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

341–350 of 728 posts

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

#341

Post by ProAm »

ryandrake wrote: post #243
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…

> Something about having the whole supply chain in one place I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines. The companies that process the raw materials are located mostly inland, then the companies that form those raw materials into metal and plastic stock are next door, and then the companies that take th…

Apple as a company that does not pay taxes should at least invest in the country they are located in. *Designed in Cupertino, Taxes paid no where, profit leveraged in the US

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

#342

Post by cucumber3732842 »

mothballed wrote: post #263
0_____0 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no contingent in the US federal government that has a coherent plan for doing what you're talking about. The investment in capability that is necessary to build the next generation of manufacturing capabilities in the US is simply not within the public imagination.

I don't think it's something that can be centrally planned well. If the US changes their environmental regulations to match China, lowered their tax-to-GDP ratio to match China, changed their worker regulations to match China, and then opened up free immigration from Mexico for cheap factory labor then the "free" market would likely take care of opening up quite a bit more manufacturing.

Hell, don't even match it. Split the difference and it would unleash a torrent of economic activity.

It will never happen because there's too many industries and jobs that only exist because of all that regulation and will fight tooth and nail to avoid a short term haircut.

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

#343

Post by throwaway894345 »

vsgherzi wrote: post #250
throwaway894345 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rai…

In spite of no totalitarian government and things like environmental regulations the US still is able to be one of the most innovative nations on the planet. I don't think we need those things to be able to have manufacturing in the united states. We had it at one point and we can do it again. It's not going to be easy and it's going to need some real breakthrough ideas before we can actually compete. Apple here is t…

We never had manufacturing within an order of magnitude of China's scale in the US. Probably not within two orders of magnitude. When the US was a manufacturing powerhouse, we had far cheaper labor, far fewer environmental regulations, far fewer labor regulations, and far simpler supply chains.

> Apple here is the first step.

Pretty sure the much-touted Foxconn plant in Wisconsin was the first step, and just like this one it will be scaled down to a few hundred jobs as soon as possible.

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

#344

Post by montagg »

827a wrote: post #285
kccqzy wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Texa…

Texas would need to train its people. And the people would need to be as hungry as the Chinese were, and are to a certain extent. You should read the book the OT is talking about, it shows how the U.S. didn’t stand a chance in manufacturing, even going back to the 80s. Literally just not getting back to potential clients for two weeks and saying X or Y can’t be done, while Southeast Asian companies were jumping at the chance to build stuff.

There’s a giant cultural shift that needs to happen in the U.S. to get that back—not sacrificing labor laws, like China does, but the same idea that X or Y CAN be done, and actually jumping at the chance to build stuff instead of feeling entitled to it.

We do have agency, but the agency actually starts in the U.S., in education and culture, and not with a company like Apple.

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

#345

Post by ijustlovemath »

jccooper wrote: post #269
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

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.

My point is that we really don't know what "plausible" is anymore with these storms. That much is clear in the data. It seems silly to be so close to a flood zone with your very expensive DUV/EUV machines. There are probably other places they could have placed this facility.

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

#346

Post by resters »

superxpro12 wrote: post #325
mikestorrent wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to brand efficiency and structure-at-scale as "authoritarian"; how painfully American of you. I know it's a completely foreign concept for anyone that has grown up in America, but it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing. Typically this is evidenced by tremendous social progress, which we see in evidence with the rap…

For all the progress, you lose me immediately with the "social credit" system. If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent. Only need to look to the recent changes in Hong-Kong and the obviously hostile takeover of a democratic government to see how "pure" these changes really are.

Snowden's revelations showed that the same stuff exists in the US.

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

#347

Post by cucumber3732842 »

rangestransform wrote: post #338
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's we? The college educated white collar professionals who are grossly over-represented in policy discourse? Middle america, the formerly industrial northeast and the former bulk industry west have been complaining about this shit policy for over a generation. Implicitly shuttering our manufacturing and heavy industry by subjecting it to policy that we knew would make it increasingly noncompetitive at the margin a…

Not overrepresented enough given that middle America has disproportionate per capita voting power

It's not just middle america. It's the entire economy that deals in things first and numbers and ideas second.

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

#348

Post by thrdbndndn »

ryandrake wrote: post #243
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…

> Something about having the whole supply chain in one place I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines. The companies that process the raw materials are located mostly inland, then the companies that form those raw materials into metal and plastic stock are next door, and then the companies that take th…

Sorry, but this sounds more like a myth, or at least heavily exaggerated. Similar to how Japan often gets romanticized.

Organizing the entire chain geographically at the scale you described (inter-city) doesn't bring huge cost advantages by itself. In China labor has historically been cheap, so the transport cost between regions was never the dominant factor anyway.

Most industrial clusters in China formed organically over time just like the rest of the world. Aside from some exceptions like mining, there isn't some master plan laying out entire cities as linear supply chains to the ocean It's not SimCity.

One thing you're right about is that there is less bureaucratic friction or 'lawyers' in the way when it comes to economic development. For the former, it's because economic growth is THE metric for the government, especially at the local level, so they do whatever it takes to make it happen. For the latter, it's because… well, in China no one sues the government, period. I'm not sure it's a good thing.

Disclaimer: I'm Chinese living in China.

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

#349

Post by azinman2 »

vsgherzi wrote: post #250
throwaway894345 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rai…

In spite of no totalitarian government and things like environmental regulations the US still is able to be one of the most innovative nations on the planet. I don't think we need those things to be able to have manufacturing in the united states. We had it at one point and we can do it again. It's not going to be easy and it's going to need some real breakthrough ideas before we can actually compete. Apple here is t…

The US had it when the rest of the world was severely bombed during WWII, and a lot of the world was very undeveloped. Things changed.

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

#350

Post by anon7725 »

pear01 wrote: post #314
SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a great freakonomics podcast that talked about China being run by engineers and America being run by lawyers. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-a...

That guy is so annoying his subpar analysis has become such a trope. America used to build things too. Lawyers have been part of the founding and fabric of both societies. Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.

> America used to build things too

Indeed. “Used to” is the key observation. In the wake of WW2, the U.S. had both dynamism and the ability and will to act collectively. This combination led to rising standards of living, the space program, Silicon Valley, the internet, etc.

The U.S. economy is still relatively dynamic, but the will to collective action has completely failed.

Europe can act collectively but lacks dynamism.

Which country, today, demonstrates both traits?

Post reply on HN