For Acer, the low-tech parts of a computer — the casings, the keyboards, the disk drives — are buns and pickles, made in Taiwan and sent by ship to the company's 34 assembly plants around the world. The beef is the motherboard, the part inside the computer that holds the processors and memory chips. Motherboards, which do not account for a large portion of the computers' weight, are shipped by air from Taiwan, while the central processors and hard drives are treated like cheese and are purchased near assembly sites.