Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

Post by tedd4u » Fri, Feb 27, 2026, 7:58 PM UTC

tedd4u wrote: post #600

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…

    There's a confusion about China — let me at least give you my opinion. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago. That is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. 

    The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill, in one location, and the type of skill it is. The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with the materials that we do, are state-of-the-art, and the tooling skill is very deep here. 

    You know, in the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure we could fill this room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields. It's that vocational expertise that is very deep, very very deep here. And I give the education system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that, even when others were deemphasizing vocational. Now, I think many countries in the world have woken up and said, you know, this is a key thing and we've got to correct that. But China called that right from the beginning.

Post by alt227 » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 12:33 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #671

alt227 wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. Oh no. It's US pension funds that own a lot of real estate, and these will continue to get bailed out or protected by the government. The decision of the US to back pensions on the stonk market has insane, crippling side effects not just on their e…

Post by m463 » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 6:44 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #243

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…

> Something about having the whole supply chain in one place I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines. The companies that process the raw materials are located mostly inland, then the companies that form those raw materials into metal and plastic stock are next door, and then the companies that take th…

Post by ua709 » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #619

ua709 wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…