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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.
The article never showed the actual screw, I was hoping I'd see a screw...
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?
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.
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.
Try screws that look like a Star of David. Standard Torx, less prone to stripping than (+) or (-) screws, yet a set of bits can be bought cheaply. i.e. not "tamperproof" shit.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
China may have been late to the party taking steps to ban child labour; but in truth, although some companies may still use child labour it is illegal in China and highly punishable. There are other countries that are far worse offenders than China.
You can blame China for a lot of things they do wrong; but they do punish people for using child labour... now.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
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
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
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.
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.
"C&C"
Oh like a music factory?
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.
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!
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.