Submitted by Jon Reed on
According to Taiwan's Economic Daily News, Apple's supply partner, Foxconn, is ramping up to start mass production of the 4.7 inch model of the iPhone 6 next week.
As part of its preparation, the article says that Foxconn will be hiring 100,000 new employees to help meet the overwhelming demand for the new handset. That's what the translated title of the report says anyway. In the text it says the manufacturer will be hiring 10 new people. Curiously, the 100,000 in the title and the 10 in the text are derived from the same characters, so I think there is a failure in the translation. 100,000 seems a little high, but plausible, while obviously 10 is nothing to write about. Not to be outdone, parts supplier Pegatron will be hiring half
a million people to cope with the demand... At any rate, the point is that Foxconn and Pegatron will be hiring some large amount of workers to deal with the expected high demand for the next generation iPhone.
In addition to the new employees, Foxconn will be using robots for part of the manufacturing process for the first time. The report indicates that human eyes will still be required for certain aspects, such as quality control. The robots, known as Foxbots will be used in a limited fashion for now, but may replace human employees in the near future.
In regards to the 5.5 inch iPhone 6, the report indicated that mass production of the device will begin in the first two weeks of August. This contradicts a note from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo earlier this week that suggested there are production issues with the larger model that may push its production as far back as early 2015.