Earlier quoted context omitted.
I concur with moregrist
I'm very glad that you confirmed that with a comment, I was a bit confused what specifically you thought.
You’re welcome
Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
581–590 of 728 posts
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#582Apple ramping up Mac mini production in Houston to meet demand for Clawbots is wild. When were Mac minis a hot commodity before three weeks ago?
That’s not the reason.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likely a combination of business-friendly policies (low tax, no employer payroll tax, etc.) and proximity to ports. Houston is the 6th [1] largest port in the USA. [1] https://pangea-network.com/busiest-and-biggest-ports-in-the-...
I agree with you on all of these except: low tax I grew up in DFW. My house in WI is assessed at a significantly higher value than my siblings house in Ft Worth. My 2025 property tax bill ~$5k, my 2025 state income tax - not gonna publish it here but not all that significant. Sibling in Texas property tax bill: ~$14k. Significantly higher than my state income tax + property tax. Also, I don't have to live in Texas.
I think there's more to your sibling's taxes than property taxes. The data tell the opposite story - WI property taxes are higher than TX ones, at least if we look at the medians:
https://www.propertytax101.org/propertytaxbystate
As someone living in Fort Worth and making good money as a Staff SWE, I got a tax refund this year. It was due to paying interest on my house, but still.
I'd recommend asking your sibling see if they qualify for the homestead exemption, it's significant. You or they can check if they're using it and see their exact property taxes here:
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not for Clawdbot, this is a re-run of the 2019 strategy where Apple promises to manufacture a low volume of high-margin PC enclosures on US soil.
>With its next-level AI capabilities, it has become an essential tool for everyone from students and aspiring creatives to small business owners. Seems to me this part of the PR release is a reference to claudbot/openclaw. What else could it be referring to?
Not even a maxed Mini with 64GB of ram is useful for local inference related to OpenClaw, that is not the reason people are getting a Mini for that, they get the base model with 16GB because it’s the cheapest device that can interact with your iCloud data (reminders, iMessage, etc).
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#585Earlier 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.
> 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 dyn…
Look america's 1939+ expansion was subsided by the british empire trying to expand arms manufacture.
What america has been doing is subsiding engineering capacity in china. This was done because it created more profit for larger companies as they merged and eliminated costs. This higher profit drove a "roaring" economic expansion. But now china is capturing more of the value.
A solution is to use tax as a way to re-patriciate engineering capacity. This is kinda what trump is supposed to be doing, but carving out exceptions for friends, and using blunt instruments doesn't work all that well.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As mentioned upthread, if you go to an American machine shop, they'll take two weeks to get back to you, and generally be a PITA to work with, vs China's jumping at the chance to build stuff. Probably because the Chinese are working 996. I know people who work 996, in China, and they dislike it as much as I would. That's "jumping at the chance."
You don't have to work 996 to have an attitude of let's help the customer take their product to market. The American machine shop will laugh at you for not being a machinist, and tell you oh we don't do powder coating, we don't make cardboard boxes or styrofoam inserts. So then you, as the customer trying to get a product to market gotta run around town figuring it all out. Meanwhile, you start talking to the Chinese…
So your argument is that because machine shops don't do the leg work for you in finding suppliers for the things you need, they're worse?
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The point is that high end and low end manufacturing are intimately related. You can’t outsource your low end manufacturing without your high end eventually collapsing.
The U.S. still manufactures high end products in some fields. But in many areas we have lost the high end as well as the low end. E.g. we can’t compete with the Chinese in electric cars.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not convinced this is all temporary.
It was last time they did this, when they started producing Mac Pros in US in 2019, then promptly stopped again. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/09/apples-new-mac-pro-to... https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/28/tech/apple-mac-pro-produc...
Apple originally announced they would bring Mac Pro production to the US in 2013.
The two articles you share are one from CNN saying apple was moving production back to China after 6 years in the US and second from apple a few months later saying they were keeping it in the US.
You put the article from September before the article from June to create a narrative that only a few months passed between Apple's announcement of US production and CNN debunking it. The only issue is that the CNN article was 3 months _before_ Apple's rebuttal.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I don’t think you can take “percentage of GDP” as an indication that the US is doing less. It could be doing the same amount while the GDP grew tremendously in other areas, for example software. And if you look at the absolute contribution in dollars, manufacturing has gone up 1.76 times between 2005 and today: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USMANNQGSP This is roughly 2.9% a year over 20 years, so slightly ahead…
When politicians talk about the decline in manufacturing what they mean is jobs. I work in American manufacturing and there are tons of amazing projects happening but the decline in jobs is real. Especially low skilled jobs, This trend will only continue and I doubt any politician, regardless of thier background, can change that. And I’m not sure it’s a bad thing as it means manufacturing productivity is increasing
The main reason it’s so political is the drop in number of jobs has been huge, and too fast for many to adjust. Automation has come fast.
“ Manufacturing employment declined from 17.3 million in January 2000 to a low of 11.5 million in December 2009, a drop of 33% over the decade. Compared to the peak of 19.5 million in 1979, manufacturing employment had declined approximately 41% by 2009.”
https://blog.uwsp.edu/cps/2025/01/29/u-s-manufacturing-emplo...
Interesting to think about. Share of GDP staying stable but number of jobs fell by around half.
Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 j…
All of those things you mentioned start small and build locally. As soon as they become big enough to want to manufacture and sell internationally, the only option is to move the production line to Asia. Unless somebody big like Apple invests in manufacturing plants and supply chains in western countries, Asia will still have all the investment and factories and this will never change.