Cupertino, California by a team of industrial designers. But the resources

needed to make this design a reality come from all over the world.

Apple largely depends on outside manufacturers to produce ready-made

components for its devices. The company's supply chain is incredibly complex and

far-reaching. Apple works with suppliers in 43 countries and 6 continents to make

all of its products but tracing the origin of even a single component is

tricky. Take the A12 chips in the newest iPhones for instance.

Jim Morrison, Vice President of Technical Intelligence at Tech Insights, told CNBC "In the Apple A12

Apple designed the chip. There is an Apple logo on the packaging. Apple is

headquartered in California. Apple outsources chip fabrication to TSMC in

Taiwan. Packaging and final tests of A12 may be done by Amkor in the Philippines.

The A12 is then assembled into the iPhone by Foxconn and China or Pegatron in Taiwan.

So which is the country of origin? For the Apple A12, we recognize it

as a USA component because Apple's name is on the chip and Apple is a

california-based company. Each year, Apple publishes a broad list of suppliers but

the company does not specify which components come from which manufacturers

and they will often use more than one supplier for a part on the same model.

One way to get a glimpse into Apple's supply chain has been through tear downs.

A recent tear down by repair firm iFixit shows that Apple's iPhone 10S used

SDRAM memory from Micron. Another teardown by Tech Insights, a firm that

dissects devices in analyzes the parts inside, also found SDRAM from Micron but

also from SK Hynix and Samsung. The outside of the phone is protected by

Gorilla Glass made at Corning's Kentucky Factory. But when you break each

component inside of the phone down into its raw materials, an even more vast global production line appears.

Modern engineered materials are much more complex they were in the past. There are

something like 80 or 82 elements from the periodic table of elements the

materials engineers have at their disposal when designing modern products like a smartphone.

The typical smartphone uses somewhere between 60 and 70 of

those 80 or so elements from the periodic table of elements.

For example, Indium, Tin and Oxygen are used to make a thin electric film on top of the screen

which gives it its touch capabilities. The raw materials that make up your

iPhone come from almost every continent. A phone's processor is mainly made of

Silicon but it also uses Phosphorus, Antimony, Arsenic, Boron, Indium and Gallium to give it better electrical properties.

Meanwhile, the electrical connections that carry all the data are made of Gold, Silver and Copper.

Tantalum is also used for the micro capacitators that regulate electricity flow.

Apple does not disclose exactly where its elements were mined because such

information is extremely difficult to track but data from the U.S. Geological

Survey gives us an idea since it tracks yearly element production by country.

Four minerals that Apple does closely track our Tin, Tungsten, Gold and Tantalum, which are known as conflict mineral.

The U.S. government has determined that the mining and trade of these minerals has helped to finance

armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding regions and contributed to a humanitarian crisis.

Leonardo DiCaprio taught us about blood diamonds but there's blood metals that are that are in our smartphones

because they contribute to internal violence in unstable States. In 2010, Congress passed

the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires all companies publicly traded in the U.S. to

report the source of their conflict minerals. Apple has complied. The company

now maps its supply chain for Tin, Tungsten, Gold, Tantalum, and Cobalt

and requires all of its smelters and refiners to

participate in third party audits to ensure humane extraction of the minerals.

Another set of really important minerals needed to make your phone are what are

known as rare earth metals. The term rare earths refers to 17 chemically similar

elements and rare earths are quite distinct among themselves within that

family but one of the characteristics that they do all share are these

fantastic magnetic and conductive properties.

Ytrium, Europium, Terbium and Gadolinium produced the brilliant colors of a phone screen

and Praseodymium and Neodymium are used for the magnets in the speaker and to help your phone vibrate. (iPhone chimes)

China is by far the largest producer of rare earth metals.

China produces somewhere between 80 and 85% current global supply of rare

earth elements. But mining these elements can be challenging and taxing on the environment.

What happens is frequently, you have a coincidence of rare earth

elements and other radioactive materials and what this does is it creates

alongside your mining operation a radioactive waste management problem.

Apple has launched a number of programs aimed at reducing its environmental footprint.

The company has two working robotic phone dissectors, named Daisy, that are each able to extract 93 kilograms of Tungsten,

42 kilograms of Tin, 1.8 kilograms of Tantalum and .97 kilograms of Gold for every 100,000 iPhone devices.

Last year, Apple even made a commitment to one day use only

recycled materials in its products. We hope to one day eliminate our need to

mine new materials from the earth. Now as you can imagine this is a massive effort.

Apple is already making headway the company now uses 100% recycled Tin in

the logic boards of its newest iPhones. We really need to learn to see the

materiality involved in these technologies. 'Cause it's not something

that you'll just notice by interacting with this technology. It really takes, you

know, education and thinking through the very real implications of the decisions

we make buying every new device in technology. Apple's sold its two billionth iOS device

this year and though it's hard to pinpoint exactly where every component

of an iPhone comes from, one thing is for certain. It's the result of an incredibly

complex supply chain and raw materials that are Ridge innate from all over the

planet. It's a process that transforms the most basic elements into one of the

most advanced pieces of technology that fits in the palm of our hands.