Behind Locked Doors - A Tour of Apple's Factory (1990)

Mac Folklore Radio

A tour of Apple’s Fremont and Singapore factories. Remember when we used to manufacture stuff in North America?

Written by Cheryl England Spencer, Macworld, September 1990. Cheryl was also the founder of MacAddict. Unfortunately Cheryl passed away in September 2022. :-( We miss you, Cheryl. Obligatory MacAddict attitude clip from Macworld Boston 1996.

Watch Cheryl giving us a tour of her office at MacAddict in 1997 in 160x120 Road Pizza (QuickTime 1.0 “Apple Video Codec”) quality.

Jean-Louis Gasée assembled a Macintosh IIcx live on stage (eat your heart out, Tim Cook) to demonstrate Apple’s design-for-manufacturing prowess. DRAM joke courtesy of the DRAM crisis of 1989.

1988: NeXT factory tour: The Machine to Build the Machines. I’ll bet Steve even critiqued the unnecessarily epic musical score.

1990: Apple: “We Are Manufacturing”, the Fremont, California factory as it stood when the article was written. Notably less epic than NeXT’s tour and distributed on the User Group Connection VHS tapes.

1987: Apple: “World Class Manufacturing Around the World”, a factory tour from three years prior to this article. The first half is Apple II-centric–that’s what kept Apple afloat during the Mac’s first few horrible years, after all.

Despite what Steve Jobs would have us believe, humans were present in the PowerPC G5 CPU factory. Don’t believe anything Steve tells you, in particular because he passed away 12 years ago.

Apple’s Fremont factory closed in 2004.