Fixing Apple's supply lines

By NICK WINGFIELD; Steven Greenhouse contributed reporting.

CORRECTION APPENDED

A day after Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, toured a Chinese factory where the company's products are made, an audit commissioned by Apple criticized the long hours and dangerous working conditions at plants run by Foxconn, the operator of the factory Mr. Cook visited last week.

In response, Foxconn vowed to reduce working hours and significantly increase wages at its factories.

Mr. Cook's appearance at a facility where Apple devices are made was an illustration of how differently Apple's new chief relates to an issue that first surfaced under his predecessor, Steven P. Jobs.

Since Mr. Cook became chief executive in August, shortly before the death of Mr. Jobs, Apple has taken a number of significant steps to address concerns about how Apple products are made.

When he became chief, many people wondered whether Mr. Cook, a skilled manager of Apple's operations, could ever rival the visionary influence of Mr. Jobs on Apple products. Instead, it appears Mr. Cook could make his earliest and most significant mark by changing how Apple's products are made.

''I want to give credit to Tim Cook for this,'' said Dara O'Rourke, associate professor of environmental and labor policy at the University of California, Berkeley. ''He's admitting they've got problems.''

Apple's supply chain is a subject much closer to Mr. Cook than it was to his predecessor. Not long after Mr. Jobs returned to lead Apple in 1997, he hired Mr. Cook to clean up the manufacturing operations, which were in disarray, with bloated inventory that hurt its profits. Over more than a decade, Mr. Cook helped transform Apple's operations into the envy of the electronics industry, with an array of partners, mostly in Asia, able to efficiently pump out its latest products.

In contrast to Mr. Cook, Mr. Jobs never visited the factories in China where Apple's products were made, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who declined to be identified to avoid antagonizing Apple.

During the years when he was chief executive, Mr. Jobs was never as directly engaged with Apple's effort to audit its suppliers as Mr. Cook was, according to a former Apple executive who declined to be identified. Still, when Mr. Jobs learned of the more serious violations of its supplier code of conduct -- instances where child labor was used, for example -- he was outraged, this person said.

Mr. Cook has spoken publicly of how his blue-collar roots growing up in Alabama gave him an early appreciation for factory work. ''I spentPuma Rihanna