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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

#531

Post by embedding-shape »

Gud wrote: post #500
pear01 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The USA still has a lot of high end manufacturing going on. There is no “used to”.

Sure, but it's seemingly doing less and less. "Value Added by Industry: Manufacturing as a Percentage of GDP" has been going downwards for a long long time, here is the last twenty years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/VAPGDPMA

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

#532

Post by tom1337 »

otterley wrote: post #462
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.

Never heard about this procedure but sounds interesting. Is there anywhere to read about how this works?

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

#533

Post by dash2 »

mikestorrent wrote: post #294
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.

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…

> it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing.

Actually, this is very hard because different individuals want different things. Normally you need a mechanism like the market or democracy to aggregate individual preferences. Expecting a dictatorship to do this well seems optimistic, and the full history of communist China doesn’t support the idea.

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

#534

Post by jama211 »

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.

So you’re only attacking the title they need to use to survive on the modern internet, rather than the nuanced points they actually make?

If anyone’s analysis is subpar it’s yours.

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

#537

Post by Thlom »

deaddodo wrote: post #493
apercu wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, but there is tons of HIGH END manufacturing we could do that we just don't, even though there is every incentive to do so.

The US does 65% of China's manufacturing capacity at 25% their population. They are doing fine.

This can only be correct in spreadsheets. In the material reality China outproduces the US by orders of magnitude. For example, China produces ten times more steel, 3 times more cars and in shipbuilding China manufactures literarily thousands of times more ships than the US.

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

#538

Post by stevehawk »

adolph wrote: post #227
iamtheworstdev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i guess he's wondering if they finally managed to secure a domestic screw producer or they're if importing them from China?

Houston is a net exporter of screw [0]. But in seriousness, Houston has domestic production of fasteners etc for oil and gas as well as NASA. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Screw

it's a reference to the last time Apple tried this in Austin, their production was throttled due to the inability of their screw supplier to meet demand.

https://mashable.com/article/apple-mac-pro-screw

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

#539

Post by heopd »

flumpcakes wrote: post #100

The woman in the pink smock-like clothing: In the video there are Chinese characters on the clothing above the front pocket area. In a picture of her later on in the news article the Chinese writing is gone. Has it been photoshopped out for the press release images?

https://i.imgur.com/FRcXiSe.png --> here is a printscreen of the girl WITH foxconntech on the work coat. Before and after: https://i.imgur.com/TEmek6j.png

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

#540

Post by asimovDev »

vablings wrote: post #434
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…

The Mac Pro is already made in the USA and has been for a long long time, at this same facility the apple server is also made.

to be fair it's not clear if Mac Pro will continue to exist, it's been in a limbo for a while. When I saw this post on the front page my first thought was "oh, this is how they solve the 'We need to have a product assembled in the US but we only have Mac Pro that we do not want anymore'"
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