Apple’s pioneering strategy to build circuit boards was to employ Jobs’s younger, pregnant sister Patty, paying her a dollar for every board she assembled. Patty “settled on the living-room couch of her apartment, the boards on the coffee table before her, the soaps on the TV and a phone cradled on her shoulder talking to friends, jamming the rows of little caterpillar-shaped integrated circuits into the holes on the surface of the green placemat-sized fiberglass printed circuit boards,” writes Malone. “She wasn’t very good at it, with a tendency to jam the chips down when they didn’t fit just right—thus bending their little gold legs and setting the stage for future short circuits—but she was cheap, methodical and, most of all, available.
For the more popular Apple II, a small team took all the parts and separated them into little kits. Every few days they gave the kits to a Los Altos housewife, who coordinated a fragmented network of assembly operations spanning houses and apartments crowded with immigrant women from Southeast Asia and undocumented Mexicans. “No one ever mentioned minimum wage, or Social Security, or workplace safety laws,” Malone writes. “And thus, for more than a year, the Apple II, promoted as the machine to liberate people from the slavery of bureaucracies and office work, was in fact being partially assembled in sweatshops.”
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