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Apple Outsources A5 Chip Manufacture ... To Texas
Lindan9 writes "In a 9 billion dollar investment, Apple's A5 chips will now be produced in Austin, TX, in a new Samsung factory that is apparently 'the largest-ever foreign investment in Texas.'" According to the article, the factory's been churning out chips since the beginning of this month.
US is now officially destination country for cheap outsourcing.
Texas just provides the cheap labor. They don't have the technology.
yay, jerbs?
The same company they're suing for imitating (int their eyes) the same product they're going to make in the new factory? Strange bedfellows indeed.
No sig today...
Dear America, do you want to work or not?
It's not Apple that made the $9b investment - Samsung did. The headline to the news entry suggests that it was otherwise. Grammer is so hard i kno lol!
I for one welcome our new Korean overlords.
Judging from the popularity of Apple / Samsung products that are made in Asia I do not see the move to America making a difference.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
. . . so they won't have to worry about Thailand-like floods stopping the production. At least if they stay away from the lakes and rivers . . . or what is left of the lakes and rivers.
Austin also has plenty of other high-tech companies around. But that air conditioning bill will be mighty high . . .
Although I seem to remember that Intel started building something there, but stopped went the Internet bubble busted. The local folks called empty frame. "Intel NOT inside . . . "
But if this here factory is already bakin' chips . . . that's sumtin' different.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Construction is temporal. We're trying to _reduce_ energy usage, believe it or not.
You might be. Countries or states that would like a growing economy are not among those interesting in giving in to entropy.
To be fair, it looks like this actually created 500-700 jobs.
One would think being "Fair" would be to quote the jobs figure from the original Reuters article - 1100 for just the chips, never mind the flash - instead of a number pulled from thin air but put forth as fact.
You go ask your local chamber of commerce if they care at all about 1100+ technical jobs appearing where they are.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't know why I'm replying to an AC, but--
Err, Samsung has been one of Apple's major suppliers for a long time now, in the billions of dollars range. They've been making a huge chunk of the chips that go into everything for years and years-- long before any of these lawsuits started.
There's nothing counter-intuitive about it. Apple is one of Samsung's largest customers and has been for ages.
The lawsuit from Apple's side is a design issue, not functional: nearness to the product is irrelevant. They aren't suing about how chips work or are made: its design from an artistic/aesthetic POV, not design from an architectural or engineering POV, that they're suing over. (I'm not defending the lawsuits or the existence of design patents, just noting the difference)
Weren't they just SUING them? Now they want a Samsung factory making chips for them?
In the Real World, relationships are way more complex than one headline or story the media loves to harp on. Samsung is producing chips now which means Apple was talking to them about that something like two years ago...
Businesses are composed of many different units and the guys who make the chips are about as far removed from the Galaxy Tab as a whale is from an owl.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you were trying to prove that Texas is a technology hub, by rattling off various tech companies in Austin.
you didn't mention Dell.
that makes me laugh all kinds of horrible laughs that i am kind of embarassed to be laughing.
a few weeks ago when I ordered some ram from newegg, it's said made in USA when I got it. And yes, works great.
1.6 million square feet is a lot more than nine football fields.
Business relationships among large corporations are not so simplistic as slashdotters like to assume.
1)
Pre existing contracts are not usually nullified by new lawsuits unless specified in the terms of said contract.
2)
Large companies, such as Samsung, often have multiple business units that operate mostly independently and may or may not care, or even know details of, legal action underway in another business unit. There are even examples (Sony and Fox come to mind.) of one division of a company suing another division of the same corporation.
3)
Assumptions made by slashdotters about the morality notwithstanding; among companies past a certain size, and both Apple and Samsung qualify, lawsuits (and especially patent lawsuits) don't imply malice or hard feelings of any particular kind. They're simply negotiation or competition by alternate means.
Lawsuits are just a way for lawyers to collect taxes without using the government as a middleman.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Look. I'm more excited about this than Lohan showing up in Playboy. This is really good news.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
third world country.... They still execute the mentally ill there, and have you seen the nutjobs that come from there? Just look at GW Bush and Rick Perry...
I thought you said they executed the mentally ill.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's the cheapest major part in the whole unit. cynical me says that is just a token gesture by Samsung, and may be just part of a deal to stop Apple shopping elsewhere.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Apple created the demand, and Samsung is the company that can meet the demand Apple has created. Credit is fine to apply to both companies, not just one or the other.
I'm certain I know how Ghost will react to this one (well, he's this online political show guy I listen to. Basically, he's from Austin, a manly capitalist Texan, who keeps getting trolled on by 4chan-types)
Are you claiming that only (or even mostly) citizens of East Asian countries own Samsung stock? Here's a hint: Multinational publicly traded corporations are called "multinational" because not only do they operate in multiple countries but they also have shareholders in multiple countries.
"You will know we are in a serious depression when manufacturing really comes back to the US."
You know when we don't price our labor out of the market we get more investment.
Bridgestone, Continental, MTU, BMW all invest in the US because it makes sense as their labor prices rise and ours become affordable.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Juggling that worldwide logistics effort is no mean feat; but they don't mix much in the way of dell technology into the sauce. It's like fedex with driver updates
You call Dell a "logistics" operation and then compare it to FedEx? I was waiting for the UPS punchline.
Nuclear power is your friend. mr burns
Every friggin LCD TV manufactured since the dawn of LCD TVs look and feel the same. If it weren't for the glowing 'Sony' emblem on mine,
Wait until Apple makes an LCD TV... it will be prettier, more expensive, and have an Apple logo on it which won't glow except to let you know that it's off. It will also have a single sheet of laser cut something or other somewhere on it, and probably laser pin holes so you can't see the LEDs unless they're on.
-- Terry
1. Destroy economy so wages are depressed
2. U.S. now source of cheap labor
3. Best of both worlds - outsourced wages with domestic location
4. Profit!
5. Rich get richer, poor get poorer
6. Repeat as desired
And they'll have a built-in market, with all those people in the U.S. who are flush with cash.
Wait...
I think I'm sensing a flaw in your logic about that actually being the plan, here...
If only I could put my finger on the place it was broken...
And then push to kill that region of your brain so you'd stop saying stupid things like this.
-- Terry
Hmm.. Your subtle political banter is too high above me. GW Bush you say? Rick Perry? Texas? Your insights are way to unique for me to understand.
Factories in China are known for making clones in the same factory after hours. If you can count the numbers of a critical chip exported, you can delay the introduction of clones to market. Yes, I know you can not prevent copies eventiually
china
I was hoping that Apple would bring those jobs back to America.
Well, I guess the Third World needs jobs too.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But as this little Apple story tells us, manufacturing seems to come in two kinds at the moment. Lots of jobs but very low wages assembly work, the stuff that is done in China. Or very few jobs indeed high tech stuff. Which is nice, sure, but it just doesn’t employ tens of millions of people, not even tens of thousands.
So in other words the "knowledge economy" will not be our economic savior?
And the actual value isn’t in making the things anyway, it’s in the designing of them and the selling. Which is the part of the process that America dominates anyway.
ProtectIP
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
They cannot sue about the chips production or their design, as they are off the shelf Samsung products re-badged for Apple. Samsung owns the IP associated with the silicon not Apple.
Apple has nothing but a few design patents which are a lousy means to stop others products at best, at worst it shows that the Patent system is completely broken when its supposed to allow for technological innovation and yet a company that has none manages to use the system to shut people who actually do innovate out of the market.
Here I have pointed out a figure from a current article published today, and you bring up some crusty thing from six months ago just to try and pull yourself out of the hole you made? And to top it off, it only offers one end of the 500-700 range given...
Just admit you made up the numbers and should actually read before posting next time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...at least not in the sense that they used to make those chips in their own fabs and are now having somebody else fab them. They've always outsourced the production of all their chip designs, as they've never owned any fabs. (Well, not as far as I know, at least.)
(And, unless you consider either the California Republic or the Republic of Texas to still exist, they didn't offshore it, either - not even if you include doing stuff across one or more land borders "offshoring". :-))
Cronism? WTF is Cronism? If you mean Cronyism, that word doesn't fit either.??
First, to repeat: This is not a new relationship; they are not entering a new deal. Apple is one of the largest single customers of Samsungs. Apple is, and has been, buying billions of dollars of chips from Samsung for a decade.
Apple is Samsung's second largest customer. Apple pays them to make their processors, their memory-- both DRAM and NAND-- and maybe various other components. Apple gives them billions every year: Apple, a _single_customer_ does. (Sony, fwiw, is Samsung's largest customer -- and by a pretty big margin to be fair).
There is nothing new here at all in the relationship. What's new is that Samsung made a new plant-- in the US of all places-- but they have more then one plant and can build them whereever. This is not an Apple-Samsung joint partnership. Samsung is the supplier. Apple is the customer.
This is nothing new.
Now, there is some speculation that the lawsuits may cause Apple to seek another supplier-- IS there one with enough capacity? I don't know-- but that would not at ALL be what Samsung would want. That's *billions* of sales a year lost. Their consumer electronics division may wish that Apple went poof, but their semiconductor division would be hit really, really hard by it. (Heck, I'm not exactly sure what Samsung would want out of their side of the lawsuits-- the only acceptable solution it seems to me for them would be for everyone to walk away back behind the lines and pretend none of it happened again. Any kind of injunction against Apple hurts Samsung, too. Not as bad, certainly. But still).
On to the rest of your argument-- first, the vast majority of what Samsung makes for Apple is in no way even distinct. Its stock stuff they make themselves and sell to all kinds of people, that Samsung itself owns all the rights to (or maybe licenses). This article about the A5 is distinct, sure: but only kind of. The A5 is "just" a customized Cortex A9 with a PowerVR GPU and a couple other things stuck together into a system-on-a-chip platform. Those are all licensed technology that Apple doesn't even own: though surely the combination and distinct customization's they made will be a certain amount of in-house IP that Apple will want to protect.
Except all kinds of other people are making things similar already. Including Samsung, and they've been doing it themselves longer.
Its not counter-intuitive to let someone pay me billions a year to make the things you're already making. Its not counter-intuitive to see that someone is increasing demand and wants to pay me even more billions, but my capacity is short-- so I build a new factory.
It IS a bit schizo that to one division in the company, Apple is the customer and one of the best ones at that. And yet, to another division of the company, Apple is the enemy. Its a complicated relationship, for sure. What it is not is a NEW relationship. There's way too much money on the line for them to decide 'oh no! Apple likes to sue people so we won't sell them our stuff!'
Apple's lawsuits in the Netherlands and, I believe, in Australia as well, were for both design issues and software patents. In fact, the court in the Netherlands threw out all of Apple's design claims, but upheld one of their "patents". In this case, for the bounce effect when scrolling a picture.
1) India and China didn't just add labor, they added demand and as their middle class has grown, that demand has grown.
2) While I'll grant it grows ever more efficient, automation had taken a good part of its toll long before China opened up. Consider, industrialization occurred in the 19th century, but middle class was at its strongest in the mid and late 20th century.
3) While considering industrialization, compare the 19th and 20th centuries. Did the demand for horseshoes remain the same in the 20th century as it did in the 19th? No. Markets change and more importantly, new markets emerge. I believe you're underestimate the number of new markets about to emerge and the number of people that will be required to work in them.
With all that said, your most fundamental mistake is focusing too much on this dime store economics bullshit. There is plenty in this world to feed, cloth and shelter every human being on the planet, providing him or her with entertainment, healthcare, etc. It really is all there. There are fields to be tilled, people who need to eat and people who want to work. The issue at hand are the barriers that prevent them from doing that. No economic system is perfect, each must be tempered.
Before your next response please review the taxation rates, unemployment rates and debt as a percentage of GDP for the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. (Austerity isn't the solution, spending is.)
All honest work is noble. Anyone who does an honest day's work and tries to do a good job should have our respect. They certainly have mine.
Do we like Apple more or less now?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
As an interesting fact, Nokia has had a fair chunk of manufacturing still happening here in Finland. Most of the Nokia gear I've bought here have been "Made in Finland". One could have thought that such a big player would've made everything explicitly in China a long time ago.
This should be good. Finally, all Chinese jobs will get outsourced here, unemployment will go down, we will become rich while the Chinese suffer a major depression like we are now, possibly resulting in the fall of the Communists, freeing of Tibet, a painful unification w/ Taiwan (similar to Germany's reunification) and a major decline in their power. Finally, their wages will be lower, ours will be higher and then...
Oh, wait....
Apple's A5 (and previous A4) CPUs weren't off-the-shelf Samsung products. They were Apple-originated designs. (Well, using cores from ARM and Imagination Technologies, integrated by Apple, possibly with some help from other outside companies some of which are now owned by Apple.)
The CPUs that Apple used for earlier iPhones on the other hand were Samsung products.