past year to $3.29 billion and "it looks like we'll have an epic end of year," CEO Elon Musk said during the investor call.

Tesla had previously targeted a 50 percent annual vehicle sales growth over the next few years. In 2021, Tesla delivered some 936,000 vehicles and has delivered delivered 908,573 vehicle to date in 2022. So in order to meet the 50 percent growth goal, the company will need to sell roughly 1.4 million vehicles in total, this year, as Autoblog notes, with 490,000 of those coming in Q4. Tesla also recommitted to beginning deliveries of its Semi starting in December.  

Developing...

Nearly half of the world’s roughly 7,000 known languages four in ten of them exist without an accompanying written component. These unwritten languages pose a unique problem for modern machine learning translation systems, as they typically need to convert verbal speech to written words before translating to the new language and reverting the text back to speech, but one that Meta has reportedly addressed with its latest open-source language AI advancement.

As part of Meta’s Universal Speech Translator (UST) program which is working to develop real-time speech-to-speech translation so that Metaverse denizens can more easily interact (read: sexually harass one another). As part of this project, Meta researchers looked at Hokkien, an unwritten language spoken throughout Asia’s diaspora and one of Taiwan’s official languages.

Machine learning translation systems typically require extensive labelable examples of the language, both written and spoken, to train on — precisely what unwritten languages like Hokkien don’t have. To get around that, “we used speech-to-unit translation (S2UT) to convert input speech to a sequence of acoustic units directly in the path previously pioneered by Meta,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a Wednesday blog post. “Then, we generated waveforms from the units. In addition, UnitY was adopted for a two-pass decoding mechanism where the first-pass decoder generates text in a related language (Mandarin), and the second-pass decoder creates units.”

“We leveraged Mandarin as an intermediate language to build pseudo-labels, where we first translated English (or Hokkien) speech to Mandarin text, and we then translated to Hokkien (or English) and added it to training data,” he continued. Currently, the system allows for someone who speaks Hokkien to converse with someone who speaks English, albeit stiltedly. The model can only translate one full sentence at a time but Zuckerberg is confident that the technique can eventually be applied to more languages and will improve to the point of offering real-time translation.

In addition to the models and training data that Meta is already open-sourcing from this project, the company is also releasing a first-of-its-kind speech-to-speech translation benchmarking system based on a Hokkien speech corpus called Taiwanese Across Taiwan, as well as “the speech matrix, a large corpus of speech-to-speech translations mined with Meta’s innovative data mining technique called LASER,” Zuckerberg announced. This system will empower researchers to create speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) systems of their own.

We all knew it was coming. The next phase of Netflix's months-long crackdown on password sharing — which itself follows the company's first quarterly subscriber loss in a decade — is soon upon us. The company announced during its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday that it will charge customers an added monthly fee to people who share their login credentials beginning in early 2023.

This move is an expansion of a pilot program currently running in Latin America which charges extra fees for "extra user" subaccounts, users outside of your immediate household who use your login to access the service. Basically, every listing on the "Who's Watching?" screen is going to cost you extra money if they don't also live with you. 

Netflix has not yet announced pricing for the punitive charges though if they follow the pilot program's "one quarter of the basic rate" scheme, it should work out to around US$3-4. For folks wanting to avoid those fees, Netflix unveiled on Monday an account migration tool that will transfer a user's subaccount data (viewing history, recommendations and the like) to their new, independent subscription. 

In addition, the company recently announced a less expensive, ad-supported tier that will cost $7 a month when it launches on November 3rd. The new tier will be available in a dozen countries, including the UK, Canada, and Mexico, by November 10th.

After Mary Sears and her team had revolutionized the field of oceanography, but before Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson helped put John Glenn into orbit, a cadre of women programmers working for the US government faced an impossible task: train ENIAC, the world's first modern computer, to do more than quickly calculate artillery trajectories. Though successful — and without the aid of a guide or manual no less — their names and deeds were lost to the annals of history, until author Kathy Kleiman, through a Herculean research effort of her own, brought their stories to light in Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer.

Grand Central Publishing

Excerpted from the book Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer by Kathy Kleiman. Copyright © 2022 by First Byte Productions, LLC. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.

Demonstration Day, February 15, 1946

The Moore School stood ready as people began to arrive by train and trolley. John and Pres, as well as the engineers and deans and professors of the university, wore their best suits and Army officers were in dress uniform with their medals gleaming. The six women wore their best professional skirt suits and dresses.

Kay and Fran manned the front door of the Moore School. As the scientists and technologists arrived, some from as far as Boston, the two women welcomed them warmly. They asked everyone to hang up their heavy winter coats on the portable coat racks that Moore School staff had left nearby. Then they directed them down the hall and around the corner to the ENIAC room.

Just before 11:00 a.m., Fran and Kay ran back to be in the ENIAC room when the demonstration began.

As they slid into the back of the room, everything was at the ready. At the front of the great ENIAC U, there was space for some speakers, a few rows of chairs, and plenty of standing room for invited guests and ENIAC team members. Across the room, Marlyn, Betty, and Jean stood in the back and the women smiled to each other. Their big moment was about to begin. Ruth stayed outside, pointing late arrivals in the right direction.

The room was packed and was filled with an air of anticipation and wonder as people saw ENIAC for the first time.

Demonstration Day started with a few introductions. Major General Barnes started with the BRL officers and Moore School deans and then presented John and Pres as the co-inventors. Then Arthur came to the front of the room and introduced himself as the master of ceremonies for the ENIAC events. He would run five programs, all using the remote control box he held in his hand.

The first program was an addition. Arthur hit one of the but-tons and the ENIAC whirled to life. Then he ran a multiplication. His expert audience knew that ENIAC was calculating it many times faster than any other machine in the world. Then he ran the table of squares and cubes, and then sines and cosines. So far, Demonstration Day was the same as the one two weeks earlier, and for this sophisticated audience, the presentation was pretty boring.

But Arthur was just getting started and the drama was about to begin. He told them that now he would run a ballistics trajectory three times on ENIAC.

He pushed the button and ran it once. The trajectory “ran beautifully,” Betty remembered. Then Arthur ran it again, a version of the trajectory without the punched cards printing, and it ran much faster. Punched cards actually slowed things down a little bit.

Then Arthur pointed everyone to the grids of tiny lights at the top of the accumulators and urged his attendees to look closely at them in the moments to come. He nodded to Pres, who stood against the wall, and suddenly Pres turned off the lights. In the black room, only a few small status lights were lit on the units of ENIAC. Everything else was in darkness.

With a click of the button, Arthur brought the ENIAC to life. For a dazzling twenty seconds, the ENIAC lit up. Those watching the accumulators closely saw the 100 tiny lights twinkle as they moved in a flash, first going up as the missile ascended to the sky, and then going down as it sped back to earth, the lights forever changing and twinkling. Those twenty seconds seemed at once an eternity and instantaneous.

Then the ENIAC finished, and darkness filled the room again. Arthur and Pres waited a moment, and then Pres turned on the lights and Arthur announced dramatically that ENIAC had just completed a trajectory faster than it would take a missile to leave the muzzle of artillery and hit its target. “Everybody gasped.”

Less than twenty seconds. This audience of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians knew how many hours it took to calculate a differential calculus equation by hand. They knew that ENIAC had calculated the work of a week in fewer than two dozen seconds. They knew the world had changed.

Climax complete, everyone in the room was beaming. The Army officers knew their risk had paid off. The ENIAC engineers knew their hardware was a success. The Moore School deans knew they no longer had to be worried about being embarrassed. And the ENIAC Programmers knew that their trajectory had worked perfectly. Years of work, effort, ingenuity, and creativity had come together in twenty seconds of pure innovation.

Some would later call this moment the birth of the “Electronic Computing Revolution.” Others would soon call it the birth of the Information Age. After those precious twenty seconds, no one would give a second look to the great Mark I electromechanical computer or the differential analyzer. After Demonstration Day, the country was on a clear path to general- purpose, programmable, all- electronic computing. There was no other direction. There was no other future. John, Pres, Herman, and some of the engineers fielded questions from the guests, and then the formal session finished. But no one wanted to leave. Attendees surrounded John and Pres, Arthur and Harold.

The women circulated. They had taken turns running punched cards through the tabulator and had stacks of trajectory printouts to share. They divided up the sheets and moved around the room to hand them out. Attendees were happy to receive a trajectory, a souvenir of the great moment they had just witnessed.

But no attendee congratulated the women. Because no guest knew what they had done. In the midst of the announcements and the introductions of Army officers, Moore School deans, and ENIAC inventors, the Programmers had been left out. “None of us girls were ever introduced as any part of it” that day, Kay noted later.

Since no one had thought to name the six young women who programmed the ballistics trajectory, the audience did not know of their work: thousands of hours spent learning the units of ENIAC, studying its “direct programming” method, breaking down the ballistics trajectory into discrete steps, writing the detailed pedaling sheets for the trajectory program, setting up their program on ENIAC, and learning ENIAC “down to a vacuum tube.” Later, Jean said, they “did receive a lot of compliments” from the ENIAC team, but at that moment they were unknown to the guests in the room.

And at that moment, it did not matter. They cared about the success of ENIAC and their team, and they knew they had played a role, a critical role, in the success of the day. This was a day that would go down in history, and they had been there and played an invaluable part.

Wait, so I’m supposed to get in my car, commute to some hoighty toighty coffee store, find and pay for parking, then wait in line to pay $3 for a few tablespoons of mediocre hot pressed bean juice served to me in a paper cup? Why would I do that when I can just walk my lazy ass to my kitchen and brew up a single piping-hot serving of concentrated coffee in under 5 minutes from the $150 Outin mobile espresso maker?

Andrew Tarantola / Engadget

I stumbled across the Outin (which keeps autocorrecting to Putin so not great branding) on Amazon while doing research for an upcoming Holiday Gift Guide and turns out that there are a shocking number of mobile, battery-powered caffeinated beverage brewers on the market these days. I was drawn to the Outin because, unlike a vast majority of available models, it handles both coffee pods (specifically, of the Nespresso variety) and ground espresso — you simply have to swap out the pod holder for small container about half the size of a film canister that holds the ground coffee. It does both hot and cold brew too. The well-equipped Outin starter pack comes with a coffee scoop, among myriad other accessories sleeves, and carrying cases, that is perfectly fitted to both fill and tamp down the grounds into the canister.

The actual brewing process gets a bit complicated as the Outin is built like a Russian nesting doll. You have to fill the canister with coffee grounds, tamp those down, snap on a perforated lid, drop the now-sealed canister in a larger mounting cup, screw that into the bottom of the heating unit before sliding the receptacle cup over the mounting cup to catch the coffee when it is extruded – where are you going there are still more steps – then pour exactly 70 ml of water into the upper chamber (gods help you if you overfill), put a cap on that, then hold the control button down for at least two seconds – but less than four, otherwise you get cold brew – and wait three to four minutes for the water to heat to 270 degrees F. From there, the Outin will automatically begin pushing said hot water through the coffee-filled pod at 20 bar pressure, but won’t stop until it runs out of batteries or you press the control button again.

Ooh, that reminds me: batteries. The Outin has 7800mAh of them and that still isn’t nearly enough. It takes around 45 minutes to fully charge the device from dead using the included USB-C cable. You get three cups of espresso out of that (four if you’re lucky) before another three-quarters hour on the charger is required.

Andrew Tarantola / Engadget

Also, I’m not a fan of having to memorize yet another obtuse sequence of button presses to get this thing to work because the designers thought they’d be clever and save money by having a single command input control everything. I’ve already had to commit to memory the patterns for a dozen various vape pens and desktop rigs, LED flashlights and household gadgets. It’s all too much so I wind up just pushing the button on this and swearing until something happens. Hell no I’m not reading the instructions, I’m an adult.

That said, espresso that makes me go “meh, at least I didn’t have to drive to get it” is still better than the alternative of “no espresso.” Plus, it’s leagues superior to the stuff I normally drink in hotel rooms while on assignment. I’m certainly not dragging this thing and its menagerie of lids-that-are-as-easily-lost-as-they-are-essential-to-the-device’s-proper-operation anywhere near the great outdoors, but I could see myself using it to pregame before working livestream events or press conferences. Maybe I’ll caffeinate myself to the point of oscillation in three-shot bursts for the duration of CES 2023.

I wasn't kidding when I told you that GM is going all-in on Ultium, the battery technology behind the company's electrification efforts, not to mention an entire generation of Chevy and GMC EVs. On Tuesday, the automaker announced that it is expanding its portfolio into energy management services — think big stationary batteries to store rooftop-generated solar power on a home or business — with its new spin-off business, GM Energy.

The new venture will be comprised of three smaller ones: Ultium Home, Ultium Commercial and Ultium Charge 360, offering "solutions ranging from bi-directional charging, vehicle-to home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) applications, to stationary storage, solar products, software applications, cloud management tools, microgrid solutions, hydrogen fuel cells and more," according to GM's announcement on Tuesday. 

The new company will be partnering with a number of established firms and utilities in the energy industry. For example, GM will be working with SunPower to develop and market a integrated home energy storage system that incorporates an electric vehicle with solar panels and battery banks to enable easy Vehicle-to-Home (V2H) power transfers. GM plans to have that home energy system ready for sale alongside the release of the EV Silverado next fall, 2023. 

Additionally, GM Energy has partnered with California's Pacific Gas and Electric utility for another V2H pilot program that will let you run your household appliances off of your EV's battery during blackouts. Eventually, the company plans to add V2G (Vehicle-to-Grid) capabilities, which will allow you to sell excess energy produced by the solar panels back to your local utility. 

For businesses, Ultium Commercial may help ease the transition to an electrified fleet. Many such existing GM customers, "have fleets of vehicles are looking to electrify their fleets, but aren't really aware of how to set up the charging infrastructure, how to manage their energy," Mark Bole, vice president and Head of V2X Battery Solutions at GM said during an embargoed press briefing last week. "And so, not only do we come in as a hardware and software provider, but in a sense, really, as a strategic advisor for these commercial customers."

"There are more power failures in the US than any other country in the industrialized world," Travis Hester, vice president of GM EV Growth Operations, added. "There were 25,000 blackouts in California alone last year, over 15 and a half billion dollars of lost commerce, just in California. So when you look at the numbers, there is a desire — and we're seeing it very clearly from commercial customers reaching out to us and asking us for assistance to deal with some of these problems."

GM is also transferring its public charging station network, Ultium Charge 360, over to GM Energy. Charge 360 launched in 2021 in Washington, Florida and California. GM partnered with Blink Charging, ChargePoint, EV Connect, EVgo, FLO, Greenlots and SemaConnect to streamline their collective 60,000-plug network of 350 kW Level 3 DC fast chargers and provide "more seamless access" to drivers. The automaker built upon that network this past July, announcing a 500-station "coast-to-coast" expansion in partnership with EVGo. In all, GM hopes to have 2,700 such EV fast charging stations across the US and Canada under its Ultium Charge 360 banner by 2025. 

The fates of Apple and Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSCM have grown inextricably intertwined since the advent of the iPhone. As each subsequent generation of iPhone hurtled past the technological capabilities of its predecessor, the processors that powered them grew increasingly complex and specialized — to the point that, today, TSCM has become the only chip fab on the planet with the requisite tools and know-how to actually build them. In his new book, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, economic historian Chris Miller examines the rise of processor production as an economically crucial commodity, the national security implications those global supply chains might pose to America.

Simon & Schuster

Excerpted from Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller. Reprinted with permission from Scribner. Copyright 2022.

Apple Silicon

The greatest beneficiary of the rise of foundries like TSMC was a company that most people don’t even realize designs chips: Apple. The company Steve Jobs built has always specialized in hardware, however, so it’s no surprise that Apple’s desire to perfect its devices includes controlling the silicon inside. Since his earliest days at Apple, Steve Jobs had thought deeply about the relationship between software and hardware. In 1980, when his hair nearly reached his shoulders and his mustache covered his upper lip, Jobs gave a lecture that asked, “What is software?” 

“The only thing I can think of,” he answered, “is software is something that is changing too rapidly, or you don’t exactly know what you want yet, or you didn’t have time to get it into hardware.” 

Jobs didn’t have time to get all his ideas into the hardware of the first-generation iPhone, which used Apple’s own iOS operating system but outsourced design and production of its chips to Samsung. The revolutionary new phone had many other chips, too: an Intel memory chip, an audio processor designed by Wolfson, a modem to connect with the cell network produced by Germany’s Infineon, a Bluetooth chip designed by CSR, and a signal amplifier from Skyworks, among others. All were designed by other companies.

As Jobs introduced new versions of the iPhone, he began etching his vision for the smartphone into Apple’s own silicon chips. A year after launching the iPhone, Apple bought a small Silicon Valley chip design firm called PA Semi that had expertise in energy-efficient processing. Soon Apple began hiring some of the industry’s best chip designers. Two years later, the company announced it had designed its own application processor, the A4, which it used in the new iPad and the iPhone 4. Designing chips as complex as the processors that run smartphones is expensive, which is why most low- and midrange smartphone companies buy off-the-shelf chips from companies like Qualcomm. However, Apple has invested heavily in R&D and chip design facilities in Bavaria and Israel as well as Silicon Valley, where engineers design its newest chips. Now Apple not only designs the main processors for most of its devices but also ancillary chips that run accessories like AirPods. This investment in specialized silicon explains why Apple’s products work so smoothly. Within four years of the iPhone’s launch, Apple was making over 60 percent of all the world’s profits from smartphone sales, crushing rivals like Nokia and BlackBerry and leaving East Asian smartphone makers to compete in the low-margin market for cheap phones. 

Like Qualcomm and the other chip firms that powered the mobile revolution, even though Apple designs ever more silicon, it doesn’t build any of these chips. Apple is well known for outsourcing assembly of its phones, tablets, and other devices to several hundred thousand assembly line workers in China, who are responsible for screwing and gluing tiny pieces together. China’s ecosystem of assembly facilities is the world’s best place to build electronic devices. Taiwanese companies, like Foxconn and Wistron, that run these facilities for Apple in China are uniquely capable of churning out phones, PCs, and other electronic. Though the electronics assembly facilities in Chinese cities like Dongguan and Zhengzhou are the world’s most efficient, however, they aren’t irreplaceable. The world still has several hundred million subsistence farmers who’d happily fasten components into an iPhone for a dollar an hour. Foxconn assembles most of its Apple products in China, but it builds some in Vietnam and India, too. 

Unlike assembly line workers, the chips inside smartphones are very difficult to replace. As transistors have shrunk, they’ve become ever harder to fabricate. The number of semiconductor companies that can build leading-edge chips has dwindled. By 2010, at the time Apple launched its first chip, there were just a handful of cutting-edge foundries: Taiwan’s TSMC, South Korea’s Samsung, and — perhaps — GlobalFoundries, depending on whether it could succeed in winning market share. Intel, still the world’s leader at shrinking transistors, remained focused on building its own chips for PCs and servers rather than processors for other companies’ phones. Chinese foundries like SMIC were trying to catch up but remained years behind. 

Because of this, the smartphone supply chain looks very different from the one associated with PCs. Smartphones and PCs are both assembled largely in China with high-value components mostly designed in the U.S., Europe, Japan, or Korea. For PCs, most processors come from Intel and are produced at one of the company’s fabs in the U.S., Ireland, or Israel. Smartphones are different. They’re stuffed full of chips, not only the main processor (which Apple designs itself), but modem and radio-frequency chips for connecting with cellular networks, chips for WiFi and Bluetooth connections, an image sensor for the camera, at least two memory chips, chips that sense motion (so your phone knows when you turn it horizontal), as well as semiconductors that manage the battery, the audio, and wireless charging. These chips make up most of the bill of materials needed to build a smartphone. 

As semiconductor fabrication capacity migrated to Taiwan and South Korea, so too did the ability to produce many of these chips. Application processors, the electronic brain inside each smartphone, are mostly produced in Taiwan and South Korea before being sent to China for final assembly inside a phone’s plastic case and glass screen. Apple’s iPhone processors are fabricated exclusively in Taiwan. Today, no company besides TSMC has the skill or the production capacity to build the chips Apple needs. So the text etched onto the back of each iPhone — “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China”—is highly misleading. The iPhone’s most irreplaceable components are indeed designed in California and assembled in China. But they can only be made in Taiwan.