Mathew Rothenberg writes this eWeek article discussing Apple's/Jobs' push for vertical integration... and the potential advantrages and disadvantages... Of interest, he recounts Jobs' personal attitude:
Remember Steve Jobs' "sand" concept for the creation of personal computers? About the time he lent his star power to the creation of the original Macintosh back in the early '80s, Apple's founder famously described his dream factory: an oceanfront site that would haul raw beach sand in one end, cook up its own silicon and deliver fully configured PCs out the other end.
