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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.
have little teensy hands, being children. That's the secret sauce. That, along with paying them dirt wages and forcing them into shoddy dorms. #Chinapitalism.
The article never showed the actual screw, I was hoping I'd see a screw...
You don't screw China; China screws you!
Or wait, maybe - In Communist China fastener screws you!
It must have been one of those.
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"
Soooo if you don't have enough screws produced locally, you just order more from China... exactly what Apple did.
That kind of basic part seems like it should be easy enough to predict need of ahead of time, and cheap enough that pre-ordering a rough amount of material you might need would not cost much.
I still don't see any real barrier to assembling some things here, and over time trying to ramp up local production to levels required.
The alternate link states "if the NYT report is accurate, it's unlikely that it will be entirely made in the U.S." - but I see the opposite as being true. It seems like lessons learned will mean that Apple will have been more careful about what they can produce locally vs. what they still need to order from China in order to assemble computers in the U.S. I'm pretty sure that is still a big goal for them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...with 20 employees on 1000 screws a day? Wouldn't that bring in like maybe $10 total daily?
Couldn't they have just ordered the custom screws air-shipped from a Chinese factory or redesigned the thing to use a more ordinary screw? I wonder what's so special about that particular screw. Is it a "tamper proof head" like Apple's 5-point "Torx" security screws to keep mere plebs from opening the hardware?
The Mac Pro is not a laptop.
China didn't start out with multiple vendors to provide the hardware. They grew it over time.
Manufacturing in the US is sustainable and it doesn't have be for slave wages either. It takes automation and time to ramp up suppliers. But, this can't happen over night. Apple knows that. And those screws? They can get the material from China overnight. The connections are still there. Apple just doesn't know them because they lost connection with their own supply chain.
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
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
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Suprised that one one produces pentalobe screws (Apple proprietary)!? A hint try screws that look like: (+) or (-)
It shows something. Apples commitment to non-user serviceable parts maybe.
The answer then is to go to the machine shop and ask what it will take them to increase their output 2x, 3x,4x, etc and supply the loans neccessary to make it happen.
This is how every German, Chinese, Japanese, and we'll pretty much every other foreign business works with its domestic suppliers .
It seems Apple just was looking for an excuse.
Doubly so, GE and several car manufacture have plants in Texas where they have the pull to get whatever screws they need. Those factories just aren't in hip and cool Austin.
Maybe if tech companies could lose their hard one for that boring college town, they'd be able to realize the benefits of domestic manufacturing.
Maybe if the US doesn't have enough capacity, Apple could take some of the billions of dollars in cash, and ... invest it in US factories? I'm pretty sure if they invested that money in the US, then they'd be employing more US workers, who could... afford to buy an Apple device. I know it's cliche to suggest that investing in your home country actually benefits the country and your own company, but it's true.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
This is why you need manufacturing in the USA.
In Michigan, there are thousands of abandoned factories and thousands of unemployed people. Nobody cares about us. We are "flyover country" or the "rust belt".
Once you stop making screws, it only takes a generation until you've forgotten how to make them, and you are hopelessly behind the technology curve when you want to start up again.
If we hadn't exported our technology to China, these factories would be able to make the tiny screws, and the people here would be gainfully employed making the screws.
Not everybody (probably less than 50% of the population) can go to the university and participate in the knowledge economy. They should be making screws and other manufactured goods. They should have a future too.
Exporting our technology and weath and jobs to nations ruled by the corrupt and evil communist party has resulted in: .01 %
massive concentration of wealth for the richest
massive job lost for the bottom 50% of Americans
addiction, incarceration, broken families, and fatherless children
a new world order where we can't even make screws
a gift of military technology to the Chinese
You might not think a tiny screw matters, but when it comes to national defense and the technological arms race, you will soon understand that the free world made a huge mistake by gifting all the fruits of a free and open society to the Chinese communist regime.
So instead of fighting for jobs here, the "super smart people" in the media are telling us that caring about your country and preserving your freedom and wealth and way of life is a bad thing. We are building up the government of china where there is no freedom and incessant nationalism, but any opposition to that is xenophobia.
The Mac Pro will not be a laptop.
They chose a really really bad shop, not using the proper equipment for screws. Any good screw machine (swiss machine) should be able to produce screws like crazy, cycle times should be in seconds. Single pass on the main spindle, parting cut then finish machining on secondary spindle. You should be able to run i'd guess 10 screws a minute unless it was something super crazy on one machine, 24-hours a day would be 14k screws / day on a single machine. Granted this would be done on a $150K+ machine, might be a little tough on a 20-man shop.
This isn't news. It's exactly what Apple and others have been saying. It CAN be fixed but not quickly or without a ton of money and a dramatic increase in end unit pricing. Apple could probably eat it all and still turn a profit with current pricing but capitalism and investors won't allow that. Even if a company is making billions they're expected to make more every single quarter, no matter what.
Yeah, at least show us the culprit.
Let me guess, it's those silver screws. Worthless pieces of crap. Everybody know that once you screw black, you never go back
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.
Austin is not the place for high quantity fabrication. Yes, there are some machine shops in town, but most of Austin is very similar to the South, in that there is much less manufacturing. Houston has more, but mostly to support oil operations.
Every day here more industrial and garage type spaces get turned into crossfit gyms and breweries. (not that I'm particularly against either, just a point blank example of what is thriving here).
Side story. Years ago I spotted an awesome vintage garage for sale/rent. I thought it might have been my chance to have a shop of my own. I talked with the owner. He essentially told me "You don't want to do that". The combination of high taxes and environmental restrictions were essentially why he shut it down in the first place. He flat out told me he was hoping for a trendy tenant. Bar/restaraunt/what have you.
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.
I think the accepted term is "Americans".
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Seriously, who spends $3,000 on a laptop anymore?
Seriously, who spends $300,000 on a car anymore?
... and the Mac Pro is a desktop computer.
Answer: Those who can afford it and to whom it makes sense to do so.
Apple just needs to be less Apple and use standard screws instead.
A 20 man shop producing 1,000 screws a day?
Figure an average hourly wage of $20/hr that's $400 in labor per hour over an 8 hour shift that's $3200 cost in labor per day. At least. I'm skipping land leases, building lease/rent, material cost, etc.
If you're kicking out 1000 screws and it takes you $3200 in labor that's $3.20 cents per screw.
I"m either missing something, the article is full of crap, or this place was kicking out 8" long bolts made out of some really hardened steel with excellent QA looking for defects... and then Apple tried getting them to make tiny tiny screws?
Nope, nothing makes sense.
Mac Pro is not a laptop.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Soooo if you don't have enough screws produced locally, you just order more from China... exactly what Apple did.
When you have to do that often then it makes more sense to just assemble the product in China rather than blowing up your supply chain and incurring huge freight and logistics costs and hassles.
That kind of basic part seems like it should be easy enough to predict need of ahead of time, and cheap enough that pre-ordering a rough amount of material you might need would not cost much.
It's just an example of the sorts of difficulties that happen when you try to manufacture something physically far away from the bulk the supply chain. It's not just one component for one product - the screw is just an understandable example of the bigger problem. There are hundreds to thousands of components in the bill of materials for a typical computer and new products are being made all the time. These components are very often not made in the US because they have a high labor content so US firms aren't cost competitive on those parts. My day job is general manager of a small electronics assembly company. I deal with this every day. I don't think you even begin appreciate the problems with ordering stuff from halfway around the world for manufacturing.
It seems like lessons learned will mean that Apple will have been more careful about what they can produce locally vs. what they still need to order from China in order to assemble computers in the U.S. I'm pretty sure that is still a big goal for them.
Ordering from China isn't nearly as easy as you make it sound. I do this for a living. First off you immediately incur a 6-14 weeks of additional lead time (no they aren't going to ship it by airplane except in emergency - that costs a fortune) because it takes that long to make the product and send it on a boat across the ocean. So you end up stocking a lot of unnecessary inventory to guard against supply chain disruptions. Second, you have to have people working closely with your supplier in the foreign country or else you get serious quality and delivery problems. This adds a lot of cost and hassle. Yes there are plenty of Chinese suppliers who would think nothing of screwing even mighty Apple and Apple knows this. Third, you are grossly underestimating the advantage of having your engineers and supply chain people close to the suppliers. Problems happen and fixing them from half a world away is never easy. Fourth, when you cannot get components locally you incur a lot of currency risk. Fifth, a big part of the reason China produces so much of the world's electronics is because nearly the entire supply chain is nearby. This reduces costs tremendously.
I could keep going. If it were economically practical to assemble electronics in the US (even ignoring the labor price disparity), companies would be doing it. US companies would love to be able to buy their stuff locally but it's just not economic. I've bid on jobs where the target sale price was less than my cost of materials because the supply chain in China for electronics is that advantageous. Getting the supply chain back to this side of the pond will take decades to happen.
It's not about Apple making products in the US. The point is for the supply chain to develop to support it, which in the end creates far more jobs than a single Apple plant that does final assembly.
It doesn't matter WHERE you build stuff, you have unique supply chain logistics to work out.
What do you bet that if Apple has a need for screws in Austin and is willing to pay enough, some bright business person will set up a screw manufacturing business that's closer and sell what Apple needs? That's what supply and demand will do in a free market system. This means that IF you can pull manufacturing back into the USA, you will also pull the parts supply chain back to the USA as a secondary effect.
So I see Apple's trouble with it's supply chain being a good thing. There are a lot of places in the USA where they used to make screws, but now don't as this moved off shore. Now there is a chance of puling those jobs back, shortening the logistics supply chain, lowering transportation costs and making inventory management less difficult. In the mean time, Apple just needs to manage their supply chain a bit better so they don't run out of parts.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You are able to sourcing parts oversees and mark your product as "assembled" in the USA.
Neither link shows a picture of the actual screw. Don't tease me about it, just show us a damned picture to tell us why this screw is so important and hard to produce.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Couldn't they have just ordered the custom screws air-shipped from a Chinese factory or redesigned the thing to use a more ordinary screw?
Possibly but then they are adding cost to the product. You are missing the point. It isn't just ordering some specific screws. The screws are just an example of the broader problem. There are literally thousands of components with the same problems because the supply chain for them in the US has withered and it takes a long time to build it back up even when it is even possible. For high labor content work it's just not economic to make the stuff in a high wage country like the US. I do this for a living so I know. The problem is that the supply chain in China already has all this stuff figured out and engineers can easily get what they need locally over there.
Believe me if it were easy and economic to build this stuff in the US, companies would be doing it. NOBODY who does this stuff for a living (and I do) wants to deal with ordering components from halfway around the world if they don't have to.
I wonder what's so special about that particular screw. Is it a "tamper proof head" like Apple's 5-point "Torx" security screws to keep mere plebs from opening the hardware?
Don't fixate on the screw. The screw is just an example of a problem they will face over and over again. The point is that the supply chain just isn't robust for electronics manufacturing in the US like it is in China. Fixing this problem will not be easy or quick.
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.
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.
I don't know that the employees of the various foxconn factories are required to live on site, but many of those factories are in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, and the people they hire are dirt poor even if they are not. The dorm environment solves those problems.
I'm not sure that can work in the USA, although we have plenty of rural areas that might make a good site, and plenty of poor people that need the work.
they are screwed
This is a non-story. Thank you New York Times for your bullshit reporting.
This is about supply chain. Standard for any business. Apple knows their supply chain requirements. They know what steps need to be taken in order for the supply chain to work in the US. The fact that Apple did not take those steps - and worse that NYT did not grill Apple about - shows a complete management failure on Apple's part.
As mysidia pointed out:
"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."
This is easily fixed and a non-story.
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
So, this tiny screw problems is this:
"20-employee machine shop that Apple’s manufacturing contractor was relying on could produce at most 1,000 screws a day."
That sounds like a sourcing problem if a shop you try to go through can't produce more than 1K screws a day. That shop should have been producing a hundred times that per day. For 20 people that is 50 screws per day. For an eight hour work day that means, per employee, each screw took close to 10 minutes to make. Were they hand crafting these things?! At half the staff, figuring not everyone is actually producing screws, that is still 5 minutes per screw.
I'm left wondering what the chances are the screw was some proprietary "security" design that complicated the tooling and screw production.
I would imagine that screw manufacturers have a lot of existing tooling for common heads at many sizes. My guess is they probably didn't have the time to scale up the tooling required for some proprietary head design, especially if the head itself changed dimensionally.
It would be super ironic if "Apple can't build stuff here" was more or less directly tied to "Apple wants to make it impossible to fix your stuff".
I saw something on Chinese automotive factories. The price of labour is actually pretty high as all the workers have to be highly trained robot technicians. Seems lots of their factories are very modern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Having to order screws from China doesn't mean you can't put an Assembled in the USA emblem on the unit.
Assembled in USA = Imported parts put together in the USA
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Exactly right. I recently used the "saves me 5 minutes a day, at my salary that's over $1000 per year" argument when new management said a new MBP was too expensive even after providing 2 MBPs over the last 12 years... it's pretty simple:
261 work days in 2018
5 minutes per day for those days is 21.75 hours
At $75K / year that's $3921 over 5 years
At $100K / year that's $5228 for 5 years
Plus you don't need the $1500 standard company-issued laptop(s) (most here don't last 5 years), so that's another savings on top.
The better machine saves in opportunity cost as well as productivity.
TFA says a 20 person company can only make 1000 screws per day????
WTF?
Each person can only do 50 screws per day? Six screws per hour? Something is wrong here, they are fileing them by hand under microscopes?
Once set up, a screw machine can make 50 screw per minute !
TFA also says they got rid of their machines for doing that sort of thing because there was no demand and got more precise machines for specialised jobs or whatever. If the business was there Im sure they'd be first in line to get a fucktonofscrew making machine and run it 24/7. I mean 28,000 screws is a lot but how much can you make of that one order?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Big US companies sell out US and then wonder why later nothing can be built in the US? Thanks guys.
It's only because they didn't want to pay you. Now the ones that are left are slowly being swapped out for robot workers.....built in china.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
America Outsourced:
Pollution
Low wages
Poor working conditions
Dangerous working conditions
Pollution
Government Subsidies.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Manufacturing in the US is sustainable and it doesn't have be for slave wages either.
The US manufacturing sector is worth approximately $3 Trillion annually. By itself it would be one of the 6 largest economies in the world. The US is VERY good at manufacturing and anyone who tells you otherwise has no idea what they are talking about. But what people fail to understand is that we don't make labor intensive goods here. (like screws) We make capital intensive goods (like jet engines). There are some goods which there is no economic to make in the US because the labor content is simply too high to be competitive. Custom screws in large volumes likely fall into this category.
Apple knows that. And those screws? They can get the material from China overnight.
No they cannot. Not without blowing up their costs. Buying in the sorts of quantities Apple deals in will add weeks to months to the materials lead time and they are NOT going to put them on a plane unless it is an emergency. Doing that for something like screws could easily cost more in freight than the screws themselves cost. It also means they have to order larger quantities and stock extra inventory to guard against supply chain disruptions. Plus there is the manufacturing lead time to make the component. I buy terminals from Japanese manufacturers all the time (JST, Hirose, etc) and lead times from them are typically 14 weeks for anything but the most common components. A lot of Chinese makers are the same.
Apple just doesn't know them because they lost connection with their own supply chain.
Apple knows their supply chain just fine. That's not the point. The point of manufacturing in the US is precisely so you don't have your supply chain wrapping halfway around the globe. You don't want to have to buy everything from China, ship it halfway around the world and then do final assembly in a high labor cost country. The point is that there are a lot of products that people never think of that just aren't made in the US anymore for very sensible reasons. The US manufacturing sector is robust and thriving but not every product can be economically made here. Conversely there are some products we make here in the US that China would struggle to make because they haven't built up the supply chain for them yet.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A 20 man shop producing 1,000 screws a day?
Figure an average hourly wage of $20/hr that's $400 in labor per hour over an 8 hour shift that's $3200 cost in labor per day. At least. I'm skipping land leases, building lease/rent, material cost, etc.
If you're kicking out 1000 screws and it takes you $3200 in labor that's $3.20 cents per screw.
I"m either missing something, the article is full of crap, or this place was kicking out 8" long bolts made out of some really hardened steel with excellent QA looking for defects... and then Apple tried getting them to make tiny tiny screws?
Nope, nothing makes sense.
My thoughts exactly. A single screw-making line ought to pump out 1,000 screws an hour- or more- and they should have several of these machines! Apple chose a shop that wasn't up to the task, and the shop took a job from apple that they weren't competent to execute.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
The only think this highlights is that Apple hasn't gotten their North America supply chains set up. If they need a certain size screw there's somebody in the western hemisphere willing to make it, they just have to give them the time to ramp up for demand. The fact that we've gutted our own manufacturing industry isn't a sign of the hyperbolic statement that an iPhone never could be build here.
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.
But you could never export them from the USA. Because of ITAR.
Can't let that screw technology fall into our adversaries hands.
Have gnu, will travel.
For want of a screw the computer was lost.
For want of a computer the contract was lost.
For want of a contract the worker was lost.
For want of a worker the taxes was lost.
For want of the taxes the infrastructure was lost.
For want of the infrastructure the country was lost.
And all for the want of a miniature screw.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is correct. Americans commonly have a mental picture of illiterate workers toiling on dirt floors making "cheap Chinese goods". That is not modern Chinese manufacturing and the preconception is one of our big blind spots.
Here's an example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This company makes beautiful multi-color silk-screened multi-layer through-hole plated PCBs for cheaper than I can buy bare copper plate board to etch them myself.
When I want to go to production I can have the boards shipped directly to an assembler there and I get finished machine assembled, soldered, and tested boards for less than the cost of shipping everything here and assembling it myself.
Is this supposed to be a penis joke?
The Mac Pro will not be a laptop.
Virtual mod +1 for making me laugh!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Just wait until Amazon launches their Amazon Gated Community! Coming soon to a state near you!
#DeleteFacebook
No, Because Apple wasn't willing to find a supplier for screws in the US. Seems like they could have gone to China and bought a screw making machine of their own to bring back to the US. If China is the place to buy small screws its likely someone in China is selling a screw making machine.
Well, whatever happened, there's only one thing we know for certain: they got screwed.
#DeleteFacebook
$2.15/hr was the 2003 rate. Chinese workers made $3.20/hr in 2006, and a fair bit more now, plus government-provided social insurances.
Besides that, the Chinese are just better manufacturers due to accumulated factors of production. It's more-efficient for regions to specialize and trade.
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They were screwed.
bickerdyke
As a Canadian, I know all too well that living next door to the U.S.A. makes it harder to find metric screws.
Are Apple using metric or imperial screws in their products? If they're using metric screws it could explain their difficulty finding american screw manufacturers who could make metric screws on short notice and in small batches?
#DeleteFacebook
And how many per day can you produce in that shop?
How long would you take to ramp up production to that level starting from receiveing blueprints?
bickerdyke
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!
Add to this that cheap laptops are often unmaintainable pieces of shit...
I work with a non-profit, and while we don't buy $3k laptops, we will only buy "Business Grade" laptops for our operations. They last longer, are easier to maintain, and are consistent making the job of our IT department that much easier. Basically for each generation of laptop I have in circulation, I have one software build for them (including drivers etc...). Instead of costing $500 per unit, they cost us $1500 or so, but over the 4 or 5 year lifespan of the laptop, it's worth it.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
It's not hopeless, it's just a matter of priorities.
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.
But if those reasons include not caring for labour rights or labor safety, environmental standards or democracy at large (which usually means that your cheap prices may also be based on corruption or other criminal activities) then you might consider that "cheaper" does not equal "better at".
bickerdyke
To my knowledge, that is explicitly forbidden in the US since its misuse was part of what became known as "Truck System".
Google already tried to build housing for their employees to help the housing crisis in the bay area.
bickerdyke
Or because screws will be hard to find, device makers will switch to glue, and will create products of lower quality and less competitive to their foreign counterparts.
If you are not selling to the rest of the world, selling to one customer is very risky, especially Apple. There are many cases of big companies getting seriously burned with making custom components for Apple.
The biggest problem with the economy isn't business needing more money, but more customers. Even if Apple is willing to spend 10x for the screws, chances are not too many companies will jump on the bandwagon to start up such a business, because of the risk, because they woudn't have enough customers.
The only game changer would be if there is some advancement in mass production, that will allow a company to mass produce and item and change its specs on a whim. Currently general use robotics are not good for mass production, they can the custom requirements but not sell 100,000 units in a week after the specs were given. Then the next week produce a different product.
As stated before the US economy is good with Big things, because big things have less tolerances, so we can build far more generic parts, and build a lot of them. We sell these big parts to a lot of customers.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
there are still reasons to buy a $3k laptop
Not really.
I recently had one of our users ask for a Macbook that, with the specs they were requesting, was over $3000.
I then quoted her a Dell Precision Mobile that had better specs, including a more-powerful video card. It also had room for additional hard-drives (or replacement of the existing standard M.2 NVMe drive), removable/expandable RAM, a higher-resolution 4K display ("Retina" isn't 4K) and all the ports she'd need so no dongle-hell. Oh, and she could get an OEM docking station for $140.
She could spend more, get an even MORE powerful CPU, more RAM, more SSD, whatever, and STILL be well below the ridiculous $3K luxury cost of the over-priced and under-powered MacBook.
The demanding apps she uses are available on Windows, and would run better on the more-powerful hardware. The only reason for over-spending +$2K for the MacBook would be a stubborn refusal to learn the radically different process how to move the mouse and click on the Adobe Premiere icon in Windows vs. on a Mac.
I'm hardly a Windows fanboy (I use Linux), but pragmatically the Dells are far superior options. Mac computers are over-priced status-symbol luxury items that have no place in a business or enterprise. They don't play well with corporate networks, they are virtually unserviceable, totally non-upgradeable now, have built-in 2-3 year obsolescence due to the glued-in batteries, and on the whole are a stupid waste of money. It never ceases to amaze me how many mindless Apple zealots will stubbornly defend the abhorrent company who continuously screws them over more and more with each generation, and can't make a quality product without serious manufacturing flaws to save their life (there's the anti-reflective coating issue on the displays, the recent SSD recall on 13" Macbook Pros, the only computer ever to have a systemic HDD cable failure, the GPU failures in pretty much every generation of their products going back years, SMD chips not being properly soldered to the motherboard requiring a rubber shim so the case presses them against the motherboard harder, the failing keyboard that we're getting flooded with, and so on).
Apple already has many, many people working closely with China as far as suppliers of everything goes. They already have a shipping pipeline so I seriously doubt for Apple it's going to take 6-14 weeks to get parts... I'm sure they would of course have some buffer of supplies, but Apple can more than afford to build up a base of supply on hand.
The real surprise to me is that Apple ever ran into this problem to begin with, as one thing they know how to deal with really well is supply chain issues. That's why I don't think it will be much of an issue going forward because the problem they had in the past was an aberration compared to Apple's usually very apt handling of supply chain management.
It's not like everything has to come from China - Apple spend $60 billion last year American suppliers... No reason that cannot grow, as long as Apple is willing to let some component costs raise - which I'm sure they are for a Mac Pro.
I could keep going. If it were economically practical to assemble electronics in the US (even ignoring the labor price disparity), companies would be doing it.
Apple does exactly that with the old Mac Pro, and presumably the new one.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
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.
And for that to happen, these companies, the ones that make the boring parts, like screws, need to have faith that they will actually have customers. This means long term relationships that are built on trust. In the Baby Boom generation of managers, we haven't seen that. What we have seen is a short term version of the shareholder value principle. As a nation, we need to move past this narrow understanding of the role of the corporation and build lasting relationships.
You're saying when the US spends 2 generations decimating its manufacturing industry and offshoring everything, that there isn't agility or capacity in the small amount of on-shore fabrication that's left?
I for one am shocked. SHOCKED. Next up, I'll be shocked to hear that a retired football player who hasn't exercised in 20 years can't run 100 yards in less than 25 seconds.
Apple could order a million of those tiny iPhone screws and it wouldn't take up more than a shelf in space. It could dual source them so it never runs out. One manufacturer in the US and one in China.
This is an easy solvable problem in supply chain management, something that you think Apple would be good at after 40+ years in business. That what happens when you outsource everything. It seems they outsource their business intelligence too. Now their brain-dead management can't figure it out.
Slashdot, where obvious truths are modded down and the poster flamed by a bunch of panty-waste, communist trash. I see it was your turn to get this maltreatment.
Everything he said up until the "fixing all of the destruction Bush and Obama inflicted on America" part was insightful, but then it took a turn for the worst. The post is correctly labeled as a Troll.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
That's why there are so many Chinese people!!!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You're saying the south got screwed?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Second and third source all your components where possible!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
Well, then there's OS that could be considered too?
OSX vs Win10?
And, this was awhile back, I think I saw some tests using Adobe Premier on OSX (iMac Pro) vs Win10 (windows PS equivalent hardware), and I believe they had much faster throughput on the Mac, seems there was some threading limiting factor on the Win machine that wasn't there for the Mac.
This was awhile back, granted....but something that might have to be considered?
I too work mostly with Linux, but for my art needs (photography, PS, Premier, LRand now their substitutes of Affinity Photo, FCPX or Davinci Resolve, and On1 RAW.....I do prefer to do those on my mac, and my OLD MacBook pro still stacks up pretty well, although I am now waiting to see what the new Mac Pro looks like and either get that or a loaded up iMac Pro.
But one does need to research how best the apps work on the hardware/OS combo...as that saved time there matters too if you are a fairly high paid worker.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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
Always finding ways to screw things up: or in this case uhm... failing to find enough screws locally to screw things up adequately?
I didn't see this magical screw so I may be wrong here, but I would bet that I'm right: There is a cheap, common, standard screw which is almost like the one that caused the bottleneck. The design of the MacPro would have been just as good... except that somewhere in my apartment I already have a screwdriver which could have removed the screw. And that kind of thing is what Apple worked so hard to prevent. They needed some crazy pagan symbol in the head of the screw so that only Apple genius-priests could turn it. So if you're wondering why your MacPro cost you $3000, here's a part of the story.
Can you link me to this phone I would ike to buy a few backups...
The corporate environment is very friendly in Texas but the manufacturing environment is lacking, as compared with Michigan. Now Michigan has lost a lot of manufacturing to China but I can only imagine there's still more in MI than TX.
- I think this attitude that everything must be "made in America" is ridiculously outdated. Economies are global now; deal with it. But when a country competes unfairly - which China apparently does, on a regular basis - come down hard on that.
- I don't like the explanation that "Chinese workers will work for little money and extremely long hours". We shouldn't be willing to accept horrible work conditions just because we want our toys and it isn't our children (or adults) who are basically slaves in all but name. If the stuff we want requires that other people suffer, that's a problem that needs to be handled at OUR end.
#DeleteChrome
For how many? There are still low volume shops that do the exact same thing in the USA. Yes it costs more, but if you want 100 the Chinese are unlikely to return your emails.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This company makes beautiful multi-color silk-screened multi-layer through-hole plated PCBs for cheaper than I can buy bare copper plate board to etch them myself.
Of course they can. They already have the machinery in place, and they buy the materials in bulk. They also sell the product in bulk.
YOU have to buy from a distributor in small quantities and make small production runs. Your costs per board are always going to be higher, even when you forget to include your own time and effort.
That is not a quality based on where they are, except for the costs they can avoid by not having US environmental and employment regulations to comply with.
If you're comparing a Thinkpad and a MacBook, yeah, you'll probably get similar list prices. The big difference is a big Apple sale is a couple hundred dollars off, whereas Lenovo does 20% off sales pretty often, and does 30-35% sales every few months. If you buy on sales, the top of the line Thinkpad is going to be $1000 cheaper than the Macbook.
And the Precision configuration that you list can easily cost 3k and more
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.
Much of your criticism is spot on, but how does a Mac not "play well" with corporate networks? They talk the same IP everything else does, they support 802.1x authentication, etc. There's even built-in support for Active Directory authentication and Kerberos, though it could use some work (or just complete replacement with the free Centrify agent).
Seriously, the rest of what you said is hard to argue with, but this particular point isn't true in my experience, and I've been working with Macs on enterprise networks for over 15 years.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Macbooks are pretty expensive, but they also use top quality parts throughout.
Besides the fact that their keyboards had design defects for 2 generations, the same parts always burn out on them over several generations (typically voltage regulators), and they still can't figure out proper thermals with any of their laptops because form over fuction.
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.
So use screws that you can get here ... or invest what you need to to get them made here, you are freakin' Apple, I think you have the money.
Charge your trendoid users a "special screw" fee, if you have to.
I agree with you on everything except the 2-3 year battery life. If you treat it well a battery can easily live a useful life of 7 years. But having said that, because of everything else you mentioned I'm quite sure that my 8 year old MacBook Pro (still on its first battery) will be replaced by a sturdy Lenovo, HP or Dell when it dies. Running Linux of course. Windows is only usable for games.
-- Cheers!
“China is not just cheap. It’s a place where, because it’s an authoritarian government, you can marshal 100,000 people to work all night for you,”
I actually know something about this, and I'm going to call at least a little bit of bs. What? A 20-man machine shop struggling to make 1000 screws per day? That's 50 screws per person, which boils down to 7-8 per hour. Even if you allow for 1 person on the team as a secretary, and 1 person to do QC, it still winds up in that ballpark.
10 minutes per screw. For a precision screw with all-machined features, this means that a crew of 18 machinists were making them manually. By hand, with very little automation.
I don't get it. Just two or three automated cnc machining stations should be able to crank these things at a much higher clip. One cnc lathe to do the basic geometry and the threads followed by a cut-off operation. Then they need to be manually moved into another fixture for the cutting of the head features, again by cnc and in bulk. At the end, bulk operations like plating, annealing or surface finishing, if the specs call for it.
This isn't specialized stuff. This sort of semi-robotic CNC station exists in virtually any mid- or large- sized machining company and there are thousands of them in the US. Two or three days of process development, purchase a lot of the stock material and boom, ready to go. I'd make a fairly large bet that the decision was price-driven and not availability. The same crew of 20 machinists in China cost 1/4 as much. Factor in shipping and the product is probably half the price overall. Don't claim an availability problem unless it's real please. Just say "we went with China cause they're cheaper" and move on. We're capitalists. We get it.
Apple fails to plan the logistics of manufacturing, so calls on their Chinese partners for help to avoid failure.
That's what I get from that story. They've spent so long outsourcing manufacturing, they've forgotten how to do it.
So many jokes possible for this topic, I can't pick one...
Director: "We want to produce these in China but we're getting a bad rep for not sourcing in America."
Manager: "But if we produce these in American then we lose our relationship with the Chinese markets!"
Director: "What can we do so this can happen?"
PR: "Pick an American supplier who can't deliver what we need, make a big public stink about how it failed, then go with the Chinese vendor we wanted all along?"
Director and Manager: "Perfect!"
Yeah, I should have just passed by your original troll comment without giving it a second thought. Nothing valuable will come from further discussion with a person like you. My bad.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
"C&C"
Oh like a music factory?
NAFTA 2 didn't help you any except get a stupid name for it.
All the experts chosen to advise all the politicians get nearly all of them to agree to an unregulated global "free" market that creates all these problems. It's difficult to monitor the planet to figure out to slap on a tariff and how much it should be because in the race to the bottom the winners are due to unsafe, slave labor with illegal manufacturing conditions.
The debate always gets into a fight about how we should have no rules just like every shit hole that undercuts the USA. You LOSE if you kill regulations and taxes because they will always win as long as you do anything better. Shipping costs can be subsidized as China has been doing... (and we aid them by paying them to haul our trash back to China.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
They don't play well with corporate networks, they are virtually unserviceable, totally non-upgradeable now, have built-in 2-3 year obsolescence due to the glued-in batteries, and on the whole are a stupid waste of money.
Writing this on my Macbook Pro which is now 6 1/2 years old, and also works just fine on our corporate network, while running the very latest version of Apple's operating system.
It never ceases to amaze me how many mindless Apple zealots will stubbornly defend the abhorrent company who continuously screws them over more and more with each generation, and can't make a quality product without serious manufacturing flaws to save their life
It never ceases to amaze me how much people will bitch about products that they don't even use.
Yea, or Apple could have just designed it with different screws. Oh, does that impinge on their creative freedom though? Oh well, then I guess the world has to burn.
Did you miss the part where he said "it cost less and is still more powerful than the MacBook"?
Methinks you did.
And this Mac comparison would be true, but he replied to "there are still reasons to buy a $3k laptop" with the words "Not really", then proceeded to give an example configuration that can easily cost exactly that
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Right. And the lessor just eats the depreciation out of the goodness of their heart and doesn't fold it into the monthly payments.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
So much this.
American manufacturing can and should be just as automated as Chinese manufacturing. But for some reason American manufacturers feel obliged to maintain these parasitic, slow, inefficient, error prone, redundant, and worst and most importantly expensive sales monkeys in the middle of a process that practically never benefits from their presence. The number of times that the sales droid knows his own company's products well enough to offer a correction to a possible mistaken order is so slim that it's not worth having them in the way of all the many many times they gum up the works, screw up the order themselves, and cost far far too much. Their sole purpose seems to be to obfuscate prices in some misguided attempt to maximize profits by haggling over every fucking sale. It's borderline dishonest and it's definitely obnoxious.
So you agree that China can charge 25% tax on car imports, but USA charges 5% ?
Yeah such a level playing field.
Wake up, China is screwing USA, their rules are so soviet union, there is no rule of law in their country.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
What tinkering do you have to do with a standard corporate laptop? I spend no time tinkering with mine.
We're manufacturing more than ever. It's just that usually it's higher up the food chain than screws.
That is not the issue here. Cost of the screw (as long as not excessive) was _not_ a factor. Availability was. And all available manufacturers in the US did not have the capability and flexibility. This is a sign of an "old" economy that has not kept up.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Besides that, the Chinese are just better manufacturers due to accumulated factors of production. It's more-efficient for regions to specialize and trade.
For everything that is not too high-tech and novel, most definitely. They invested heavily into that area while (among others) the US did not care. Hence they are now ahead. Wages play a pretty small role in this.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Amazon private prison Warehouse work $0.53/hr
This doesn't make any sense.
Let's see, 20 employees at $20/hr x 8 hour shift = $3200/day Ignore overhead like power, water, lease, etc. $3200/1000 screws = $3.20 per screw.
Were they making them by hand?
Why didn't Apple just order the screws from China and ship them to the US for the factory to use to assemble the computers?
The benefits of keeping jobs in our own country fall disproportionately on our working class. Screw efficiency, we're talking about people's lives here.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Sometimes a $3K laptop is needed. I spend probably 70% of my working time remote - at clients, on business travel, etc. I have a fully-loaded Lenovo P71 (about $3800 new) because it has the horsepower needed to do advanced 3D modeling, PCB layout, FEA simulations, etc. Basically it's a portable workstation - and I use it as such. It has, of course, much more power than any equivalent-priced Macbook - but then I use mine to do real stuff, not just e-mail and docs and such.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
We're number 2 in manufacturing output, with $3.6 trillion in output. That's more than the GDP of all but 4 countries (the US included).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You mean he can't run an SQL server and four simultaneous virtual machines on it?
I bought a cheap laptop this year, too. But I put a bigger drive in it and upped it to 8GB of memory. It's 'unsupported' with that amount of memory in it, but it works great.
Apple needs many, many custom proprietary screws. Because when they need to design something, they let 'er rip and Invent It Here.
Also, you can't make something so un-repairable that it's disposable without changing the screws in the design every few weeks.
Business usually has short term priorities rather then long term plans.
And the governments seem more interested in protecting IP then workers. Just look at the CUSMA trade thing and how quick GM reacted by shutting down non-Mexican factories. at least Canada will be forced to extend copyright for another 20 years and protect the pharmaceutical companies patents more, TPP backdoored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Careful, you're dangerously close to suggesting that other countries might be legitimately better at some things than the States, and that the USA isn't the best country evarrrr in all possible measures.
The wages argument really comes with this ugly inference that the *only* reason other countries can do things is because they are poorer.
Look this up, you would enjoy it. What happens when you lose your manufacturing.
The US used to subsidize the watch making industry to make sure they could build aeroplane instruments in time of war.
The benefits of keeping jobs in our own country fall disproportionately on our working class. Screw efficiency, we're talking about people's lives here.
It won't be the working class who benefits from most of the manufacturing jobs which are reshored back to the USA. It will be the robotics engineers, marketing staff, and sales departments. This is the biggest problem in this debate, IMHO - we don't even know what we are debating about. Increasing manufacturing in the USA is no longer about bringing back $60k/yr jobs with pensions for people with no college degrees.
Jobs for the working class are now in sectors like customer service and retail. Since these do not pay nearly as much, we need to find ways to help them live a good life regardless of their economic value to society. I personally am a proponent of a universal basic income, but there are plenty of options. They all likely require increased progressive taxation, however, and the very politicians claiming to focus on the working class are the ones fighting against the programs which would actually help them.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Weâ(TM)re screwed.
Agreed on the value of a laptop that lets you accomplish the work that you need to do on a mobile basis. I regularly get work done in weekly status meetings that go over their allotted time, just because I bring my laptop into the room. I donâ(TM)t agree on it being a MacBook. As someone who uses a 2015 MacBook Pro as a daily driver, I can say that my windows PC at home is much more stable. I donâ(TM)t have to restart it just to get apps to run properly or stop my mouse from treating left clicks as tight clicks. Stability left the OS long ago, and I canâ(TM)t help but feel guilty for asking my employer to spend $2500 on a machine that actually makes me less productive. If Iâ(TM)m allowed another laptop, Iâ(TM)ll definitely be asking for an MSI or Dell. The time is past where my apps were Mac-only. Sincerely, disgruntled Apple user
And unlike CNC, where the N stands for Numerical, and not the 'n' contraction of &
Well of course being poorer is only one reason. The other reasons are things like lower business taxes, fewer regulatory hurdles, and nonexistent environmental regulations. All of that makes it much cheaper to manufacture stuff in dirt poor nations.
Except America has shown if anything they couldn't give a crap about infrastructure.
It costs less than $2,000 to import a 40-foot shipping container.
There is a lot more to the cost equation than just the cost of the container. If it were just the cost of a container it would be a no brainer but there is WAY more to it than that. Total landed costs for a typical product can easily make a $100 product cost $130-170 by the time it reaches its destination. I'm a cost accountant and I've worked doing global sourcing for a living out of Mexico, China, and India.
When I ran the math in 2015, it was $1,300, making the shipping cost of a pair of men's cotton trousers from China to the dock at the US six cents.
It's a LOT more than $0.06. Here is a very incomplete list of costs off the top of my head that will be incurred in getting the product from China to its destination in the US. Not all of these apply to all products but the point is that there is far more to it than just the cost of the container on the boat.
1) Packaging and dunnage
2) Inventory holding costs
3) Cartage costs to/from ports
4) Tariffs/duties/taxes
5) Order management costs
6) Lead time costs (must order products months in advance which ties up resources)
7) Capital opportunity costs
8) Exchange rate costs
9) Transaction/accounting costs
10) Insurance
11) Engineering oversight
You know how we make clothes in China?
How? Yes. Do you know why? Because why is the more interesting question. Those products are made in China instead of the US because making clothing is a labor intensive process which means that labor costs are paramount. Labor costs in China and other even lower labor cost countries are SO much less that it is cheaper to make it there in spite of the overhead and logistics hassles. Yes some of the materials come from the US (also elsewhere) but the actual weaving and sewing that goes into making large volumes of clothing is only cost effective in very low labor cost countries.
Apple already has many, many people working closely with China as far as suppliers of everything goes. They already have a shipping pipeline so I seriously doubt for Apple it's going to take 6-14 weeks to get parts... I'm sure they would of course have some buffer of supplies, but Apple can more than afford to build up a base of supply on hand.
I'm not just pulling that figure out of my ass. Yes it REALLY does take that sort of lead time after receipt of order in a lot of cases. Even for Apple. Yes Apple can do some things to expedite but ultimately it takes time (typically 4-8 weeks) to make product for a spot buy and the product is going to get put on a boat and it takes 3-5 weeks for a boat to get from China to the US minimum. No they aren't going to put the parts on a plane unless they absolutely have to because that costs FAR more per part. Products don't get made instantly so it takes another few weeks to actually make the product even if they are able to start immediately upon receipt of the order (rare). Even if Apple places a blanket order, that just let's the company plan production but it still takes time to make it and it still takes time to ship it.
Let me give you an example from my company. We build a wire harness that has plastic connectors on each end. The connector parts are made in China and then shipped to Mexico for final assembly. Then they are shipped to a US distributor and then on to us. We order them 50,000 pieces at a time under a General Motors pricing contract. The company making them is a huge multinational, the distributor is a huge company, and the ultimate customer is GM so we're not talking about dealing with sweatshops here. Lead time is a non-negotiable 14 weeks after receipt of order for what really is a rather simple and standard part. Even GM could not accelerate this.
We get the connectors for about $0.35 each - if you were to buy one yourself through distribution (think Digikey or Mouser) it would cost you over $2.00 each. And if they were out of stock it would take them... 14 weeks to get more. Why? Because the company that makes them has a finite capacity to make parts so it takes them 8 weeks to work through their backlog of orders and then another 4-6 weeks to get the product to us. This is TOTALLY normal in manufacturing.
It's not like everything has to come from China - Apple spend $60 billion last year American suppliers... No reason that cannot grow, as long as Apple is willing to let some component costs raise - which I'm sure they are for a Mac Pro.
No Apple is not going to be willing to budge much on component costs without very good reason. Apple has margins to protect to keep their stock price high. Big companies don't get that way by being lazy with component costs. That link you provided is just a lazy regurgitation of an Apple press release and is VERY misleading. That is Apple taking credit for any US based company they have a supplier relationship with and counting every job at that company in Apple's favor, whether or not the actual products are made in the US. You might consider getting your data from an independent source with something resembling objective analysis.
Apple does exactly that with the old Mac Pro, and presumably the new one.
That's just the exception that proves the rule. One high margin, low volume product made in the US (that Apple hasn't updated in years) does not a trend make. Apple is doing that more for the press value than because it makes economic sense. When they start assembling iPhones or MacBooks in the US then you might have a point. It's not just Apple either. Pretty much nobody does high volume assembly work of commodity products in the US unless it is something that can be heavily automated with a multi-year production run.
They're living in the rural areas because they want their freedom. They don't want dorm condition with rules about things like tobacco and guns.
A few might genuinely want that. Most, including all of my relatives, live there because they can't afford to live anywhere else, and can't get the kinds of jobs that are available in cities that offer an equivalent quality of life. A crappy job in a small town goes a lot further than a crappy job in the city.
It's not just that.
Think about a GM automotive factory. They make 13 types of Chevrolets, 9 models of Buick, 6 models of Cadillac, 11 models of GMC, and 4 models of Holden.
Now imagine GM has these factories in Canada, Mexico, China, Australia, Sweden, and France.
Now: these factories suddenly start making the similar models on their lines, with parallel lines for the variations on each platform. They may specialize in one or two engines. They ship for final assembly to one or two specialized factories.
You start with factories that keep stopping lines and retooling to make inventory for the different models they're producing. You end up with factories that instead produce the models they can run continuously, and ship parts and finished cars around in trade.
The second model is more-efficient: fewer stoppages and a simplified operating platform means the factories can churn out more product in the same time and with the same labor.
It's not just that you built a manufacturing base and someone else didn't; it's that you specialized and increased efficiency in what each of you manufacture, instead of trying to produce everything in the world. This is also why standardized parts are so important: a Chinese screw factory can make billions of a certain type of screw in a continuous run by dedicating a number of its lines to that tooling based on the demand, and reallocating capacity between lines as demand shifts. Because demand is so god damned high, they aren't running small batches and then retooling; they're pumping out screws like crazy. The computer manufacturers all over the world use those screws because they're cheap and highly-available, which is a result of this standardization.
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Not sure what a tirade about NAFTA has to do with my statement. I didn't say it is better that the screws come from China or that the US couldn't make the screws. All I was stating is that if something is sold as "Assembled in America" that buying parts from someplace other than America wouldn't change the labeling.
Professional mechanics often spend that much on a tool box. Not the contents, the box. When you need what they do, you buy Lista instead of Harbor Freight. $30K for quality tools is not high end at all.
Time is money and efficiency reduces wasted time. The delta between a Walmart shitbox and a mobile workstation is a trifle if you need what that workstation offers.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Only one (1) CNC machining center is required to produce such a relatively small volume of parts.
American made Haas are located in California and will happily supply competitively priced CNC machining centers capable of far more complex work. Haas are the largest machine tool builder in the western world.
Apple either didn't do due diligence or the machine shop promised what it could not deliver.
https://www.haascnc.com/index....
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You mean crappy hex bolts that are easy enough to take out with a regular driver?
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
My recollection is that I spent about $80 to get it from Schenzen to Tennessee in under 24 hours. That was faster than I could fly there, pick them up, and fly back home.
No one ever believed that every part would be manufactured in america, made from American metal smelted with American oil. Ordering a screw from China does not effect that label.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
This is a common fallacy. Yes, it is entirely possible to find similar deals in the Windows realm, Windows is open and diverse. You can find even worse price gouging in the windows realm if you are dead set on getting screwed. Similarly, if I wanted I could spend $100K on a windows desktop, and if I tried hard enough I am sure I could even get it to under perform a Mac at 10x the cost.
This does not change the fact that the Mac tax is very high. The Apple brand is one of the most prestigious brands in existence, you cannot seriously believe that Apple just gives away their products for peanuts out of the goodness of their hearts.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
... feel obliged to maintain these parasitic, slow, inefficient, error prone, redundant, and worst and most importantly expensive sales monkeys in the middle of a process that practically never benefits from their presence. The number of times that the sales droid knows his own company's products well enough to offer a correction to a possible mistaken order is so slim that it's not worth having them in the way of all the many many times they gum up the works, screw up the order themselves, and cost far far too much. Their sole purpose seems to be to obfuscate prices in some misguided attempt to maximize profits by haggling over every fucking sale. It's borderline dishonest and it's definitely obnoxious.
Reminds me of buying a car.