So much of the history of Silicon Valley is about the design, and not the labor and the execution...When we think about early Apple, we think about Steve Wozniak wiring the Apple I, and then we don’t worry about who wires any of the other Apples they make. It’s just wiring. The first one is the important part. The fact that the rest of them are wired by immigrant workers in basements throughout the Bay Area isn’t particularly relevant to the Apple story as far as people are concerned.
The industry took this as its ethos. You have the construction of what they called fabless semiconductor production, which is: They figured out you can offshore all the actual wiring and the production, and you can just do the design here.
That’s the ethos still. If you look at the back of an Apple product, it says designed in California, produced in China. Those parts are produced in a number of different places, none of which are California. Being able to separate the intellectual work, what they understood as the design or the “real” hard part, from the bodily labor is key to what we call the Palo Alto system. It’s the Palo Alto kind of capitalism that we don’t even think about.