Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 728 posts

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

#231

Post by dlenski »

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…

> They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government

They'll also hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony with maximum fanfare, at which they'll be sure to fawn over Donald Trump, let him ramble at length, and maybe give him some sort of shiny award.

Let's call it The Steve Jobs American Technology Greatness Prize. It'll be a blindingly flashy PVD-gold-plated 12" silicon wafer with a Mount Rushmore-style portrait of Jobs and Trump etched into it.

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

#232

Post by SpaceManNabs »

snazz wrote: post #158
SpaceManNabs wrote: post #7

I 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/

Thanks! I wonder how they enforce retention of personal data if a user adds identifying data and they use a model from anthropic or wtv like others said. maybe that is the wrong question at all if they are using their own models but i thought they didn't. Apple's AI strategy on the whole sounds coherent to me but the specifics are super confusing.

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

#233

Post by mothballed »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #213
tokyobreakfast wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build products in the US. Those jobs Steve Jobs told Obama are "never coming back".

Which of those have come back?

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.

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

#234

Post by Aurornis »

Dig1t wrote: post #117
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

They will build to a much higher standard than normal US residential construction, as they do with most commercial buildings. Many people do not understand the vast difference between residential construction quality and the quality that mega corps get. I personally watched Apple build their new campus in Austin (I have daily progress pictures of the construction site, I work there), everything is solid concrete. The…

> Many people do not understand the vast difference between residential construction quality and the quality that mega corps get.

It’s not limited to mega corps. Commercial construction is built to a higher standard. Some times you can buy commercial grade hardware and materials for your house if you want.

Larger buildings are also more robust at the foundation because it needs to be so much stronger. That thick concrete is necessary, not a luxury.

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

#235

Post by Romario77 »

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…

if you look at Mac Mini design, it didn't change much in many years (2011-2024 is practically the same)

https://preview.redd.it/always-loved-the-design-of-the-mac-m...

so maybe that's the reason they chose it. They just designed a new iteration in 2024, so maybe they don't expect much change for a while.

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

#236

Post by rayiner »

gigatexal wrote: post #153
rayiner wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 economi…

If you were correct, it would be trivial for Apple to reshore the manufacturing. But it’s not. Because what China has proven is that, when you outsource the “low margin low skill” stuff, everything going up the chain will follow. China used its low-margin low skill work to bootstrap the rest of the stack, and now they can make air to air missiles with range exceeding US missiles: https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/china-first-close-...

Margin is the wrong way to look at it. Law and finance are high margin work. But lawyers won’t help you win a war.

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

#238

Post by hn_acc1 »

dangus wrote: post #196
ruraljuror wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get fatigue when everyone claims that all these Chinese businesses are state sponsored. Do we not recognize that western governments do this too? Do we not recognize that western banks and VC firms are quasi-state institutions? Do we not see western countries continually subsidize businesses by lowering corporate tax rates and giving out cheap loans? The US government was giving out $7500 per car to buy EVs and the…

China is not state-subsidized / running at a loss on materials so much (although they probably get cheaper rare earth minerals) - they're running at a loss on wages. There's no "loss" there - the state doesn't have to buy labor and sell it to the companies to put into the product at a loss - the companies simply pay less overall in terms of labor, because that's the prevailing rate.

Even if you paid 5% more for materials for an iphone but could pay 50% less for labor than China, you could probably beat China.

How does the state sponsoring come in? The state represses the people and the wages and prevents them from leaving for greener pastures in many cases, which benefits the corporations.

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

#239

Post by NetMageSCW »

rayiner wrote: post #122
bastardoperator wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This President isn't doing a good job on really any level. Its not that I want anyone to fail, it's that the President today is currently in a state of failure, and those failures like enriching himself can have long term devastating effects on our society.

[flagged]

How many American Citizens have to be murdered and how many human rights have to be violated before it is a bad job?

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

#240

Post by PlatoIsADisease »

boznz wrote: post #121
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

When it floods, they can hold their hands up and say "well we tried".. then get back to business as usual in China

Ask any AI, they say Apple has the best marketing of any company in history.

All this tracks. Anyone else getting bombarded with WSJ youtube videos about Apple manufacturing?

Post reply on HN