Apple: Production Costs
Genevieve Butler
Southern New Hampshire University
Abstract
Apple has shown consistently through their design and innovation that they are ready to push the technology bar past all competition including themselves. They source their natural resources from all over the world and follow up with production occurring in Shenzhen, China. Though this allows them to keep production costs down with lower wages, costs and allows for a higher profit margin, do the other factors of production play in their favor?
According to Economics Today, production is defined as “any activity that results in the conversion of resources into products.” (Miller) In the world of economics, the theory of production explains the principles by which a business will decide how much of a product that they will sell or produces along with which factors of production it will use. When looking into the production costs for a company the information is broken down between inputs and outputs. Input refers to the resources that are used to create a product or an output. (Theory)
A more numerical example of this information is shown in a product function, which is a technological relationship between the inputs and maximum possible outputs. (Miller) Through this relationship a business can begin to determine the minimum amount of resources needed to produce a set level of output. Classical economics is driven on the foundation that there are three main input categories, capital, labor and land or natural resources. There is also a fourth category that economists have added in recent years, entrepreneurship. When the world saw the design decisions from the late Steve Jobs beginning with the iPod touch entrepreneurship a legitimate factor of production. When looking further into the future on Steve Jobs innovation and designs we...