Slashdot Mirror
Apple Plans 'High-Tech Manufacturing' of Data-Center Gear in Arizona (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Business Insider report: Apple is seeking permission to conduct "high-tech manufacturing" and to build data-center server gear in a Mesa, Arizona, facility, according to a notice published Monday by the US federal government. A notification published in the Federal Register on Monday said Apple was looking for approval from the Foreign-Trade Zones Board to produce "finished products" in a special zone that exempts it from customs duty payments. "Apple Inc has repurposed the site as a global data command center that will conduct high-tech manufacturing of finished data center cabinets for other data centers," according to a document filed by Mesa on behalf of Apple in June and made public Monday. [...] The Arizona effort would mark a rare instance of a US tech company manufacturing and assembling a finished product domestically, where labor costs are higher. Apple's effort appears limited to equipment for its internal operations, however, rather than for a mass-market consumer product.
Trump Wins Again!
"conduct high-tech manufacturing of finished data center cabinets for other data centers"
Stores forty-two 1u servers in a stylish brushed aluminum housing. Introducing the New Apple iRack Pro.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
If the site does not allow my Ad Block to run, I ain't looking. A warning would be nice. An alternative would be nicer.
Wait for der Drumpfenfuhrer to take credit for this.
The sixth comment in and you managed to Godwin the thread. Keep up the good work.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I quickly scanned the article. My impression was they will screw them together in mesa, and all the pieces will be imported. By "finishing" the product in mesa they avoid customs on all the pieces. Before, they actually screwed them together in NC, Oregon, etc, the places they were used, and probably had to pay import taxes on the components. So net, no new US jobs, probably fewer since centralizing the finishing will optimize the process.
"The Arizona effort would mark a rare instance of a US tech company manufacturing and assembling a finished product domestically, where labor costs are higher"
Well that is because of this key phrase...
"high-tech manufacturing"
Meaning there will be very little labor and lot of robots.
I regard this as bolloxing of the law.
If mentioning Trump is now 'godwinning' a thread, comments worldwide may as well be shut down now.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
They already got it:
"Foreign-trade zones are essentially outside US customs territory, which means companies can avoid duties when exporting or importing merchandise. The US government supports the zones to help create jobs through "the encouragement of operations in the United States which, for customs reasons, might otherwise have been carried on abroad."
"On its domestic sales, Apple would be able to choose the duty rate during customs entry procedures that applies to finished server assembly cabinets (duty-free) for the foreign-status materials/components noted below and in the existing scope of authority," the notice continues.
Las Vegas isn't much cooler than Phoenix (maybe 10 degrees most of the time), yet Switch is doing booming business here with datacenters popping up all over town. The temperature outside hasn't been much of an impediment for them.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Do you really want a data center where the temperature quite often approaches 110 degrees?
Sure. Here's one. Take a tour. They have a facility in Scottsdale, too. Other companies host here, also. Digital Realty has nearly 1 million square feet of data center space in the county.
Why not Idaho? Cooler weather, low taxes, and cheap real-estate.
Idaho has a single tier-3 data center. Compared to Phoenix, I'm sure the major difference is the concentration of top-tier networks already here in Phoenix. I doubt there are as many top-tier networks running through Idaho. We also have cheap power and land, but I'm sure the prices in Idaho aren't very high either. Then again, there aren't many people in Idaho and it pays to locate your equipment near to the population centers. The population of all of Idaho is about 1.6 million, while about 4.5 million live in metro Phoenix. Intel, Motorola, and Honeywell also have a lot of major facilities here, I'm sure for many of the same reasons as the data centers.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Mesa sees an average of 301 sunny days each year. Solar power is now at or near parity for grid power and continues to get cheaper. The heat isn't going to cost anything extra in long run.
In my personal experience, Apple stuff is still widely regarded as high end in a lot of workplaces. Should Apple be able to step into the enterprise, it would definitely be a large market. It isn't like Apple hasn't been there, because with the XSan, Apple was the #2 selling storage vendor for a while (long time ago, but still notable.)
Ideally, Apple should spin the enterprise division off, similar to Filemaker/Claris. That way, the toymaking arm can focus on new shinies while a dedicated company can work on what enterprises need. Heck, take the XServe... it may not have been a hit, but it was a very solid piece of equipment for its time. Done right, Apple could keep a premium price point and compete with things like UCS, but it would take some design (perhaps a hypervisor in the BIOS so machines can be racked/stacked/wired, turned on, and immediately be ready for taking VM or distributed storage loads), but with all the cash in Apple's war chest, they could buy Nutanix or StarWind Software and be in the enterprise game in no time.