It’s difficult to fully appreciate how much our lives have become digital in recent years. From a time when we were still using landline phone numbers and dial-up internet, we’ve shot through into an era of smartphones, smart televisions – and even smart fridges. How are all these digital products manufactured so that they’re both robust and practical? This short guide will explain how manufacturers take parts and raw materials and make them into laptops, phones, tablets, and televisions.
Supply Chains
First, it’s important to emphasize that these products aren’t put together in one facility. That would be a huge task for a single manufacturer, so they’d have to have dozens of different production lines in order to get all the components in place to make a smart, digital product. A smartphone, for instance, has hundreds of different components that are sourced from around the world.
You might find that your device’s microchip is sourced from Korea, its motherboard from China, and its core metallic components from across Africa. These are then shipped to manufacturers who put the devices together at the end of the supply chain. The final stage, of course, for these products is their shipping to shops and warehouses, when they’re then purchased and sent to consumers.
Building a Device
So now we’ve familiarized ourselves with the complex system of shipping routes and commercial relationships upon which our digital products depend, it’s time to turn to the building process itself. Clearly, if you decide to take a digital device apart, you’ll see that there’s lots of technical equipment contained within it – but connecting it all is actually the easiest task in the production process.
It’s the other aspects that are more complex and interesting. For instance, to make television sets, laptop cases, and phone bodies, precision metal-cutting is used. That helps firms produce these components at pace. You’ll find an array of these metal cutters at kerfdevelopments.com – impressive in their robotic precision. Meanwhile, the soldering of wires is likewise completed by smart machines rather than by hand.
Software
And within your digital device are the components necessary to run complex software that you see through your screen. Your phone’s ability to make an internet call, load up an app, or play a game, are all due to the hardware that’s been installed within it. And that hardware is twofold: there’s the part of your phone that supports the processing of digital information and the part that connects you to wireless internet.
The former means that your phone can read any app or program that’s been written in digital language. And the latter means that you can connect to others around you, either on social media or in an online game. That’s how these magical devices happen: through a combination of ever-improving hardware and the skills of software developers who make the apps we all use every single day.
Making a digital product is not without its challenges. But as you can see, it’s a well-refined system that turns out millions of products per month.