Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unless of course you need aerospace or space-qualified screws Ok... Is that what they're using to build Mac Minis and is that what they need to iterate on typically?
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Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
181–190 of 728 posts
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#182Apple 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…
> Apple is very tied to Chinese manufacturing
Apple (and all the other multinationals) are tied to manufacturing in nations with cheap labor.
China is far from the only nation with cheap labor.
> India now accounts for approximately 25 percent of global iPhone production, up from single digits just a few years ago.
https://manufacturing-today.com/news/apple-moves-quarter-of-...
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#183Apple 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.
No amount of time will let the U.S. - a country of 348 million people - replicate what China - a country with 1.4 billion people - a can do with manufacturing.
This isn't "working harder".
This isn't "rebuilding infrastructure".
This isn't "training people in trades".
The numbers are so cartoonishly lopsided as to be a non-starter for categorically replacing Chinese manufacturing.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#184Apple 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…
Good point about the supply chain; and it seems like most responses mistakenly disagree with you.
Thomas Friedman talks about this after his most recent visit to China. Where China excels is through rapid supply chain development by fierce regional competition among several (state-supported/sponsored/seeded?) competitors.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#185Is no one else interested in the "assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S." in the pictures? Are they using nvidia GPUS? Their own silicon? Is there any data out there on what these servers are like? I don't think we've ever seen a picture of them before.
WSJ published a video yesterday with the first pictures of those servers: https://twitter.com/yiningkarlli/status/2026176857541075274
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Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#186This feels like tariff evasion tactics, I am not against it tho, I think apple is handling it well.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#187Apple 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.
There’s no world in which large scale manufacturing is returning to the US. Not only are our labor costs dramatically higher than in east asia, but we also lack the logistics infrastructure to quickly produce components and get them to their next stage of assembly quickly. And we can’t just build that stuff because we don’t have a totalitarian government that can just bulldoze farms and houses to run a highway or railway. We also are less interested in pollution, which raises the sticker price on US manufacturing.
If we’re serious about it, we are going to have to commit ourselves to economy-tanking tariffs (like thousands of percents) for many decades until the US worker is as poor as the Vietnamese worker.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#188Apple 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…
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Well, if your Mac mini is to be painted Space Gray then the only way to go is to put in there a few $40 space-qualified screws made in the US to justify the price increase.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was Kamala campaigning on bringing manufacturing to Texas?
Probably referring to the CHIPs Act? Technically Biden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act
Technically Kamala.
— As Vice President, Kamala Harris was a key proponent and promoter of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which aims to boost U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#190Why 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.
It's in the post: "In Houston, workers assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S."
I'm curious what "logic board production" really means. My suspicion is it means "soldered a thing onto a motherboard" where all the individual pieces were shipped from Asia and the soldering is done by robots.