Health, Science and Technology

Last week, The New York Times gave us an inside look at what it’s like to work at Foxconn, the manufacturing company that owns several China-based factories that crank out Apple’s iPads, iPhones and iPods by the millions.

The story is full of examples of horrifying working conditions in Foxconn’s factories that would never fly here in the United States. Here are some of the more troubling ones from the Times story:

Foxconn is a 24-hour operation. Employees work six days a week, sometimes in 12-hour shifts. They’re on their feet for so long that their legs begin to swell. There are underage workers. They live in crowded dorms on the factory’s campus. In recent years, there have been reports of workers leaping from buildings in apparent suicides.

The 3rd quarter 2011 results posted by Verizon show that the iPhone 4 has done particularly well. It was announced that they saw two million iPhone 4 smartphones sold within the 3 months of the quarter. Remember that this is the iPhone 4 and not the 4S we are speaking about here. Moving on to the iPhone 4S, specific numbers were not provided but it did comment that sales were extremely strong at launch and that they are still struggling to get more stock to satisfy demand. In total, Verizon sold 5.6 million smartphones with over half of them running the Android operating system. Total new connections on the Verizon network are 1.3 million with 882,000 of them being retail postpaid customers. Total connections for Verizon now stands at 107.7 million. For those interested in numbers from AT&T, they announced earlier today that they sold 1 million iPhone 4S units since launch and that over half of its postpaid customers have a smart device.

The iPhone 5 could launch in June this year, although there has been a bit of talk of it not showing up till September of this year. Either way, the iPhone 5 (or 4GS) will eventually arrive and with it, a few tweaks here and there.

The infographic embedded below, shows a number of changes that might happen to the next generation iPhone and also gives a percentage of how likely the change will be made.