Back in 2012, Apple executives attended a meeting in China where they watched a video of an experimental fully-automated assembly line for the iPads. They watched as iPad parts traveled along conveyor belts and were cut, polished and then partially assembled into a final product. This got Apple excited about creating their own fully automated assembly in an attempt to cut back on labor costs. This ended up being a huge expensive failure.

After seeing the video, the Apple executives were told the line needed very few humans to operate and the line would contain over 1 million robots within 2 years, but by 2019 the company responsible for the production line was only using 100,000 robots across all of their manufacturing. There was something missing.

Apple wanted to be able to cut 15,000 workers from the production line so they tasked their ‘secret’ team with reducing the amount of human labor needed by half. They launched their own robotics lab in 2012 quietly in an attempt to develop their own assembly automation techniques which housed a team of automation specialists and robotics engineers who tried to copy the iPad automatic production line.

But it failed. The problems that arose included basic lack of fine detail. Apple's use of glue required precision that the machinery just couldn’t match when compared to their human counterparts and small screws needed the automation to correctly pick and position them but that automation couldn't find problems as well as a human hand could.

It wasn't the only department working on the project nor was it their biggest failure. That title goes to the millions spent attempting to automate production of what would become the MacBook in 2015. That automated production line began in 2014, and its failures delayed the launch of the Macbook itself. There were problems with the conveyor belt that moved parts along the line but the greatest issue was that parts along the line kept breaking down requiring more and more human intervention.

"If things stop working, the automation can't detect that all the time and repair it," Bourne told The Information. “If any firm were capable of fixing a technology problem, it would surely be Apple, but alongside technical issues there were more fundamental ones.” Since Apple redesigns its major hardware in some small way every year, they would also have to redesign those automated factory lines. Training human workers on new designs is clearly easier and faster.

The most profitable tech company in the world, and - some would say - the most technologically advanced company in history, still relies on humans to build their products. Apple has spent many years and millions of dollars on automating production lines with technology, trying to get machines to build machines but they always revert to using human intelligence when those machines fail. Technical issues and wise business strategies will keep companies using human labor in line with machines if they have any interest in efficiency and low production costs. This Full Automation project was fully abandoned in 2018 and Apple has since adopted a blend of human intelligence and robotics that has solidified the company’s long term profitability based on the concept of evolving assembly much like Henry Ford in 1913.