The iPhone 5s, Apple's latest flagship smartphone, has been in great demand since the time it went on sale, with a two to three week waiting period for orders placed on the company's US and Chinese online stores. A major reason responsible for this delay was the phone's limited supplies.
However, it looks like Foxconn (the trade name for Hon Hai Precision Industry), the company that assembles the iPhone in China, has ramped up production by running its factories around the clock, and employing more workers on its production lines in a bid to reduce the iPhone 5s waiting time, according to a
report by the Wall Street Journal.
The report mentions that Apple is now shipping all variants of the iPhone 5s within three to five business days. Citing people familiar with the development, the report elaborates that Apple requested Foxconn to focus on iPhone 5s production at the cost of
iPhone 5c, a new less expensive iPhone which has reportedly failed to get as good a response as the
iPhone 5s.
It states that Foxconn has operated 100 production lines 24 by 7 in Zhengzhou, north central China, at full capacity, citing executives at the Taiwanese contract manufacturer. It employs about 300,000 workers at the site , focusing on just making the iPhone 5s and its components including metal casings.
It mentions Foxconn executives as saying that there are the about 600 workers on each of the iPhone 5s production line for assembling the phone. The facility produces 500,000 iPhone 5s units every day, and it takes more time to produce the latest flagship compared to the previous iterations of the iPhone, notes the report.
The iPhone 5s is referred to as the 'most forward-thinking iPhone yet' by Apple and features a new A7 chipset which boasts of a 64-bit architecture and also includes a M7 motion co-processor for measuring motion data through various sensor like accelerometer, compass and gyroscope. The iPhone 5s runs iOS 7, the new iteration of Apple OS. It comes in three inbuilt storage variants 16GB, 32GB and 64GB and is available in three colour variants such as Gold, Silver and Space Grey.
The Apple iPhone 5s comes with a 4-inch display with a resolution of 640x1136 pixels and boasts of a 326ppi pixel density. The iPhone 5s sports an all-new 8-megapixel iSight camera with dual-LED flash, which the company called True Tone flash. The rear camera features an f/2.2 aperture and a 15 percent larger image sensor compared to the iPhone 5. It also houses a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera.
The Apple iPhone 5s is the first device in Apple's portfolio that features a fingerprint scanner, which the company calls Touch ID. The Touch ID scanner can be used to unlock the iPhone 5s or even authorise payments on iTunes.