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A Tiny Screw Shows Why iPhones Won't Be 'Assembled in USA' (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Despite a trade war between the United States and China and past admonishments from President Trump "to start building their damn computers and things in this country," Apple is unlikely to bring its manufacturing closer to home. A tiny screw illustrates why. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.]
In 2012, Apple's chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, went on prime-time television to announce that Apple would make a Mac computer in the United States. It would be the first Apple product in years to be manufactured by American workers, and the top-of-the-line Mac Pro would come with an unusual inscription: "Assembled in USA." But when Apple began making the $3,000 computer in Austin, Tex., it struggled to find enough screws, according to three people who worked on the project and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.
In China, Apple relied on factories that can produce vast quantities of custom screws on short notice. In Texas, where they say everything is bigger, it turned out the screw suppliers were not. Tests of new versions of the computer were hamstrung because a 20-employee machine shop that Apple's manufacturing contractor was relying on could produce at most 1,000 screws a day. The screw shortage was one of several problems that postponed sales of the computer for months, the people who worked on the project said. By the time the computer was ready for mass production, Apple had ordered screws from China.
In 2012, Apple's chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, went on prime-time television to announce that Apple would make a Mac computer in the United States. It would be the first Apple product in years to be manufactured by American workers, and the top-of-the-line Mac Pro would come with an unusual inscription: "Assembled in USA." But when Apple began making the $3,000 computer in Austin, Tex., it struggled to find enough screws, according to three people who worked on the project and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.
In China, Apple relied on factories that can produce vast quantities of custom screws on short notice. In Texas, where they say everything is bigger, it turned out the screw suppliers were not. Tests of new versions of the computer were hamstrung because a 20-employee machine shop that Apple's manufacturing contractor was relying on could produce at most 1,000 screws a day. The screw shortage was one of several problems that postponed sales of the computer for months, the people who worked on the project said. By the time the computer was ready for mass production, Apple had ordered screws from China.
no one in the usa will work for $2.15/hr 60-80 hours a week + must live on site.
If only it was possible to engineer a product using readily available parts instead of custom items specifically designed to stifle repairs and create vendor lock-in. ...if only it was possible...
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
The Mac Pro was not a laptop.
"Old man yells at systemd"
...with 20 employees on 1000 screws a day? Wouldn't that bring in like maybe $10 total daily?
Apples can be made here just fine. If they give up on their image mandates and want to just infiltrate the market they're perfectly capable. People who recognize my user name recognize me as being highly critical of Apple. What few know is that my first electronics industry job back in 1996 was related to Apple. I manufactured Mac Clones. Legal, lawful ones under contract from Motorola. They weren't far different from normal PCs of the era, they were little beige boxes with standard PC components, they had an electronically ejected floppy drive instead of the standard mechanical push button of the era, and everything was SCSI instead of IDE, but I must say there was an appeal to using off the shelf components. I lost my job when Steve Jobs got his job back, killing clones was one of the first things he did.
If Apple was having trouble getting a particular screw in the computer world then it wasn't a normal screw.
Indeed their reliance on tri-wings and other "don't you dare fix this yourself!" products instead of normal, mass produced, easy to get screws is half their problem.
What this article leaves out is the United States used to be like China is now when it comes to manufacturing. Our politicians sold us out. We've been financially punished through specific taxes and targeted labor practices from that are designed to keep us from succeeding in the manufacturing world. Most of this was done in the George H.W. Bush era, but it wasn't exclusive to him. Every president between Reagan and Trump, and I'm not so sure about Reagan in his second term, has sold the United States to foreign interest. The reason we aren't setup to do what Apple is bitching we can't do was government sabotage of our own industry.
#1 Use normal fucking screws
#2 Stop allowing our politicians to sell us out - flush the toilet occasionally and replace the contents up on the hill
#3 Educate yourself about what's going on
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I would posit only that this shows that Apple are terrible at sourcing products, especially bespoke non-standard products of their own design.
This tells you several things about: a) the practicality of their designs, b) their deliberate awkwardness to manufacture, c) their patent portfolio, d) their ability to "think outside the box".
So you couldn't buy a custom-made screw. And you didn't know that in time for production. And that stymied however-many-million-dollars of product from going into production.
And we're not talking some aircraft-grade, ultra-thin, super-duper-magical screw. But a screw to hold, say, a motherboard to a case, or a case together (but their Mac cases didn't have screws, did they?). You couldn't have just bought a bunch of M3/M4/M5 screws and drilled appropriate holes?
This says everything you need to know about Apple, not what Texas can or can't produce. They'd rather create weird shit that serves no purpose that can't be fulfilled with a 1/10th of a cent screw that you can pick up anywhere, and pass that cost down to you, blaming American manufacturing when they own inability to design, source, plan and manufacture a simple fixing shows them up.
Manufacturing requires an ecosystem of other manufacturers for mutual support. A single widget machine is not technology; the manufacturing capacity and knowledge along with perpetuation of same _is_ technology.
Back in the day when off shoring started, the argument was the grunt labor is going overseas, but all the knowledge work is staying here. Obviously stupid on the face, but people fell for it. Manufacturing problems are solved on the plant floor as they occur. Nobody waits for the 'knowledge' to show up from 12 time zones away.
Heck, even the anecdote in the summary made the natural assumption that the place to get the screw was China, not Pennsylvania, or some other not Texas based US source--because that is where the mature ecosystem now thrives.
Congratulations, America, you got what you paid for.
Apple, you have the chance to among the first 'on-shorers' to stick with it to reap long term benefits, like your predecessors did 200 some odd quarters ago when they went the other way.
*nod* I think a major element was they discovered the availability they could take for granted in China all of a sudden became supply chain issues when trying to build the same device in TX.
This is what happens when you ship all your manufacturing overseas for 40 years and suddenly expect manufacturing to ramp up overnight after 40 years of neglect.
I'm pretty sure the screw factory is fully automated C&C... Otherwise you can't produce tens of thousands of screws a day. Even with Chinese work efficiency.
This is bullshit and you know that. It's about SUPPLY CHAIN. Apple knows this. In fact supply chain issues have been the bane of Apple's exist for that past 40 fucking years! Apple knows about it. What Apple did not do was ensure that they had sufficient supply chain available here, which they could have easily done.
This was Apple's fault. It's a known issue that is easily solvable.
Believe it or not, labor costs are rarely the biggest factor.
The issue is with a global supply chain is there are some things that some countries can just do better then what others can for a wide range of reasons.
Now China has an infrastructure that is better designed at making screws then there is at the US. Getting the right form of metal, to the places that can manufacture them, who have enough customers to make such verity profitable to mass produce. So this screw is made for US based Apple, and also Korea based Samsung, and LG...
For a company to manufacture such screws in America, they will need to find a place where there is a workforce ready to do such work, setup machinery and get a customer base for their products. American Manufacturing is good at making Big Things, Small things Asia seems to be better equip for.
As we moved away from Industrial Economy to Technology. The demand for small item manufacturing came into play.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
While a half dozen people have already pointed out the Mac Pro is not a laptop, no one mentioned there are still reasons to buy a $3k laptop. Laptops which act more like mobile workstations than a laptop often have very powerful processors, large high resolution screens, lots of RAM, large SSD hard drives, powerful video cards, and large batteries. I use a similar machine at work (closer to $2k because I don't need a good video card), and while my company could save $500 or more by getting me a desktop having a mobile work computer provides a lot of freedom. I can bring my computer to meetings, work from home (compliance requires I use a work machine at home), and work while on work trips.
When you have employees costing the company $100k-$200k per year, a 1% productivity enhancement from a better machine can pay for a $1k more expensive laptop in under a year.
Just because most people can do their jobs on 13" ultra slim laptops, doesn't mean everyone can.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Believe it or not, labor costs are rarely the biggest factor.
It always surprises me how many people have a hard time grasping this simple fact. It is especially true when we are talking about something like a screw that is produced in batches that reach - at least - into the range of 100s of pieces per hour. Nobody is spending a significant amount of time per unit on this; not in design, not in manufacturing, not in QC. It is all automated. Often these end up being produced overseas not because the cost savings is significant but because the buyers didn't bother looking for a supplier in this country and potential manufacturers in this country didn't know there was a demand for this particular component. In the case of this particular screw, regulations are not a huge impact either (in comparison to say screws for medical, military, or space applications).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Your company is doing it wrong then. It doesn't make sense to purchase a depreciating asset. That's why many organizations and especially larger ones lease their laptops placing the cost of the lease in OpEx instead of CapEx. You have to replace equipment every so often, a lease will provide you with new laptops every 3 to 5 years depending on your terms. This ensures you always have up to date hardware and software and keeps costs predictable.
A MBP is always overpriced crap unless you are only talking 2 or 3 in your organization. If you have quantity at all VDI quickly wins and is vastly more secure and again, more predictable. Same goes for coders that think they need mobile laptops when in reality they can either share an RDS session host or have their own VMs meaning they have the same processing power from their tablet as well as their laptop. It also means a dropped laptop never results in data loss.
and it turned out that US industry cannot even handle large volume screw production.
The problem is not large volume screw production... its large volume custom screw production with very short notice given. Don't expect to go to a factory with a custom product design and expect to have a huge volume of them manufactured for reasonable cost without any lead time.
It takes setup time and money to build out a certain amount of production capacity.
If you want to compete in the modern manufacturing business you have to get used to the idea of ramping up production at very short notices because the Chinese did that a long time ago. The MAGA crowd pisses and moans about jobs being 'un-patriotically outsourced' but it's about more than that. The Chinese simply kicked the US's as at this sort of thing decades ago and apparently they are still doing it. If you can't go from a CAD drawing to spitting out custom screws or whatever other component the customer wants in a matter of days using robotic lathes, presses, milling machines etc... and do it at high volumes you might as well not bother competing, this is not a game for slow movers.
Yep. Manufacturing takes an ecosystem, it's almost impossible to do everything in house. Hell, Ford sub'd parts for the Model T. I have a friend who used to own several businesses, including a machine shop. As his clients moved their manufacturing overseas, his machining business dried up and he eventually had to shut it down.
Revitalizing a manufacturing sector isn't trivial, one company, even Apple, can't do it overnight.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Same goes for coders that think they need mobile laptops when in reality they can either share an RDS session host or have their own VMs
Completely missing the OP's point. Back when my last company hired developers, we paid them between $500-1000 each and every day that they worked. If spending an extra $1000 on a laptop, or a really good monitor, got us an extra 10 minutes of work a day, it more than paid for itself. Hiring a replacement employee costs tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity alone - if an extra $1000 on a laptop keeps them around for a few more months because you've created a nicer work environment it pays for itself again.
Being penny-wise and pound-foolish on the main interface between a developer and the company is common, but that doesn't make it sensible.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
My laptop is a Lenovo running Windows, and it is over $2k. Macbooks are pretty expensive, but they also use top quality parts throughout. The same goes for other flagship machines such as Surface Pro/Book laptops and the Thinkpad P52 (what I have). I am having trouble finding configurations for a 17" 4k Dell with H series processors and all the other bells and whistles, but I bet it would be over $2k as well.
The Mac tax on laptops is not that high. Comparable Windows laptops are almost as much, as long as you are really looking at comparable machines. I still built my own desktop though since you can easily save $1-2k on a top of the line build. I can't build my own laptop though.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I don't know that the employees of the various foxconn factories are required to live on site
They are not. Some factories still have dormitories, but most workers don't live in them, and those that do usually transition to outside housing when they can afford to.
many of those factories are in the middle of bumfuck nowhere
Foxconn's biggest factories are in Shenzhen, an enormous metropolis of 20 million people and one of the fastest growing cities in the world.
You're ignorant comments at the end hid an insightful post in the beginning.
For decades our economy (and environment) benefited from moving entire sectors of the manufacturing industry overseas. The USA has remained a manufacturing giant overall (in 2005 China was 20% of global manufacturing while USA was 18%) but this article illustrates the USA lost key capabilities in many sectors of manufacturing. This is not necessarily a bad thing since we gain significantly from our partnership with developing countries, but it is certainly a concern we should address.
About 10 years ago, as the economy was recovering from the financial crisis, manufacturing jobs starting "reshoring" back to the US. We went from 11.4 million manufacturing jobs in 2010 to 12.4 million jobs in 2016, and is now at about 12.8 million. The trend line for the past 8 years is pretty constant except for a bad year in 2016.
Unfortunately now we have a President who cares more about his talking points than actual progress. Creating artificial reasons to reshore manufacturing (like the trade war) instead of real market-based reasons only damages our economy overall while other developed economies take advantage of our foolishness. Being economically inefficient on purpose is not a great strategy.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
China logistic is far better then USA because all the factories are already there. This is a well known issue. USA factories can't afford to keep mfg capabilities on reserve, ie not producing stuff, so things you orders have a much longer delivery time since they have to be scheduled. It's also not easy for a us factory to ramp up or down their labor force as needed which also as to the issues. In comparison, in China, all the materials are there already and there are so many factories that is fairly easily to get orders out quickly. You could argue that they could order parts from China which many do in advance and assemble in the us but that's us assembled, not made. Most companies don't bother since there not enough advantage.
Apple wasn't marketing these Macs as "Made in America" any way. They were just labeling them as "Assembled in America" so ordering the screws from China and screwing them into cases in Texas wouldn't have affected the labeling at all.
This is incorrect. I've ordered 500 boards from them in a single run before. The shipping costs more because its too heavy for e-packet delivery, but I wanted it via DHL for faster service anyway.
I've yet to find a US based fab shop that can ship an unmasked single layer board for the price of a nice board from JLC.
That's not the only gap. When I'm working on a piece of kit at 2:00 a.m. I don't want to have to call for a quote, email a gerber file, and wait for a salesperson. This is 2019. Online quoting and ordering should be a thing.
Except that the American manufacturing sector is doing just fine, better than it ever was. See https://www.forbes.com/sites/t... . But the nature of manufacturing has changed over the years and involves fewer jobs before. And the things that are manufactured tend to not be consumer goods but big ticket items. For example agricultural equipment is still made in the US and exported all over the world. China imports this equipment. There are cottage industries in the US making all sorts of goods (with a lot of Chinese components). All told, American industry is quite healthy despite what some folk say loudly.
As was said earlier, labor is not really a part of the equation when it comes to overseas outsourcing. It's the supply chain that draws companies to China. For example this company making pinball machines in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Attempts to start a trade war with china do nothing to help American industry. In fact it hurts it by cutting off the supply chain we need to make cool things here at home.