I don't know if I've ever read such a long piece filled with so many interconnected details, but ultimately telling no coherent story.

It's like a modern crackpot conspiracy theory, but told in iPhone land.

This is what I was thinking/ further reading the article confirmed. Takes ‘I digress’ into a new dimension. Had to abort midway through.

I was hoping it went somewhere interesting. It didn't.

> When computerized management first came to the shop a half century ago, the limitations of memory were so severe that early bills of material could not be recorded as single data entities. The solution was to break them into component parts, such that each part or subassembly became an individual bill with an individual shop order. As the scale of these subassemblies grew, the shop was now relegated, in the words of Richard Lilly, to the “business of making parts instead of products.”

Can someone ELI5? Been a programmer and computer history dilettante for 35 years but don’t know what this lack of memory condition caused.

The author thanks that if a list of parts doesn't fit on one page, that the second page has to be produced by a different factory.

He see seems to conflating complexity of manufactured products with complexity of BOM documents.

Maybe they reached the filesize limit on a '70s computer by including complete production receipe?

TL;DR

> The precise meaning of the messages my students found scrawled in their iPhone 5c is something only workers or managers at the Wuxi factory could definitively determine.