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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

#481

Post by tw1984 »

827a wrote: post #264
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…

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…

> 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).

Really love your 1990s style western centric view.

Care to explain how fancy western IP is not leading in more and more techs fields, e.g. drones, EVs, renewable energy, robotics, fighter jets etc.? because western companies invested in China and gifted fancy western IPs they don't even have to China?

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

#482

Post by trvz »

F7F7F7 wrote: post #354
sigmar wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm a product exec now but used to be designer and lead UX teams. Even though I don't use those skills as much nowadays it's still a almost daily hobby of mine. Like the rest of HN (maybe it's HN's fault!) I managed to convince myself that I not only needed a Mac Mini desktop but also a 4090 rig for AI. The 4090 hasn't been booted up in 9 months and the Mac Mini is now the world's most amazing 10GBE NAS server. My ol…

I think you’re using “underpowered” wrong here.

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

#483

Post by ianbutler »

palmotea wrote: post #478
ianbutler wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're providing much too much credit to China's government, the dynamic is simpler: China just hasn't calcified yet after workers press for better standards of safety and quality of life and maybe they won't because that's where being authoritarian comes into play. They will crush that in a way we have moved away from. We used to build great things in the US and then we decided the blood price of 30 lives for the Br…

> We used to build great things in the US and then we decided the blood price of 30 lives for the Brooklyn bridge or 100 for the hoover dam wasn't worth it. It's really not hard to build anything when you ignore any second order questions of impact. Why do you think certain people here want deregulation and for the EPA to go away. Because wouldn't it be just totally awesome for our rivers to burn again? https://www.s…

I’m not those people you’ll not find a disagreement from me

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

#484

Post by Synaesthesia »

BurningFrog wrote: post #326
Avicebron wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Authoritarian central planning isn't an inherent trait of engineers and nor should we aspire for it to be.

China hasn't done much central planning for many decades.

They do, the state permits a free market but they also coordinate strategically to make decisions which benefit the country.

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

#485

Post by Synaesthesia »

dangus wrote: post #454
hn_acc1 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mater…

Factory wages in China are almost $2 more per hour than factory labor in Mexico. I don't buy this argument. Sure, labor protections in China are weak, but let's use our mirrors: the US has no guaranteed paid time off of any kind, it has unions on paper only, 1 in 10 Americans have no health insurance, and it's nearly the only country where medical bankruptcy exists as a concept. The largest employer in the US runs a…

Yeah but China is a low cost economy, rent, food and things like transport and electricity are cheap. That means employers simply can pay workers less than the USA because the cost of living is so high in the USA.

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

#486

Post by rockskon »

vsgherzi wrote: post #216
rockskon wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No amount of time will let the U.S. - a country of 348 million people - replicate what China - a country with 1.4 billion people - a can do with manufacturing. This isn't "working harder". This isn't "rebuilding infrastructure". This isn't "training people in trades". The numbers are so cartoonishly lopsided as to be a non-starter for categorically replacing Chinese manufacturing.

we don't have to entirely replace Chinese manufacturing to build back American manufacturing that's a false dichotomy.To compete we'll just have to be more revolutionary than the manufacturing industry already is.

And what exactly will stop China - a country infamous for copying U.S. technology - from copying whatever the U.S. comes up with?

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

#487

Post by deaddodo »

rayiner wrote: post #170
deaddodo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the part that blows my mind. People seem to think the US is incapable of and does no manufacturing. It is the second largest manufacturer[1], and has a capacity about 65% of what China does. Which is 350% of the next largest manufacturing country. What they stopped manufacturing was menial and low-end product; because it's not price-effective to have 100 Americans sit on an assembly line and solder SMT compon…

> What they stopped manufacturing was menial and low-end product This statement is as inaccurate as the comment you’re trying to debunk. The fact is that China leveraged it’s low-end manufacturing work to work its way up the chain and now is the leader in many areas: https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outper... . E.g. China has been investing heavily in radar technology and as a result has air to a…

Your entire blurb doesn't prove an inaccuracy, it simply shows that China has diversified it's manufacturing beyond low-end manufacturing.

I never claimed that they did not do high-end manufacturing.

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

#488

Post by palmotea »

fragmede wrote: post #467
shimman wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> Infinity dollars won't help if the culture is radioactively toxic and shitty.

And what's "radioactively toxic and shitty"? Not wanting to slave away for low wages in bad working conditions?

Business apologists like to slander American workers, and it's tiring. Most of the "radioactively toxic and shitty" culture is management culture.

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

#489

Post by deaddodo »

delfinom wrote: post #144
deaddodo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the part that blows my mind. People seem to think the US is incapable of and does no manufacturing. It is the second largest manufacturer[1], and has a capacity about 65% of what China does. Which is 350% of the next largest manufacturing country. What they stopped manufacturing was menial and low-end product; because it's not price-effective to have 100 Americans sit on an assembly line and solder SMT compon…

Yes/no. China at this point is hard in automation, beyond anything the US has. China is well past the peak of sweatshops. As someone in the manufacturing space in the US, the biggest issue we have in the US is that manufacturing continues to die. Any manufacturing we have left is the old guard dying off. It comes from a range of issues from companies refusing to invest in younger employees, to the cost of real estate…

Incorrect. To reiterate, the closest near competitor below it does ~30% what the US does; and it only goes down from there. And, compared to China, they are doing 65% of their manufacturing capacity at 25% of their population. The US is doing fine.

The fact that China is diversified beyond low end manufacturing just shows that they have incentive + economic impetus to expand that field; and hardly disproves what I stated or shows any trend of US manufacturing "dying off".

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

#490

Post by r14c »

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.

I believe the premise is that you have to oppress the rich to a certain extent to prevent them from usurping the people's government for their own ends.
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