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Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
21–30 of 598 posts
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a political move. Vietnamese manufacturing is cheaper than Chinese. Chinese labour has gotten expensive over time. EDIT: politics are definitely a welcome side effect, but not the main reason
Why would Apple decide to build in Vietnam after secretly committing $275B to advance Chinese manufacturing? Western political heat seems most logical.
Because 0 Covid policies are leading to unpredictable and extended delays.
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#23Doesn't seem far enough away or nuclear armed enough to be a very good backup plan.
It is a good backup plan for sanctions against China and a blockade or war with Taiwan because of the port facilities, advanced infrastructure, and other advanced industry. For World War 3 it's not necessarily a great plan, but it's as good as any other plan for that scenario.
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#24I'm interested to know to what extent this is just assembly of parts imported from China, or whether the real control over things like the M1 chip assembly, secure element, logic board, etc. are also moved to Vietnam? Seems like that's the secret sauce / real proprietary stuff that tells you whether the high value is moving too. (or maybe that is not even in China either)
And do they have the surrounding parts + engineering ecosystems that is so touted as why China is the place to get things built?
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#25A lot of comments here are criticizing Apple for chasing cheap labor. Ignoring for a second the fact that this has a lot more to do with geopolitics and hedging geopolitical risk, I think it's important to think more carefully about the impact of companies investing in developing economies. By and large, the factory work done by people in developing economies is dramatically better in terms of quality of life and saf…
Capitalism is one of the biggest eradicators of poverty. 1B of people in China was lifted from poverty because of it. And once it's done with one poor country, it starts taking care of the others :)
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#26I don't really see what the problem is with offshoring. If other people elsewhere want to work for cheaper, then it's fair competition. It's not like protectionism would work long term anyways. And in this particular case, Vietnam is more aligned with the US than China, geopolitically, so this makes a lot of sense.
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#27How is no one mentioning that China is threatening Taiwan. If the US ends up in a war with China, suddenly most Apple products would have serious operations problems if not being shut off completely. Cheap labor isn't a bad reason, but this is also a hedge against the heating politics between the West and both Russia and China.
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#28And the products will be more overpriced than ever.
And ads are coming....
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#29>Apple suppliers Luxshare Precision Industry and Foxconn lol this is a political move, they are just creating Vietnamese shell companies owned by their same Chinese suppliers to get some good PR.
I think like 7% of iPhone 13s are also made in India and that number is supposed to grow so I think they’re trying to hedge well.
Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook
#30I suppose this means Wisconsin is SOL. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/25/foxconn_wisconsin_fac...
They were never going to build Apple products there though. That was for LCD television components.
I don't think the point they were making was about Apple products being built there, but that Foxconn continues to put their attention elsewhere with other projects.