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Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

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Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#101

Post by rayiner »

lysace wrote: post #55
AIorNot wrote: post #37

Better than nothing- assemble things made in asian countries in usa, just a step above boxing

Why is that better?

Because it’s important to have the domestic capacity to build the most sophisticated products. Political power is downstream of manufacturing capacity. The countries that have sophisticated enough centrifuges that they can refine weapons grade plutonium derive an incredible amount of political power from that fact.

Remember that, after World War I, the U.S. had most demobilized its military. The Japanese had more aircraft carriers than the U.S. in 1941. That’s why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor—it thought it could win!

But while the U.S. was weak militarily, it had been the largest industrial producer since the late 19th century. Within a couple of years of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had built a bigger air force and navy than the rest of the world combined.

That’s why it’s better to be able to make Mac Minis in Houston. Because you can repurpose those facilities to produce electronics for warships instead of having to buy parts from countries you might be at war with.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#102

Post by SilverElfin »

https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/02/24/apples-us-mac-min...

> Apple's work on a new Mac mini factory in Houston wasn't a quickly-conceived plan to appease President Donald Trump. The reality is that Apple had a plan ready to do this long before the demands started.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#103

Post by apercu »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #84

Apple is very tied to Chinese manufacturing in a way that is hard to replicate in US. They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government, but if it goes as well as last time, they will stop as soon as they can. In china they were often able to iterate on designs and have custom screws and other parts made and ramped up in very short times. Something about having the whol…

Jebus. “It’s hard to manufacture in the US.”

Yes.

That’s what rebuilding capability looks like.

China built dense supply chains over decades. Of course iteration was faster.

Hard isn’t a reason not to do it.

It’s what happens when you’ve optimized for margin and optics and performance instead of resilience.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#104

Post by nutjob2 »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #89
adamgordonbell wrote: post #84

Apple is very tied to Chinese manufacturing in a way that is hard to replicate in US. They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government, but if it goes as well as last time, they will stop as soon as they can. In china they were often able to iterate on designs and have custom screws and other parts made and ramped up in very short times. Something about having the whol…

The press release says they’ve been making their own servers there successfully so it doesn’t seem like there is a reason they would stop Mini manufacturing quickly.

Two different things. They do not have margin to preserve on the servers.

If I was interested in "performative local manufacturing" I'd also build my own servers, it has the least economic impact.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#105

Post by tencentshill »

vsgherzi wrote: post #96
adamgordonbell wrote: post #84

Apple is very tied to Chinese manufacturing in a way that is hard to replicate in US. They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government, but if it goes as well as last time, they will stop as soon as they can. In china they were often able to iterate on designs and have custom screws and other parts made and ramped up in very short times. Something about having the whol…

Just as manufacturing in China took time manufacturing in the US will take time. The US has lost much of its skilled labor and mom and pop parts shop. If we have any hope of re-invigorating this some large company is going to have to bite the bullet. Chicken and egg problem imo. I'll leave whether this is worth it or not up to the economists.

It needs a careful long term approach from real leaders. Not a run-and-gun, corrupt, chaotic president throwing tariffs (taxes) up on a whim.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#106

Post by apercu »

ijustlovemath wrote: post #91

Helene survivor here. What's wild to me is that, regardless of the small scale of this facility, it's only a few hundred meters from a 1% flood zone: https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search The address I found for the facility is 9101 Windmill Park Lane Hudson, TX 77064 This seems ill advised given recent events like Hurricane Harvey

Weirdly the first thing I thought was "Why Texas"?

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#107

Post by kylehotchkiss »

latexr wrote: post #50
evanjrowley wrote: post #4

Why does the video show them assembling rackmount servers and not the Mac Mini? Is that assembly really in the US? Asking because the woman in the first shot appeared to have Chinese letters on the left side of her uniform.

> Why does the video show them assembling rackmount servers and not the Mac Mini? Because the video is of the workers in that specific factory, and they’ll only start producing the Mac mini there later in the year. It’s in the title. You can’t show real video of something which hasn’t happened yet.

> You can’t show real video of something which hasn’t happened yet.

We're going to have to teach our children this concept about discerning the AI slop their grandparents flood Facebook with :')

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#108

Post by notepad0x90 »

general_reveal wrote: post #63

Was it such a sin that our electronics were made in the East? Was the west truly deprived and the east really abused? It’s nearly the end of of our lifetime (+-100 years is a margin of error), so the fact for our lifetimes is that our electronics got made there. What is the final judgement about this?

The same reason Europeans are moving away from US tech right now. You can't bury your head in the sand and pretend geopolitics is imaginary.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#109

Post by mholm »

hackingonempty wrote: post #97
locusofself wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why were mac minis so popular for this compared to any other machine, cloud VPS or local VM?

Macs have "unified memory" meaning the GPU uses the same memory as the CPU and minis can have up to 64 gigs. So its a lot faster than running on a CPU and a lot cheaper than any other GPU based rig with similar memory.

Most openclaw users are not running the models locally.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#110

Post by lysace »

ijustlovemath wrote: post #91

Helene survivor here. What's wild to me is that, regardless of the small scale of this facility, it's only a few hundred meters from a 1% flood zone: https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search The address I found for the facility is 9101 Windmill Park Lane Hudson, TX 77064 This seems ill advised given recent events like Hurricane Harvey

That's a good sign it's not a serious long-term effort. Onshoring cosplay?
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