It was Christmas 1998, and a secret commercial experiment was under way in an Apple facility in Ang Mo Kio.

A team of over 20 employees had just flown in. Over the next few months, they would toil six days a week, sometimes up to 15 hours a day, to master a single task: learning how to assemble Apple’s brightly coloured iMac, which came with a chunky cathode ray tube monitor imported from LG in South Korea.