Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Managed to do what?
At least he’s trying. Instead of the other side just yelling about “corporate greed” while doing nothing but collecting lobbying money as jobs continue to get exported.
Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
281–290 of 728 posts
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#282Apple 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…
I think this could stick. The supply chain competence needs to get built in the USA.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#283Helene 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
Industrial buildings are typically built at dock height. Even if they don't do any grading, that would put the building well above any plausible flooding in that area.
It also turns out that for insurance purposes you are allowed to use infill to get the corner of a property that's below the high water mark above it. At least in some states.
Some of the calculus is not about if it will flood it's about if you'll lose your investment if it floods. If an underwriter is willing to cover it, you might go for it anyway.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
why were mac minis so popular for this compared to any other machine, cloud VPS or local VM?
In classic Apple fashion, they fooled people into thinking an integrated GPU is the same as Nvidia. Gosh I wish I could hire their marketing company.
Where did they say this?
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, to be clear about one thing (which I believe is also raised in the book): Much of this is the direct result of Apple investing literally a quarter trillion dollars and exporting critical western IP toward developing Chinese advanced manufacturing capability (among other American technology companies). The story of startups only being able to manufacture in China is a cute tale that is true for startups. For Appl…
A company like Apple has very little incentive to care about geopolitics, other than by current or future government laws and regulations (a government mandate, tariffs, etc). In the absence of government intervention, Apple has determined that investing a quarter trillion dollars is the cheap choice; getting the same result in the United States would probably need much much more than a quarter trillion dollars worth…
Your learned helplessness is defeatist and boring. We need not be Moloch's subjects; Apple's business priorities are not the result of some natural and unstoppable force, and their leadership is not exempt from responsibility because of your belief that it is. Someone, sometime, in a surprisingly boring room, wearing a surprisingly boring suit, made decisions like those which opened a factory in China instead of Texas.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Manufacturing output has been ~monotonically increasing except during the great recession for the past 3 decades. Jobs though have been basically monotonically decreasing. We're still getting the strategic benefits of more manufacturing, just have fewer people getting their thumbs cut off in stamping machines or melted alive in steel mills.
I don't think "we" are getting benefits from more manufacturing. Surely the company CEOs and shareholders are, but the average Joe who doesn't hold shares and just needs an honest, well-paying job is not reaping any benefits.
I view manufacturing to have some parallels like farming. An advanced society is eventually going to get the employment numbers down low through inevitable automation and technology. The goal then is to continue to enjoy having the food and things you made despite not being employed in those fields. How exactly that happens is up for debate.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I have seen exactly that, thanks to AI...
You have not. If it was generated by AI, it was not real video. AI was the reason I added the word in there.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#288Helene 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?
The American flag hung on a wall they didn't even bother to paint is a good sign it's not a serious long-term effort.
Steve Jobs would have fired someone over that obvious broken window situation, and he'd have been (mostly) right to do so.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Authoritarian central planning isn't an inherent trait of engineers and nor should we aspire for it to be.
Have you met an engineer? I'd say "being an engineer" is probably the single most predictive trait for authoritarianism in my experience.
Possibly, but it's just as much a predictive trait of being libertarian, which for all its faults, is extremely anti-authoritarian.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#290Very happy to see this!