My iPhone was picked up by FedEx in Shenzhen, China, followed by a short hop over to Lantau Island, Hong Kong. From there, a long flight to Anchorage, Alaska, another flight to Newark, New Jersey, and then to Wilmington, Massachusetts. Finally, it's a short delivery truck drive to my office in Bedford, Massachusetts.
It's very impressive that through this combination of Apple's order fulfillment capabilities and FedEx's worldwide delivery system, this little box makes it from a factory in China to my hands in only three days (one of which was a Sunday). I think that this is the first order I've ever placed from Apple's web store, but I can't imagine that this is the most cost-effective way for Apple to fulfill all U.S. orders. I imagine that ideally, Apple bulk ships stock from China to warehouses in the United States, and then ships to individual customers from there. Surely direct shipment from China to a U.S. customer is reserved for situations where the U.S. warehouses can't keep up with demand.
From 1984 to 1987, I worked at Microsoft. For about half that time, I was a member of the Windows 1.0 development team. I joined Microsoft straight out of college. Although I’d had several summer jobs doing programming since high school, this was my first permanent job in the software industry. Here's my version of the Windows 1.0 story.]]>
Working at Microsoft in those days was somewhat like living in a college dorm. Because so many of us had relocated to the Seattle area straight out of college, most of our friends and acquaintances were our coworkers. This, combined with the pressure to get this already late product out the door resulted in us all working lots of nights and weekends. Frisbee, playing guitar, and throwing bouncy balls were all popular hallway activities. With few responsibilities outside work, work was fun, although it could definitely wear you down over time.
Even the hiring process was fun: Send resume. Get letter back. Send some sample source code. Get phone call inviting me out to Seattle for a visit. Fly out to Sea-Tac and go through a full day of Microsoft's famous interview process. Get job offer at the end of the day. Try not to show too much excitement on the spot. Spend another day checking out Seattle. Fly back to school to finish senior year. Get mailgram from Bill Gates (i.e. the Microsoft HR department) congratulating me on my job offer. Get another letter from HR with a copy of Time with 
We spent the summer and fall of 1984 trying to get Windows to the point of being functionally complete. During this time, we were told two things by Steve Ballmer: the final product had to fit on a single 360K floppy disk, and the product would ship amidst great fanfare at Comdex that November. Unfortunately, we all pretty quickly realized that neither of those would become true.
Windows 1.01 finally shipped in November 1985. Steve Ballmer's final ship-date promise to the press was "before the snow falls," and we just made it. We were rewarded with a trip to COMDEX – the first business trip ever for many of us, where we got to explore Las Vegas and soak up the attention surrounding the long-awaited release of Windows. One of the highlights was the Windows roast where everyone made jokes about how long Windows had been vaporware. John Roach from Tandy was there, enjoying the opportunity to rib Microsoft for how he had been burned by all the delays.