About 10 Apple employees spent some of their valuable hours over recent months on a project that might seem unusual for the tech giant: customizing an open source AI tool for ImageTek, a small manufacturer in Springfield, Vermont whose lines of business include printing millions of labels for food packaging.
The Apple engineers developed a computer vision system to automatically identify color errors, and on one run it picked up bacon labels with a far-too-pinkish beige before they got shipped, according to Marji Smith, ImageTek’s president. She says the timely catch helped ImageTek from losing a crucial customer. While not revolutionary, the technology requires finagling that comes easy with experience in AI—something that ImageTek lacks.
“We’re not a gigantic company, and we don’t have any AI or software team,” Smith says of the 31-year-old, 54-employee business. “What Apple is doing is positively impactful for us.”
ImageTek isn’t an Apple supplier. Instead, the engineering assistance it’s receiving is a previously unreported portion of the $600 billion investment in US manufacturing through 2028 that Apple announced this year. The iPhone maker committed to opening up a server factory in Houston, which it did recently. It also pledged to increase spending with domestic suppliers and educate “the next generation of US manufacturers.”
For a company with 166,000 employees and $112 billion in annual profit last fiscal year, the investment in education is small. In August, the company launched a training program, known as the Apple Manufacturing Academy. It’s run in partnership with Michigan State University, which is receiving $2.5 million from Apple to partially reimburse for classrooms, marketing, and instructors as part of the first 12 months of a three-year deal, according to a contract obtained by WIRED through a public records request.
The academy has held free monthly workshops in Detroit to share lessons with and provide networking opportunities for over 100 small-time manufacturers from around the country. What’s significant is that ImageTek and two other participants revealed to WIRED that they are receiving an unexpected bonus in the form of site visits and deep technical support from Apple employees. “I haven’t found any strings attached,” Smith says.
Jamie Herrera, a director of product operations at Apple who oversees the academy, says its goal is to make an impact. “It takes a little bit more than just what you can get out of a training session,” he says. “We’re able to pair them up with engineers, experts … and go deeper into: How do we take that learning and start to turn it into application?”
Apple has just one factory, which assembles iMacs in Ireland, and is generally secretive about its manufacturing processes. But its staff have decades of knowledge from collaborating with partners such as Foxconn—mostly outside the US—that make parts or put them into iPhones and other Apple products. Academy participants believe they have been treated to unique candor, including about how Apple recovered from its 2014 Bendgate scandal, in which some iPhone 6 models warped in tight pockets.
The company has run a training program for manufacturers in South Korea for several years. By opening up in the US, Apple could show the Trump administration, which is focused on increasing domestic manufacturing, that the company is rolling up its sleeves. That could help it win favors on tariffs and other potentially costly policies. “It’s goodwill,” says Harry Moser, founder of the industry-supported Reshoring Initiative, which tracks and encourages US manufacturing investments. “It’s great they are doing it, and there’s very few companies that have the money to do it.”
To a small extent, working with upstarts could provide Apple employees fun opportunities for experimentation that may even inform its own manufacturing.
Herrera says Apple is not seeking any direct benefit from what he described as the significant investment of labor. “What we’re looking at is that rising sea for all ships,” he says. “The fact that we’re able to help US manufacturers in any way we can to elevate and accelerate their progress, it’s only going to be better for everyone.”
Jobs in US manufacturing have barely budged over the past decade, but trillions of dollars in projects are in the works by Moser’s estimate. Ultimately, a more robust US manufacturing sector could help companies like Apple potentially lower their costs.
“Quite Transparent”
Smith, a longtime manufacturing executive, joined ImageTek last year and applied for Apple’s academy at the first chance. “We see what’s happening with the return of tech manufacturing to the US, and we want to be a part of that,” she says. “We’re investing and growing a lot right now, and we’re hungry for support.”
This year, three people from Apple traveled to the machinery manufacturing region in Vermont colloquially known as Precision Valley to visit ImageTek, which also assembles products including circuit boards, and as of recently, agricultural drones. Smith laid bare to the visitors ImageTek’s challenges. When she mentioned how humidity, worker errors, and machine failures were affecting color quality in label printing, the Apple team suggested setting up a camera and an automated tool to compare an ideal sample to fresh prints.
“People on the internet have been known to argue about the color of stripes on a dress,” Smith says. “Having a data-based approach was something we needed.”
Beginning in September, a larger group from Apple has joined 30-minute calls nearly every week to coach ImageTek through the process and hand off code. Smith described the employees as mostly having over a decade of experience at Apple in manufacturing operations and quality.
The color comparison is currently done off to the side of the factory. The goal is to integrate the setup directly into the press and expand it to catch errors in other products. Smith says the Apple team has been eager to keep helping. No one has mentioned who owns the code and whether a bill will ever come due.
“We haven’t talked about licensing or rights,” Smith says. But with customers such as the bacon maker renewing their contracts with ImageTek because of quality improvements, the company is in its best financial position ever and striving to grow enough to supply Apple someday.
Amtech Electrocircuits, a family-owned electronics manufacturer based in suburban Detroit, also applied to the manufacturing academy as soon as it could. CEO Jay Patel says he came to the realization that he needed outside expertise to compete with overseas manufacturers and grow the company his father had started. “I will not camp outside an Apple store to get an iPhone,” he says. “But I will camp outside the manufacturing academy to make sure we get in.”
Patel did get into the first workshop in August. Ever since, he and his team have been meeting over video with a couple of Apple process engineers for an hour every one or two weeks. They are helping Amtech introduce sensors and analytics tools to reduce downtime in the production of electronics used in agriculture, medicine, and other fields. “We need to mitigate the waste so we can be more competitive,” Patel says.
“Pilot Purgatory”
Overall, about 15 companies have received extensive consulting, Apple’s Herrera says. An additional beneficiary has been Walkerton, Indiana-based Polygon, which began making fishing rods about 75 years ago before specializing in industrial products such as tubes that are snaked through the body to remove tumors. Apple isn’t a customer.
Ben Fouch, chief financial officer for Polygon, says older machines give the company troubles; for example, a Haas mill that occasionally punches poorly-located holes in tubes and a centerless grinder that can’t track its output. Workers have to manually inspect thousands of parts a day, limiting production, and holding Polygon back from its goal of doubling annual sales to north of $100 million.
Fouch knew automated sensors could help by, for example, identifying the environmental culprits of the hole-punching issues, but with so many potential options to try he didn’t know where to start. “The worst thing you can do, in a smaller business especially, is muddle through pilot purgatory, hoping to find a viable product,” he says. “When someone else has done it before, they know the viable path, and they can save you the time and the expense.”
That’s just what three directors and managers from Apple’s engineering and operations teams offered when Fouch and Quinn Shanahan, who oversees Polygon’s medical device production and special products, visited the manufacturing academy in October and November, respectively. Over what Fouch estimates was five hours, the Apple employees evaluated Polygon’s challenges and applied the industrial engineering equation of Little’s Law—which can identify capacity bottlenecks—to devise solutions.
The result was a detailed strategy mapping out sensors and software that could affordably track production and alert about anomalies. Polygon can now count the number of passes the tube makes through the grinder, and it will soon be able to understand whether an overheated motor or other factors could explain the botched hole punching, Shanahan says.
If all goes as planned, Polygon will have implemented a working system to address its most significant bottlenecks for no more than $50,000 compared to the $500,000 that an automation consultancy may have charged, according to Fouch. The Apple team is working on visiting Polygon to talk through other upgrades. “They have walked these paths before,” Fouch says. “Without their help, it’s going to take us much longer.”
Apple’s Herrera says giving small manufacturers a sense of the benefits of automation and other technologies could eventually lead them to work with consultants and invest in more expensive systems.
Two other academy participants tell WIRED that they have not received extensive assistance from Apple—Herrera says it comes down to which companies have prepared a “problem statement” that Apple can help with—but they are working to bring what they learned to their factories. Jack Kosloski, a project engineer at Blue Lake, a plastic-free packaging startup, says it was eye-opening for him to hear about the depth of Apple’s product testing.
In one academy session, Apple employees described a robot that wears jeans and simulates bending over as part of stress testing to try to prevent a repeat of Bendgate, Kosloski recalls. “They go down into the specs of jeans, the materials, to make it the most accurate and reliable data they can have,” Kosloski says. “I had never seen something like that.”
Seth Greenberg, a senior account manager at Focus Integration—which is developing robots to load pallets—says technical drills and thought exercises led by Apple experts during his visit to the academy in September energized him so much that he happily returned this month.
Last week, Apple released online courses covering topics including quality control and computer vision to open the academy to a broader audience. Virtual participants are also promised extensive consulting from Apple.
As President Trump’s tariffs force some companies to find US manufacturing partners, the recipients of Apple’s help believe they are now better positioned to win some of the business.
ImageTek’s Smith wants to invite Apple engineers back to Vermont to celebrate as its factory expands and off-color bacon labels become a relic. “We have been very glad they took an interest in us,” she says.
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