Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by TimorousBestie » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #566

TimorousBestie wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China used its low-margin low skill work to bootstrap the rest of the stack, and now they can make air to air missiles with range exceeding US missiles: https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/china-first-close- ... We’ve got to get you some better sources, mate. This is a straight-up Russian propagandist pretending to operate out of the UK while having a mailing address in South Korea. https://mediabiasfactcheck…

Fact check websites are tankie propaganda. But this particular point about air to air missiles is well attested.

> Fact check websites are tankie propaganda.

Notice that this doesn’t contradict your link being shoddy. Blindly reiterating Russian propaganda is very patriotic of you.

> But this particular point about air to air missiles is well attested.

Please don’t pretend that I was disputing the expected range of the PL-17; that’s clearly not the point I raised.

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

#592

Post by alt227 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:02 PM UTC

vsgherzi wrote: post #242

whynotmaybe wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, US didn't lose it, we collectively decided that whenever we buy something, the price was the most important aspect. It's like everybody forgot that their neighbour's job depend on them. We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys.

What you're describing literally is us losing it. We lost in the market. Price was above all for the market and we didn't adapt and lost. I agree with the point you're trying to make but we did lose it in the sense that we do not have the manufacturing capacity we once did

We didnt 'not adapt and loose' we welcomed it with open arms in order to get cheap prices. People voted with their wallets and collectively decided they didnt give 2 hoots about where something was made as long as the price was right.

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

#593

Post by alt227 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #391

whynotmaybe wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, US didn't lose it, we collectively decided that whenever we buy something, the price was the most important aspect. It's like everybody forgot that their neighbour's job depend on them. We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys.

> We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys. A huge part of that is rents. Basically, a store that owns their property outright or even on mortgage has far less worries when business turns down during a crisis. Take Covid - a year or two, depending on where you were, in more or less lockdo…

> A huge part of that is rents.

And this is becasue huge international investors still own sites like malls and retail centers and still remember the massive rents they used to command for those units.

The bubble will burst when enough sites are written off, and IMO rents will come back down to a reasonable level in a decade or 2.

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

#594

Post by throw0101a » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

mlsu wrote: post #274

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.

Have you met an engineer? I'd say "being an engineer" is probably the single most predictive trait for authoritarianism in my experience.

There's a decent amount of research that finds a correlation between engineering degrees and terrorists:

> According to two European social scientists working in Britain, Italian Diego Gambetta and German Steffen Hertog, who present their case in Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education, the presence of engineers among known Islamist extremists is 14 times greater than can be explained by random distribution. It was a finding the authors reached with caution and even a certain resistance. “We are social scientists,” Hertog explains in an interview, “so we are always seeking socio-economic explanations. We accepted this idea that there might be personality traits, expressed first in choice of profession and then in political ideology, very reluctantly.”

* https://macleans.ca/news/world/why-do-so-many-jihadis-have-e...

> This article demonstrates that individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent among violent Islamists worldwide than other degree holders. We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors – engineers’ relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset – is the most plausible explanation.

* https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/29836/1/Why_are_t...

* https://spectrum.ieee.org/extremist-engineers

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

#595

Post by JSR_FDED » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

I absolutely love my Mac Mini. But wtf is an "advanced AI server"?

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

#596

Post by alt227 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

blendergeek wrote: post #588

alt227 wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 announcem…

I did not do that intentionally apologies.

However, this issue is complicated by the fact that Trump toured the factory in 2019 and claimed it was new, something the press picked up an and therefore the media stories of the time are pretty warped.

In reality, Apple had many issues ramping up production in the US for various reason, one example being supply chain.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/now-know-why-apple-had-142145...

If they started in 2012 and it all went rosy, why did they have another press release in 2019 announcing it again, and why are they making a big song and dance about it again 14 years later? If everything with manufacturing in the US was going fine, I would have expected them to start making a lot more products in the US over those 14 years. Instaead we have a couple of troubled product lines, and some big shiny press releases trying to show off its importance.

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

#597

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:13 PM UTC

apercu wrote: post #140

mgh95 wrote: post #114

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

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

#598

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

cloverich wrote: post #265

apercu wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 moved from TX to west coast a few years back. Property taxes down, all other taxes and expenses up; total cost of living much higher now. It's also business friendly enough to make deals on taxes as needed, I can't imagine that will be a problem. I get the hate on TX but tbh outside of the heat, it can be a pretty great place to live across many dimensions.

[deleted]

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

#599

Post by NickC25 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

lukan wrote: post #527

adamweld wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only listened to one interview with Dan Wang, but I understood him to be particularly talking about the politicians, not the country as a whole. I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.

"I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyer" I can't speak for china either, so I looked it up and indeed, Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering and his predecessor Hu Jintao worked as a hydraulic engineer before becoming a politician. Well in germany we had Merkel as a doctorate in quantum chemistry (b…

>.... unless they use their skills to manufacture a total state surveillance and control machine

Well, um, that's China in a nutshell. They did exactly that.

Turns out people with power like to amass and maintain power, regardless of the structure they gain it in.

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

#600

Post by tedd4u » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

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…

    'Q:What does China's competitive edge look like in practice?'
    
    'A: One example from The Times article: When Jobs decided just a month 
    before the iPhone hit markets to replace a scratch-prone plastic screen 
    with a glass one, a Foxconn factory in China woke up about 8,000 workers 
    when the glass screens arrived at midnight, and the workers were 
    assembling 10,000 iPhones a day within 96 hours.
    
    'Another example: Apple had originally estimated that it would take nine 
    months to hire the 8,700 qualified industrial engineers needed to oversee 
    production of the iPhone; in China, it took 15 days. Anecdotes like that 
    leave you "feeling almost impressed by the no-holds-barred capabilities 
    of these manufacturing plants," says Edward Moyer at CNET News, 
    "impressed and queasy at the same time."'

From: https://theweek.com/articles/478705/why-apple-builds-iphones...