Gotta love PR embracing the many definitions of "made in"
Surely, someone high up asked,
"What is the least amount of work we have to do in order to not pay tariffs?"
Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
151–160 of 728 posts
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#152Others need to follow. It's strange that we don't view the manufacturing of advanced electronics as a matter of national security.
The government is slowly waking up to how important chips are and how far behind domestic sources have fallen from foreign (mostly Chinese and Taiwanese) sources. That's what the 2022 CHIPS act was about. These things just take a lot of time, there are tremendous headwinds to fight, and the US government + US media increasingly seems unable to see through projects past the next election cycle.
What folks don't talk about, is that the reason for all the offshoring, is good old-fashioned American Greed™.
Lots of billionaires in the US, got that way, by exporting all their production to China. Because they did it, lots of lower-tier people had to do the same, or go out of business.
Since we worship billionaires, that little bit never seems to get mentioned, as it makes them look bad.
The only cure is to cost some of those billionaires money.
Ain't gonna happen.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what? Even if you hate who the president is, it is in the best interest of everyone that the president does a good job. Wanting the president to fail and millions to suffer is scorched earth hatred, not strategy.
Even if you hate the orange guy, there's something to be said for his approach of using threats to achieve results instead of carrots like tax breaks.
Haha very telling that this is what you find laudable. Onshoring manufacturing … it’s a low margin low skill (relative) industry compared to the services and things of the modern economy. We import goods made cheaper in other countries and benefit from it in consumer surplus… that the educated here on HN can invert a tree or whatever the latest leet code garbage is being asked in interviews but never took and economics class or basic ethics is beyond me.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#154What's the over-under for Trump mentioning this in the State Of The Union speech tonight? The timing of this release can't be a coincidence.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It would be tough to get a windows machine at that price that gets anywhere close on performance Not that tough. I paid $299 for a Ryzen 5800h mini PC last year, which roughly lands in the same performance bracket. Would have considered the Mac Mini, but the AMD box has much better Linux support.
> a Ryzen 5800h mini PC last year, which roughly lands in the same performance bracket [as a Mac mini]. Not really. And this is before the M5 Mac mini which ships later this year. Putting it together in desktop‑mini form factors: - Raw CPU: M4 is much faster single‑core, generally faster multi‑core at lower power. - GPU: M4’s iGPU is roughly 2×+ Vega 8 and more modern. - Memory subsystem: M4 has far higher bandwidth…
Let's assume the 5800H consumed 50W and the mini consumed 0W and both ran 100% utilization all year at $0.20/kWh.
The mini would save $87/year. That's a 3.5y breakeven assuming no reinvestment.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#156Apple 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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> Unless of course you need aerospace or space-qualified screws in which case they are definitely coming from the US.
Are you claiming somehow that China would be incapable of making these? Or just admitting that the USG generally restricts such contracts to be sourced from the US only? And what does this have to do with Apple?
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#157Earlier 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.
It allows your Claw to access all your iCloud data easily like reminders and iMessage for example
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#158I understand apple's push for US manufacturing in general but what do they mean by AI servers? I thought apple's current AI strategy is using other AI models?
Private Cloud Compute uses their own hardware: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#159Mac minis are sold out in NYC these days because everyone gets them to try out openclaw. Even if this move by Apple is unrelated to the recent demand, it certainly was timed right for the policy and market makers.
It's so funny to me that HN seems convinced that artists have a sudden renewed interest in desktop computers, when LLMs have been driving mac mini sales for more than a year
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#160Good but they should be named 'Mac Donald' or Trump Mini or something and it should be engraved with gold letters. And they are too small, they should be huge