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Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

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

#461

Post by dangus »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #230
dangus wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conversion rate is actually 0%. Nobody will pay more for a USA version. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43787647

Well, um.. Forgive me for not being in the market for a showerhead in the last few years and / or not knowing about this one company that I didn't see at Home Depot/Lowes when I did buy a couple of them? I admit I'm probably an outlier, but in terms of durable goods, I'd pay 30-50% more for lots of things if they were "made in the USA" or "made in Canada" (any western country) and it meant something - like, better pa…

I haven't heard of the brand either, they just happened to actually run the experiment. I think you'd just have to pretend that both options are presented in a hardware store next to each other: identical product, company, warranty, support phone number, etc. Are we really buying the more expensive one just because it's made in USA or will we just say that we will do that and act in our own best interests by saving our money?

> and it meant something - like, better parts availability, repairability, documentation, support, etc.

But remember, this bit isn't related to the country that assembled the product, it has much more to do with the company and brand doing the post-sales support, marketing, and the rest of the customer-facing stuff. The Mac mini isn't getting a better post-sale experience just because it's going to be assembled in Houston. The product and company are identical.

Finally, I think it may be worth recognizing that there's a growing perception that Chinese products are the best ones, just like how people felt about many American products built in the post-WW2 era. I would subscribe to this perception that Chinese products are more likely to be good than products made in many other countries. They just have the ecosystem and the most expansive, skilled high volume manufacturing on the planet.

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

#462

Post by otterley »

JeremyHerrman wrote: post #237

For anyone who liked Apple's Xserve lineup, it's very cool to get a peek at these rackmount Apple "advanced AI servers" I'm excited for these to fall into collectors hands in a decade or two.

If they’re built anything like AWS’s servers, their cryptographic key chip that’s required for boot will be destroyed the moment it’s removed from the rack it’s in, rendering it useless. They’ll be scrapped.

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

#463

Post by [deleted] »

logotype wrote: post #296
hn_acc1 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, um.. Forgive me for not being in the market for a showerhead in the last few years and / or not knowing about this one company that I didn't see at Home Depot/Lowes when I did buy a couple of them? I admit I'm probably an outlier, but in terms of durable goods, I'd pay 30-50% more for lots of things if they were "made in the USA" or "made in Canada" (any western country) and it meant something - like, better pa…

You’re not alone. I’m a self-funded startup founder and I still buy Made in USA goods (clothes, appliances, tools, supplies, equipment, etc). For me the price isn’t the main factor, it’s simply that I want to support the countries I like. Been doing this for 10 years now. Based in London so I also buy Made in England things too. Never ever support authoritarian regimes!

[deleted]

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

#464

Post by burningChrome »

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 and very motivated.

This is the legacy of Tim Cook before Jobs passed. He was the guy who put immense pressure on Chinese factories to deliver on the insane quotas and timeframes he forced on them. He essentially blackmailed companies in order for them to his bidding - threatening to go to competitors if they didn't deliver exactly what he wanted.

The stuff Apple got away with in China could never be repeated here. I mean, you think you can regularly push so many workers to commit suicide, you have to put nets around the buildings in order to dissuade them from jumping off buildings? Yeah, not happening here. Which is why Apple does business there. Its why Tim Cook was able to abuse Chinese labor laws to get them to deliver the impossible, time and again, regardless of the human cost.

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

#465

Post by DeathArrow »

decimalenough wrote: post #439
pear01 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What point do you think you're making? That's not the question. You're just repeating the same obvious geopolitical comparison everyone regurgitates these days. The question is about whether any of that can be meaningfully attributed to some lawyer vs engineer divide. Your question doesn't answer that in the slightest and thus I have no idea why you are asking it.

It's not about the specific degree the leaders hold. Thanks to Communism, China (and the Soviet Union before it) had a profound belief that society can be engineered , and that people and nature are both raw material that can be shaped to fit the needs of society. The US, on the hand, is obsessed with individual rights, and any sort of collective action that threatens those rights is extensively litigated. This is re…

>Thanks to Communism, China (and the Soviet Union before it) had a profound belief that society can be engineered, and that people and nature are both raw material that can be shaped to fit the needs of society.

Isn't that a trait of the left in general?

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

#467

Post by fragmede »

shimman wrote: post #365
montagg wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

All these things sound like great reasons to force Apple, along with the rest of big tech, to pay to better our society in the form of taxes.

It doesn't seem like money is the only issue. Infinity dollars won't help if the culture is radioactively toxic and shitty. (Arguably if you had infinity dollars you could spend it on therapists and counselors to fix the culture.)

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

#469

Post by swsieber »

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.

It rings true though.

I worked at a dev company, and we got bought by an IT company. Much pain and friction, all around. Is that a reductive representative of the company differences? Yeah, but it's still a useful mental model that helps one understand the differences. And I think the lawyer vs engineer trope is useful. Yeah we have both. Both my companies had both IT and developera, but the stakes & priorities were different enough that that lense became extremely helpful.

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

#470

Post by yanhangyhy »

Saline9515 wrote: post #427
yanhangyhy wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i dont have.. and nobody talks about it.. in china. this remind me one of the ep of the TV show when they found so many evidence of a massacre using chemical weapons and broadcast it.. and then found out its all fake.

If no one talks about it, why is this .gov.cn article discusses the problems currently posed by the existing social credit system? There isn't indeed a nation-wide score, but given the size of Chinese municipalities (often larger than most countries in the world), it's far from anecdotal. https://credit.fgw.sh.gov.cn/xyyj/20220902/8693d5ba378d4f578...

> There isn't indeed a nation-wide score

there is no score at all. even this article didn't talk about anything about 'score'. its no different compare to many other countries. soical credit system is a general concept.

I do wish everybody outside of china have your mindset. then we have nothing to worry about.

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