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.

Comments

Asia goes up!

[InsightIn140Bytes]

US is now officially destination country for cheap outsourcing.

Re:Asia goes up!

[msauve]

The 25 employees of the new automated plant will appreciate that fact.

Re:Asia goes up!

[Anonymous Coward]

So will the hundreds in the local construction industry, those in the power industry, transport industry, and the local government who collect property tax.

Re:Asia goes up!

[msauve]

Construction is temporal. We're trying to _reduce_ energy usage, believe it or not. A billion dollars worth of chips really isn't that much to transport. You're assuming they weren't given massive tax breaks to build the plant there (they were - 100%).

To be fair, it looks like this actually created 500-700 jobs. That's still not what people might expect from a $9 billion plant, so the point of my facetious comment stands.

Re:Asia goes up!

[samkass]

1,100 high-tech employees on the processor side of the fab, and more than that on the flash memory side. A $3.6 billion construction project. Yes, I'd say they will appreciate it.

Re:Asia goes up!

[durrr]

The numbers of jobs created should be ~10 of "mostly useless emergency supervisors"
But of course, given the trend of politics-driven inflation and wage-stomping movement seen in general in the US you could probably create ~20000 jobs at $1/hour(counting 1970 equivalent USD) in a year or two.
China 2.0 bitches, enjoy nation-wide degeneration.

Re:Asia goes up!

[should_be_linear]

Wall Street: "$9b here? Are you fcking nuts?".
Samsung: "We believe in american workforce!"
Wall Street: "OK, so you ARE crazy... what the hell is wrong with China"
Samsung: "No way, they wouldn't follow even basic environmental and working conditions. We are getting out of there"
Wall Street: "NOOOOOOO!"

Re:Asia goes up!

[marnues]

I'm not reducing my energy. I'm using it smarter and expecting it cleaner. I have no plans to give up my electrical appliances, nor will I unless the need actually arises. And that need will not come.

Re:Asia goes up!

[allanw]

There's semiconductor fab companies that manufacture the wafers in the USA, but still ship them to Asia for packaging and testing, which requires less labor skill and investment. See this Micron video for instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvf29R7nXlM

Re:Asia goes up!

[Pax681]

1,100 high-tech employees on the processor side of the fab, and more than that on the flash memory side. A $3.6 billion construction project. Yes, I'd say they will appreciate it.

not just that if you actually look it's more

The 1.6 million square foot factory cost $3.6bn, but the total investment is closer to $9bn, according to Austin Chamber of Commerce, making it the largest-ever foreign investment in Texas. According to Reuters, the fab ramped up to full production at the beginning of December.

that's a fair wad of cash injected into the local economy and not an investment to be sniffed at at all.
Reuters has an article on it HERE

Re:Asia goes up!

[sgt scrub]

[snark] What? Ten of them are from the U.S! Considering the tax payers only had to pay 80% of the cost of the plant (bonds) to get them to hire that many it isn't
THAT bad of a deal. Besides. Perry, through friends, made a nice chunk of cash. [/snark]

Re:Asia goes up!

[erroneus]

This is Texas we're talking about. The property tax will likely be at the "agricultural rate" because they will have a few head of cattle living on the manufacturing campus like Exxon does... in fact, they'll probably be Texas Longhorn cattle and they will end up with a tax credit.

When Apple starts moving the actual assembly of their iDevices to the US, I might be more impressed. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see SOMETHING being made in the U.S. and I hope more is made here too.

Re:Asia goes up!

[Ihmhi]

local government who collect property tax.

The standard sweetheart deal is no property tax for the first 5-50 years depending on how good the negotiators are on either side.

Then usually the plant/stadium/etc. is "getting old" and a new one "needs" to be built somewhere. Maybe somewhere that's willing to offer a tax break...

Granted they do help create jobs in an area, but it's sort of foolishly wasted on certain things. A supermarket, for instance, will never really go away - it will just likely be bought out by a competitor. One building in my neighborhood has changed hands four times in the last 30 or so years. First it was an A&P. Then, Pathmark had no problem buying a ready-made store. Then Pathmark moved to a bigger lot next door (way bigger, in fact - they had it purpose-built for their store) and National Wholesale Liquidators came in. Then NWL went bankrupt and now Save Smart occupies the space.

No matter how you cut it, I can practically guarantee that you'll get 50+ years out of a good grocery store - even if it isn't always with the same owner. It is way easier to attract A&P, Kroger, Stop & Shop, etc. to come and build a store in an empty building than it is to get a sports team to come in and occupy an empty stadium.

Re:Asia goes up!

[Ihmhi]

And from the inevitable bootleg Chinese dub with bad English subtitling:

Wall Street: "$9 thousand million dolars?!?".

Samsung: "We make believe American workforce is believe!"

Wall Street: "Your brain works no good anymore. China is glorious and wonderful!"

Samsung: "No left, they wouldn't lead to good empirical working conditions. We are leaving timely now."

Wall Street: "DO NOT WANT"

Re:Asia goes up!

[Nutria]

wage-stomping movement seen in general in the US

It's called Supply And Demand: when (a) the supply of labor jumped by 2 billion as the result of India and China turning their countries semi-capitalist and open to foreign investment, and (b) the demand for labor drops due to automation, the natural wage rate must and does drop like a stone. Combine this with the extra costs incurred from environmental and workplace safety laws, and it's no wonder that the number of industrial jobs in the US has plummeted.

The smart person accepts this fact and adjusts him/herself accordingly (either by living with a lower wage or doing what it takes to have a higher-paying job).

Re:Asia goes up!

[rtaylor]

Even solar is lower than that.

Sure, might have to run the dish/clothes washers during the day but I'll gladly pay $10 per load for each of them.

Re:Asia goes up!

[grainofsand]

I have been to manufacturing centres (we used to call them factories) and I can promise you we do not want them back nor the jobs.

When ever I hear someone talking about the loss of manufacturing jobs, especially no-skill or low-skill jobs, I ask them if they hope their own children will one day work in such a job. They always say no.

Working in a no-skill / low-skill job in a factory is awful. We should not want any part of our labour market filling jobs like those.

Re:Asia goes up!

[Anonymous Coward]

The article states that there are ~1100 jobs created out of this. I work in the semiconductor manufacturing industry (major competitor to Samsung) and can tell you that of those 1100 jobs my estimate is that >600 of those are college graduates (engineers of some kind mostly) and I would estimate that there are probably ~100 PhDs. With a state of the art facility that cost $9bn you can bet that there are lots of technical hurdles that are constantly springing up especially as new products are being manufactured in the factory. The part of the manufacturing that requires lots of low cost, low skilled labor is the assembly portion which is still occurring in Asia but wafer manufacturing, especially on a cutting edge process, requires lots of very technically skilled labor. This is why Samsung built their wafer factory in Austin where there is a large supply of technical college graduates.

Re:Asia goes up!

[erroneus]

Actually, I say "yes." Such jobs aren't meant to be careers. They are a means to getting where you want to be next. When I was young, I did non-career work to keep myself going until I could get where I wanted to be. But where I came from, "fast food" was almost all there was.

And people entering the workforce in the career of their choice aren't usually the best as far as I'm concerned. In fact, I have a young trainee right now who never comes to work on time and I find it more than a little annoying. But since I am training her to take my place so I can relocate myself to another office, I'm not going to complain. This is her first job and she's not off to a great start exactly. Had she started off doing "lower work" she might have developed a better work ethic and an appreciation for the type of work she's doing now.

I could go on about "kids today" and their poor work ethic and all that, but I think that situation doesn't need any elaboration as it pretty much speaks for itself. But at least my two older sons are doing things the way I would prefer them to do. My oldest worked long and hard at "Whataburger" and is now well on his way to being a nuclear engineer. My second son is currently working his ass off at a fabric/craft store to save money for college. I couldn't be more proud of them.

We need more young people in the work force working these types of jobs. It's not just good for the economy, it's good for our work force at all levels.

Re:Asia goes up!

[Opportunist]

But with a wage rate plummeting like a stone, demand for goods is not far behind. Ya know, demand for goods ain't just "what people want". It's also, and at least as important, "what people can afford".

And "doing what's necessary to get a higher-paying job" isn't going to cut it either. Because if everyone does it... well, can you guess it?

Re:Asia goes up!

[Nick_13ro]

My enthusiasm for parsing legalese waned too quickly to look up all the details for all the involved parties; but it looks like Samsung is certainly not being sent away empty-handed... The city of Austin's agreement is one part, and looks like some rather nice tax 'incentives' and procedural waivers(two decades worth of municipal tax breaks, a variety of free infrastructure upgrades). Apparently the county, state, and school district(?!?) also have their own packages. I, for one, would like to thank the citizens of Texas for subsidizing my semiconductor purchases!

:) Coming from a country that used to subsidize everything I can tell you tax breaks is not subsidizing. A subsidy is giving money taxed or borrowed from somewhere else to some deadbeat factory that would otherwise go bankrupt the following month- the fact that said factory is never expected to pay any sort of tax or social security contribution just goes without saying. :)

Re:Asia goes up!

[grainofsand]

Structural unemployment is indeed a natural consequence of the move from primary to secondary and then from secondary to tertiary economies.

Provide for those who do not neatly fit into the result of the transition and stop demonising unemployment.

Re:Asia goes up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, your definition of "successfully adjusting", is indistinguishable from "starving". You can't "successfully adjust" to lower wages without limit. At some point, rational actors will seek other means than "successfully adjusting", in order to maintain their...well...lives. You can certainly make the case that a large segment of the population could take a pay cut without severe repercussions - right now. You can't make the case that people can (or would) adjust to an income stream that falls below the cost of living. Protip: You cannot survive in America on the salary a Chinese worker makes.

We artificially manipulate supply and demand all the time. This is why fizzy sugared water - which is NOT particularly rare - sells for dozens of times the cost to make it. It's why we have unions and anti-trust laws, and patents, and tariffs. The "law"of supply and demand is grade-school economics, sufficient until you realize that demand is usually adjusted without altering quality OR supply. How? Think about it during the next commercial break.

Re:Asia goes up!

[PopeRatzo]

So will the hundreds in the local construction industry, those in the power industry, transport industry, and the local government who collect property tax.

I'm guessing that the tax subsidies that Apple got were worth a lot more than the property taxes Apple would pay to the local government.

No big corporation is going to build a plant or bring any jobs anywhere in the US unless the local government cuts a vein for them. I don't care if it's Apple or Wal-Mart or Sears or Ford. They go to whichever local government makes them the sweetest deal to avoid paying a penny in taxes to the community.

Didn't the Florida Marlins just blackmail the local government into building them an $800million stadium? Sears just threatened to leave Chicago unless they got $150mil in tax relief. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange did the same.

In the 21st century, when a company builds a plant in the US or creates jobs, they are the ones enjoying the biggest benefit.

Re:Asia goes up!

[Ol Olsoc]

This is the odd thing coming out of some folks now. We are supposed to embrace our newfound poverty.

Let's all hope for hopelessness, for that is the only path of hope.

Re:Asia goes up!

[Guy Harris]

So what you're saying that the American 99% will get a bit richer, at a price of Korean (or Chinese, or whatever) 1% getting a lot richer instead of the local 1%.

Well, I wouldn't go quite that far; see my other reply - an Indian-American member of the local 1%, along with an all-American member of the local 1%, and other members of the local 1% will probably get richer as well (for "local" defined as "the U.S." - and, at least for those two, you could probably define it as "Manhattan Island").

Re:Asia goes up!

[Dhalka226]

When ever I hear someone talking about the loss of manufacturing jobs, especially no-skill or low-skill jobs, I ask them if they hope their own children will one day work in such a job. They always say no.

Of course nobody wants their child to be a factory worker. They are all meant to grow up and be president or win the Superbowl.

Now ask them if they would like jobs to be available when reality hits and it turns out that little Johnny is going to be in the majority of Americans who never have a high-paying job or a nice office. Ask if they have enough tucked away in that retirement fund (what, no retirement fund?!) to support 40 year old Johnny because, gosh, he's too good for that kind of work!

Nobody wants their kid to have a job like that. Nobody should want their kid to have a job like that. But it's a hell of a lot better than long-term unemployment. Service jobs and intellectual property can only employ so many people, and it's only going to get worse.

Re:Asia goes up!

[FrkyD]

No. It hasn't.

Even the highest fifth (top 20%) has averaged less than what had previously been average GPA growth rate over the prior 40 years of a little over 3%. And the bottom half of the top 20% did poorly, because the top 1% did so well that it raised the average for the top 20%. That means that over the past 30 years only people roughly within the top 10% were able to realize any growth in real income.

Robert Reich puts it this way:

The wages of the typical American hardly increased in the three decades leading up to the Crash of 2008, considering inflation. In the 2002, they actually dropped. According to the Census Bureau, in 2007 a male worker earning the median male wage (that is, smack in the middle, with as many men earning more than he did as earning less) took home just over $45,000. Considering inflation, this was less than the typical male worker earned thirty years before. * * * But the American economy was much larger in 2007 than it was 30 years before. If those gains had been divided equally among Americans, the typical American would be more than 60 percent better off than he actually was by 2007. [6]

You can read some more here: http://acivilamericandebate.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/the-30-year-growth-of-income-inequality/

Re:Asia goes up!

[unkiereamus]

"mostly useless emergency supervisors".

Honestly, I couldn't quite parse your entire comment, let alone this particular bit, but taking my best guess as to what you meant by this statement, I felt the need to respond.

I am a paramedic, almost the very definition of an emergency worker (though firefighters might come closer to the mark), we are staffed to the level that actuarial types say we can reasonably be expected to be needed. Note the emphasis. When I worked in the states, I spent roughly 25-50% of my time doing a) shit all and b) nothing...watching TV, surfing the web, etc.

What I'm getting at, though, is that emergencies happen, and they cost a lot of money when they do, though that cost can be mitigated by having someone properly prepared to meet the emergency.

While I personally have no aptitude for that particular sort of number-crunching, I can respect it, and if the actuarial types are doing their jobs right, even if I spend 99.9% of my time sitting with my thumb up my ass, in that last 0.1% of the time, having me, a trained and prepared emergency responder able to cope with the emergency saves the company (or in my case, the government/society at large) enough money to justify my salary for the other 99.9% of the time.

Emergency personnel aren't "mostly useless", we're "(sometimes) mostly idle", there's a difference.

Re:Asia goes up!

[msobkow]

You can't survive on what some immigrant workers accept for pay, either. High living cost areas in the US and Canada are notorious for painting their wages as "high", and they are, relative to the poorer areas some immigrant labour comes from. I mean economic immigrant to a "high pay" area, not necessarily a foreigner.

But when they get there, they find themselves forced to room with several people to get by, living in conditions no better than they did at home in order to send a significant chunk of their pay home. It's the tech equivalent of the "Alberta Oilsands Lifestyle" -- long hours, brutal living expenses, and relatively high pay for short periods followed by trips home to survive unemployment while looking for the next contract.

However, they already get paid less than a "local" worker with a house, family, tuition expenses, healthcare expenses, etc. at the high local costs can afford to. The "immigrants" come from areas where most of their costs of living are lower.

I've lost count of how many times I've had to abandon a market because the cheap immigrant labour companies swamped the market at cut-throat rates. Then along came actual overseas outsourcing, and even those jobs disappeared entirely.

It may be supply and demand, but the cheap supply markets show no mercy on the countries with the demand. The only saving grace we have is that many of the cheap overseas sweatshops produce crap, or pad their bills through incompetence and low productivity. Unfortunately it takes management getting burned a few times before they realize that you get what you pay for and start hiring local talent at decent rates again. And the growth of the local talent market is a lot slower than the growth of the doomed project farmed out to the lowest bidder.

Automation will make the grunt coder obsolete soon enough, the same as it's done to every other low-skilled labourer for millenia. "I'm a programmer" doesn't mean what it used to -- the tools are a lot easier to work with nowadays, and there is a lot more experience that's been documented and reproducible than there used to be 20 years ago.

No one gets paid to read core dumps any more, and I can't say that I miss that aspect of old style computing at all. Live code editing during a breakpoint rocks for productivity. Similarly, manufactured code is simply more cost effective than manually produced source. It may not be as "elegant", but it works, and works well enough to get the job done. In the end, that's all that matters -- getting the job done.

It's what everyone gets paid for.

Except for bank executives and CEOs who rake in bonuses for gutting companies and losing money. I don't know why we pay those people anything at all. They're incompetent and greedy, and bad for the future of any business.

Re:Asia goes up!

[sjames]

Actually, Sweden's economy is in good shape with declining unemployment. They are hardly crumbling. You may be thinking of a period in the early '90s when they were growing slower than the rest of the EU (slower growth, not recession or even stagnation). Much of that has been made back up since, and consistent with their policy of placing security over growth, they have suffered little from the big crash. They have "too much immigration" because the people there are well served by their economy.

In a world where technology is steadily bringing us the dream of eliminating the need for human labor, your choices are to oppress the masses until they cut your head off, ban technology, or make careful alterations to the economic structure to accommodate the changes. The bury your head in the sand and hope iot goes away strategy is rarely correct.

Cheap labor

[Animats]

Texas just provides the cheap labor. They don't have the technology.

Re:Cheap labor

[Svartalf]

Heh... Says you...

TI
Freescale
AMD
IBM
Qualcomm

These and more have more than a piddling engineering presence in Austin.

Re:Cheap labor

[Pharmboy]

Dell and HP are also Texas corporations, which are two giants in producing end products for the entire globe. Of course, Dell finishes their stuff in Mexico (which is still better than China).

Re:Cheap labor

[martin-boundary]

That's not so bad. I think the biggest problem will be the language barrier. Texans have a peculiar version of English that could potentially lead to millions of dollars wasted when the managers in Cupertino try to communicate exactly what they want over the phone...

Re:Cheap labor

[JonWan]

Austin is part of Texas. It's where we keep all of the Democrats.

Samsung...

[Joce640k]

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.

Re:Samsung...

[Joce640k]

Nope. Samsung used somebody's else's operating system (Android) and put it in a form factor which:
a) Had been done before Apple did it
b) Is pretty obvious - the only real variation possible is the roundness of the corners, everything else follows function (it's a screen!)

Re:Samsung...

[Cardcaptor_RLH85]

The only part that Apple is sourcing from this Samsung plant is the A5 processor. I don't think that any Android phone or tablet uses this chip so that's not the issue at all.

Re:Samsung...

[bjwest]

It doesn't matter how the damn thing looks. 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, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and a Vizo, Samsung, or any other brand sitting on the shelf next to each other. Ditto for pretty much every LCD monitor, as well. If you're stupid enough to buy a Samsung tablet, thinking you're getting an iPad, then you deserve neither. Caveat emptor, you stupid "consumer". I'm a customer, and I look at what I'm purchasing to make sure it's what I want.

Just because something is black with rounded corners, doesn't mean it's patentable. I hope Apple gets their asses handed to them soon over their bull shit patents.

Re:Samsung...

[Pi1grim]

Ah, come on already. Enough with the "all the phones have similar design" argument. Put side by side iPhone 3G(S), iPhone 4, any HTC smartphone, any Sony-Ericsson smartphone, Nokia smartphone and Samsung Galaxy (I and 2) then see try to match similar looking phones. Somehow only Samsung managed to make their phone look painfully like the iPhone.

Re:Samsung...

[TooMuchToDo]

When you can site 2001: A Space Oddessy as prior art, that gives Samsung license to tell Apple to go eat a bowl of dicks. Apple? innovators? My ass. They sell marked-up shiny.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-08/24/samsung-2001-prior-art

According to Samsung, director Stanley Kubrick had the idea for tablet computers about four decades ago, in the 1968 sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. A clip from the film (available on YouTube, Samsung hastens to add), shows astronauts eating while watching a TV show on flat, personal computers.

The Galaxy Tab maker argues that Kubrick's forward-thinking tablet has, "an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table's surface), and a thin form factor."

Re:Samsung...

[antifoidulus]

That seems to happen a lot with these big east Asian electronics firms, they get so big they end up competing with themselves. Look at Sony, they used to(and maybe still do?) manufacture a lot of the parts that went into Apple computers such as the battery, while at the same time competing with Apple in both the laptop and the personal media player fields...... Though Samsung would be wise to make sure they don't end up going down the same path that Sony did, i.e. get so big and have so many conflicting goals that they end up losing a lot of their core business to smaller and more nimble competitors.

Re:Samsung...

[nightfell]

Nope. Samsung used somebody's else's operating system (Android) and put it in a form factor which:
a) Had been done before Apple did it
b) Is pretty obvious - the only real variation possible is the roundness of the corners, everything else follows function (it's a screen!)

It's not the form factor that Apple is suing over, it's the industrial design of a specific implementation of that form factor. Apple has not sued, threatened to sue, or otherwise made any sort of huff about the dozens of other tablets that have been around both before and after the iPad, just those that bear a striking resemblance to the iPad.

The Galaxy Tab is a near clone. Apple is right to sue over it if they hold their own design to be distinctive (which it is). This isn't about a rectangle, rounded corners, or black borders, it's about a unique collection of attributes that is immediately recognizable as an iPad.

Re:Samsung...

[nightfell]

And that display from 2001 would not infringe on the iPad.

Or put differently, even Samsung's lawyers wouldn't have had any trouble pointing out the 2001 device from an iPad or a Galaxy Tab.

Re:Samsung...

[luis_a_espinal]

Yet Samsung's own lawyers couldn't tell them apart. In real life.

And that's because the lawyers were incompetent, not because the products were reasonably indistinguishable from one another.

Re:Samsung...

[Solandri]

In the U.S., design patents can only be granted for "ornamental" features. i.e. features which serve no functional purpose. The Coca-Cola bottle is the archetypical example. Making that bottle that shape serves no function, it's completely ornamental.

In that regard, flat, rectangular, and rounded corners are all functional, which is why Apple was denied the injunction they sought against Samsung in the U.S. The color of the bezel could be regarded as ornamental, but with black, white, and silver being the most common choices, I seriously doubt any design patent based on a black bezel would stand. If Apple striped it a certain way, that might qualify. The only other design patent-worthy aspect of the Apple's complaint I can think of is the radius of the rounded corners. But that can easily be circumvented by using rounded corners with a slightly different radius.

And by the way, the appearance of the iPad from the front is a near-clone of a Samsung digital picture frame released in 2006. Be careful who you accuse of copying whom.

Re:Samsung...

[BasilBrush]

So how come the Samsung looks more like an iPad than it looks like the 2001:A Space Oddessy tablet?

What bullshit.

Re:Samsung...

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

When you can site 2001: A Space Oddessy as prior art, that gives Samsung license to tell Apple to go eat a bowl of dicks.

Errm, you can "site" something as long as you want, if it doesn't actually fit, you are blowing smoke. And since the device in 2001 doesn't actually look like an iPad (or any other device sold today), that's what you just did. Nice Debunkification here.

Re:Samsung...

[jamesh]

If it weren't for the glowing 'Sorny' emblem on mine, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and a Vizo, Samsung, or any other brand sitting on the shelf next to each other.

Nonsense. I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see one.

Damned both ways?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear America, do you want to work or not?

Re:Damned both ways?

[Ethanol-fueled]

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

Headline allusion error

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our new Korean overlords.

Re:I for one welcome...

[rohan972]

In Korea, only old people are overlords.

Re:I for one welcome...

[swalve]

They've been our overlords for a while now. A LOT of our stuff has Korean innards. LG and Samsung are huge OEM producers.

At least Austin should be free of floods . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . 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.

"To be Fair"

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:"To be Fair"

[msauve]

Regarding the expansion to support Apple chips, "Samsung has been an Austin-area employer since 1996...The company will also hire an additional 500 employees."

Re:Irony

[Ixokai]

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)

Real world blows Apple Hater mind - news at 11

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:I live in Texas

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile some where in China "They took our jerbssssss"

It's really not that strange.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Texas is still a.....

[ColdWetDog]

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.

Re:the funniest thing about your post

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Dell is, arguably, more of a logistics and integration company than a tech company(which isn't necessarily a bad thing, they are pretty decent at it, and somebody has to do it)...

They are pretty good at providing a one-stop-shop for a variety of Intel and AMD silicon, with supporting chips from a number of other vendors, mounted on a standardized set of boards from a few pacific rim OEM shops, and stuffed into plastic boxes in Mexico according to your order. 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...

Multinational

[tepples]

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.

Re:Multinational

[Guy Harris]

In case of Samsung in particular, its stock only trades on the Korean stock market.

Not exactly - it also trades on the London and Luxembourg stock exchanges, but what's sold there might be their Global Depository Receipts. Apparently, "as someone residing outside Korea, [I] may invest in Samsung stock (005930, 005935) through a qualified institutional broker in Seoul", and "For information regarding investment in Samsung GDR, [I should] contact [my] broker."

Apparently a slight majority of their stock, and a significant majority of their preferred stock, is foreign-held, although I don't know whether there's anything those pie charts are leaving out. The "List of a Major Shareholder & Related Parties" includes several individuals with Korean names and affiliates with names that include the string "Samsung" (today's lesson is brought to you by the letters "c" "h" "a" "e" "b" "o", and "l"), and the "List of Shareholders with the Ownership of 5% and above" includes Good Old American First National City Bank, err, umm, Citibank, along with Samsung Life Insurance and National Pension Service (probably meaning the Korean national pension service)

Re:Multinational

[oxdas]

My understanding is that Samsung uses a complex circular ownership structure with Samsung Everland at the top. This allow Lee GunHee and family to completely control Samsung even while owning only a small piece of the pie. This form of ownership is not valid for a public company in the United States, but Korea has different rules. Other companies achieve this same effect in other ways. Newscorp, for example, uses a multiclass stock structure whereby the family owns a small minority of the stock, but retain near majority voting rights.

Re:Multinational

[GlobalEcho]

Even for a chaebol, Samsung is pretty corrupt. I will be interested in this book (Think Samsung) by their ex legal officer, if it is ever translated.

Logistics

[tepples]

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.

Wait until Apple makes an LCD TV...

[tlambert]

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

Brilliant!

[tlambert]

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

Perhaps done for supply control

[maxwells_deamon]

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

Re:Irony

[JimCanuck]

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.

Your six month old article means what exactly?

[SuperKendall]

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.

Apple didn't "outsource" anything...

[Guy Harris]

...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". :-))

On the contrary, work should be respected

[Kohath]

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.

Re:On the contrary, work should be respected

[unkiereamus]

The corollary to that that I live by is that "Anyone who does a job I wouldn't do, deserves my respect.".

I worked as a temp on a construction job once. After a week, I quit. I couldn't take it, my back and knees were killing me, not to mention I was bored out of my mind. I will never work construction again, I'd rather flip burgers for less money, but despite the fact that I've since found my niche in a semi-professional field, I still respect those that work as unskilled construction labor...those poor bastards.