Apple CEO Tim Cook On Apple's US Manufacturing Move

We mentioned a few days back the "Assembled in America" tag showing up on some models of Apple's iMac. Nerval's Lobster points out that in a new interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Apple CEO Tim Cook offered some details on what that means: "'Next year we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac,' Cook told the magazine. 'We've been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to it. It will happen in 2013. We're really proud of it. We could have quickly maybe done just assembly, but it's broader because we wanted to do something more substantial.' He also had comments about Android and current litigation against Samsung and others."

Comments

PR gimmic, if your cynical

[Anonymous Coward]

If they bring "some" jobs back to the States.
If the jobs come back to the States, certain politicians will owe Apple.
If they are owed by the Government they can call in the favor.
If they can get some political influence on their problems with Android and Samsung, it will benefit them.
If they can get political action against Android and Samsung it will increase their revenue.

Later on Apple can find an emergency that forces them to off shore their production again.

If your cynical.

Re: PR Move

[hawks5999]

If this is a PR move, it's costly. As the news of the Made in the US concept spread, AAPL lost $30 billion in market capitalization.

This needs to be a principled move because shareholders are going to complain greatly about any margin erosion for the sake of patriotism.

China not as cheap

[bhlowe]

Manufacturing in China is getting more expensive and North America is becoming more competitive. The tax rate on repatriating money made outside of the US also makes manufacturing in the US more advantageous.

What would you have preferred to see?

[Brannon]

Here are your options:

1. Manufacturing in the USA, with manufacturing using robots, creating low thousands of well-paid jobs for Americans.

2. Manufacturing in China using hundreds of thousands of low-paid Chinese jobs.

3. Manufacturing in the USA without robots, but with hundreds of thousands of minimum-wage part-time jobs--and all Apple products increase in price by 30%.

Apple is currently doing #2 and transitioning to #1. Are you really upset that they didn't pick #3?

Re:What would you have preferred to see?

[Dcnjoe60]

Here are your options:

1. Manufacturing in the USA, with manufacturing using robots, creating low thousands of well-paid jobs for Americans.

2. Manufacturing in China using hundreds of thousands of low-paid Chinese jobs.

3. Manufacturing in the USA without robots, but with hundreds of thousands of minimum-wage part-time jobs--and all Apple products increase in price by 30%.

Apple is currently doing #2 and transitioning to #1. Are you really upset that they didn't pick #3?

Your choices all have the same outcome. It is not the number of american jobs that is important to the economy, it is the number of american jobs that provide a livable wage.

In a robotic plant, most of the workers are the ones who box things up at the end of the process. Usually the minimum qualifications are a high school diploma, if that. How is that a well paying job?

Unless Apple intends to pay a livable wage to its employees at these plant(s), which would mean either a significant price hike in products or a reduction in profits, all they are doing is pandering to the populus notion of buy American.

Re:What would you have preferred to see?

[Dcnjoe60]

Other unskilled jobs include janitorial, housekeeping, etc. These are unskilled because anyone who graduates high school has all the requisite knowledge and skill to actually perform them, and they pay low because well, anyone who walks off the street can do it.

There was a time, not too long ago, that anybody who graduated high school had all the requisite knowledge and skill to actually do almost any job, even start and run their own business, like Microsoft.

Back in the day, most business leaders, even , weren't college educated, but instead rose through the ranks to get to their position (with the exception of maybe medicine and engineering). Today, you spend $100,000 to get a degree so you can work in an entry level position. A generation or two ago, you just graduated high school for the entry level position and somebody with a college degree want into a junior management or mid-level position.

Face. it, most work fits in the category of being unskilled and monotonous. We just don't like to think about it wheny it applies to our own field.

Apple is doing this

[SuperKendall]

Apple could demand better adherence to US standards in the Foxconn plants making their products.

Apple is doing this, they already demanded less overtime of workers and better enforcement of restrictions against child labor. And then they brought in an independent firm to audit this happening and asked FoxConn to allow them access.

The real question is, why is NO other company doing this.

Things are obviously not perfect at FoxConn but Apple is trying to make them better, in a way that anyone can keep track of. No other company is providing any kind of visibility into these issues.