Foxconn, Apple’s primary supplier in Asia, has been using students to assemble the newly-released iPhone X, according to the Financial Times, even making them illegally work overtime.
The alleged employment of high school students is likely a response to lagging development and production of the smartphone, as the holiday shopping season is either already here or imminent. Six high-schoolers told FT that they are regularly working 11-hour days at a factory in Zhengzhou, China, constructing the iPhone X. The time parameters exceed China’s legally mandated amount student interns are permitted to work.
“We are being forced by our school to work here,” Ms. Yang, an 18-year-old student who declined to use her first name for fear of reprisal, told FT. “The work has nothing to do with our studies,” she continued, adding that she assembles up to 1,200 iPhone X cameras on a daily basis.
All of the work conducted was voluntary, “and compensated appropriately,” Foxconn said. It did admit that there was a violation of internal policy, specifically that student interns — who usually range from the ages of 17 to 19 years old — work more than the allowed 40 hours a week maximum.
Apple has been hit with a bevy of bad news in recent weeks, albeit some alleged. Not long after CEO Tim Cook said the iPhone X is “a value price, actually,” Best Buy, one of its biggest retail partners, announced it would not sell the new mobile devices outright because consumers complained they were too expensive. (RELATED: Here Are All The Important Things You Could Buy Instead of The iPhone X)
There’s also the litany of reports of technical issues.
From significant glitches in the new iOS 11 mobile operating system, struggling cellular connectivity with the latest smartwatch, to a “crackling” noise sometimes emitted from the iPhone 8, a large number of Apple’s products and services for certain users are malfunctioning, defective, or just ineffective.
Most recently, a 10-year-old boy seemed to trick the iPhone X’s facial recognition system — which like the smartwatch’s cellular capabilities, was one of the key selling points — into unlocking because he looks enough like his mother.
Also, in what is probably the most infamous defect, users of Apple’s iOS 11.1 are complaining that the predictive text feature is automatically inputting the letter “A” along with another Webdings-esque character when the letter “I” is intended. (RELATED: Power And Billions Of Dollars: Apple’s Deal With Communist China, And Why They Did It)
Apple did not respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment by time of publication.
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