"I've been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management," he says. "When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority."
As an engineer, I understand why you are scared that "global-supply management" is getting involved. But you forget that the volumes that Apple works at have changed in the last 10 years, to the point where new products need to be manufactured at launch, in quantity that no one else in the industry has ever heard off. Good old days where you could manufacture 1 million iPhones in the first quarter and be happy, those days are over.
So pay a bit of respect to global-supply management. Manufacturing is actually as respectable as engineering. Just different concepts, but both optimize under heavy constraints to achieve near-impossible goals (at least at Apple).
As an engineer, I understand why you are scared that "global-supply management" is getting involved. But you forget that the volumes that Apple works at have changed in the last 10 years, to the point where new products need to be manufactured at launch, in quantity that no one else in the industry has ever heard off. Good old days where you could manufacture 1 million iPhones in the first quarter and be happy, those days are over.
So pay a bit of respect to global-supply management. Manufacturing is actually as respectable as engineering. Just different concepts, but both optimize under heavy constraints to achieve near-impossible goals (at least at Apple).