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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

#611

Post by yndoendo »

tombert wrote: post #120
yndoendo wrote: post #113

While shopping I look where items are produced and by whom company. When I see an item is manufactured in Texas I put it back on the shelf and keep walking. That State is too politically corrupt for me to financially support, same with Florida.

Don't most big tech companies have an office in Dallas or Austin? I remember that the MS campus was huge when I lived in Dallas. If "can't have been made in any capacity in Texas" is your criteria that might be pretty difficult.

I rarely buy from big tech companies and support them. I am a sunk cost for Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon ... all companies you have to pay me to engage with.

Example, rarely do I navigate to YouTube, I download the videos before watching them. Or if not, and I am presented with advertisement .. I say F' It, not watch, and move on with my life.

Computer components are a requirement and I limit my purchases as much as possible.

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

#612

Post by yndoendo »

prmoustache wrote: post #320
yndoendo wrote: post #113

While shopping I look where items are produced and by whom company. When I see an item is manufactured in Texas I put it back on the shelf and keep walking. That State is too politically corrupt for me to financially support, same with Florida.

Also US manufacturing is synonymous with shitty quality and has been for at least 5 decades.

Some things are good some things are bad.

USA lacks proper regulation for operator safety in automation environments. USA company can manufacturer machinery that is easily capable to remove limbs and decapitate people.

EU regulations require safety be built into the machinery if it can be. This means anything that is manufacture in the USA and authorized for use in the EU is of better quality.

Most US companies don't care if one of their client employees is physically harmed because they put up a warning sign.

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

#613

Post by brightball »

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…

Yep. Stories like that are the strongest case to protect US on shore manufacturing. All of the knowledge, skill talent and associated supply chains naturally colocate.

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

#614

Post by midnitewarrior »

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 manufacturing facility they are committing to is 8-12x the size of the average American home at 20,000 sq. feet.

This is a token operation meant to project the idea that manufacturing is coming back to the United States. This is appeasement by Tim Apple.

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

#615

Post by copper4eva »

dubcanada wrote: post #579
thrdbndndn wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but this sounds more like a myth, or at least heavily exaggerated. Similar to how Japan often gets romanticized. Organizing the entire chain geographically at the scale you described (inter-city) doesn't bring huge cost advantages by itself. In China labor has historically been cheap, so the transport cost between regions was never the dominant factor anyway. Most industrial clusters in China formed organicall…

As a Chinese living in China, you must know the layout of the city does provide logical sense. I've only been once, and I buy stuff from factories fairly often. When I went there I basically went to a mall district where all the furniture was sold, then I went to the tile district to review tiles, I went to several other "districts" that where nothing but that single item. I went to the window factory, which was dire…

You seem to assume that just because similar industries exist near each other in China, that it must have been government intervention. Which maybe it was, I don't know. But this same trend exists in the USA too.

You have areas with lots of Oil Refineries, Houston and Baton Rouge for example. You have areas with lots of steel mills, like in North West Indiana. These are examples I personally know of. Obviously a lot of big tech factories exist close to each other in Silicon Valley and in Austin Texas too.

There are "industrial clusters" in America too, simply put. It is natural for large chemical plants or industrial sites to build up near where their source is. Hence all the oil refineries around the gulf. This is not a uniquely China thing at all. Lots of major US cities are known for specific types of industries.

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

#616

Post by intrasight »

bigyabai wrote: post #409
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

It's so funny to me that X users think OpenClaw represents more than 1% of Apple's desktop sales because it's what their timeline says is true. If you want to humiliate me conclusively, throw me some numbers. LLMs have moved trillions worth of hardware value, but only a fraction of it is Apple branded.

Why do you say that? Anecdotally, everyone I know who has bought a Mac mini in the last month has done so to run OpenClaw. Yes only three people, but before that I only knew one person over several years who had bought one.

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

#617

Post by ijustlovemath »

_heimdall wrote: post #564
ijustlovemath wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that we really don't know what "plausible" is anymore with these storms. That much is clear in the data. It seems silly to be so close to a flood zone with your very expensive DUV/EUV machines. There are probably other places they could have placed this facility.

I don't think we can both consider FEMA's 1% flood risks and also assume no longer know what plausible is with these storms.

I think it's safe to assume given recent storms that the 1% floodplains are _underestimating_ the risk

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

#619

Post by nicoburns »

ua709 wrote: post #589
moregrist wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 T…

There's a long-term economic problem looming around the loss of jobs: which is that most people's ability to command a share of our economic output (i.e. earn money) is tied to their value as a labourer. If that labour is no longer needed by those who control capital and thus allocation of labour resources (which is increasingly the case across many segments of our economy), then we end up with an economy where people increasingly struggle to earn a decent living.

Of course there are areas where that labour would be useful: healthcase, teaching, childcare, elderly care all come to mind (and there are many other examples). But our economy is not set up to enable this. The problem isn't supply side (difficulty retraining people to do the jobs), it's demand side: the people who need these services often don't have the money to pay for them. So the jobs are badly paid.

And it's a downward spiral: as wealth becomes more concentrated, demand for labour drops because those controlling the wealth already have their needs met and often don't care about the needs of others.

If history is anyhing to go by, then this will eventually lead to war and/or revolution.

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

#620

Post by copper4eva »

montagg wrote: post #344
827a wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your learned helplessness is defeatist and boring. We need not be Moloch's subjects; Apple's business priorities are not the result of some natural and unstoppable force, and their leadership is not exempt from responsibility because of your belief that it is. Someone, sometime, in a surprisingly boring room, wearing a surprisingly boring suit, made decisions like those which opened a factory in China instead of Texa…

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…

I think US regulation is a huge part of what you're talking about though. In the US it is a literally pain to do anything new. I work at a chemical plant, and it took years (I'm not exaggerating, it was something like 2-3 years) to get all the permits to build a new unit. Because of how slow the city is.

So when you talk about how Asian companies were quicker to jump on new things, that's exactly what I think of. I haven't worked in Asia, but I imagine their government is not holding them back with red tape even a tenth as much.

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