Steve Jobs seems to be discussing the global manufacturing program adopted by Apple in this quote:<p>> "And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow... something’s transmitted there."<p>While these numbers are not that widely reported in US media at present, in 2012 Apple was employing 47,000 workers domestically, but ~700,000 foreign subcontractors for the production of over 100 million phones, tablets and laptops. Source: Duhigg and Bradsher (2012)<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-an...</a><p>The message seems to be, "We're going to maximize shareholder dividends and executive bonuses by replacing well-paid domestic manufacturing jobs with cheap sweatshop labor in other countries. Yes, this will reduce average wages across parts of the USA that once enjoyed middle-class prosperity, leading to increased homelessness and poverty, but our legal responsibility is to maximize shareholder profits and anyway, everyone else is doing it, so quit whining. It's not like you have to talk to the poors or the cheap sweatshop laborers, is it?"<p>Of course, socioeconomic conditions today are so bad that iPhone owners now have to negotiate sidewalks littered with tents and opiate addicts all across Apple's origin region in the California Bay Area. That's what neoliberal capitalist fundamentalism has created.