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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.
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!
So will the hundreds in the local construction industry, those in the power industry, transport industry, and the local government who collect property tax.
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.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
E pluribus unum
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)
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.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
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."
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"
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Austin is part of Texas. It's where we keep all of the Democrats.
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
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.
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.