Slashdot Mirror
iMac Factory Burns
BobRainGod wrote
in to tell us that a fire has apparently wasted Apple's
Mexican production plant, and stunted iMac production.
No this doesn't have anything to do with the APSL.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
If the rumors are to be believed, the current iMac is to be discontinued soon with a new model (code named "8-ball") to replace it.
2^5
I think the fact that they get paid a hell of a lot less for doing the same work as their US/EU counterparts has nothing to do with their "rights" to anything. I'm not arguing for their rights, I'm just arguing about our complicity in their "less than human" status. They, in practice, don't have a right to pursue a quality of life on the scale of people in El Norte. And if they tried, via collective bargaining or petitioning their political leaders, they'd be slapped down faster than a CPU cycle.
Slavery is not the same as cheap labor. Slavery is forced employment. People who work for cheap wages do so because they have no other employment alternative, usually because they either don't have the skills, or they live under the heavy hand of an oppressive gov't (the latter often contributing to the former).
Of course, in this case the "oppressive gov't" (i.e. de Mexico) has a hand in making LG an attractive proposition to Apple, by offering policies (or, rather, non-policies) that would be the envy of those who find the US government "oppressive". Your defense essentially just blames the victim. The people at the LG plant have skills, the very same ones utilized at the plants in Cork and Sacramento. Yet they're paid a small fraction of the wage. They're hemmed in as surely as any old-style slave, though they won't be hunted down or shot for leaving -- they would only receive punishment if they tried to assert themselves on the "plantation".
And there's no quick fix (e.g., minimum wage) to the problem.
I'm not asking for a quick fix. I'm just asking for the same "fix" that you or I would get.
Basically, we're all getting a free lunch out of this. But we pay in other ways. Blow it off if you want to. I don't want, henceforth, to see your name attached to whining about "gov't this" and "gov't that" when the problem at hand can probably be traced to the guy staring at you in the mirror. Can we also safely assume your defense of the rights of Mexican workers to come to the US by any means necessary in order to seek an "employment alternative"? If manufacturing capital is free to roam across borders in search of a free lunch, why shouldn't its victims be able to freely cross borders in search of a decent wage? Shall we petition the INS to bring down the fences and call off the dogs, then?
It's amazing that this "Christian nation" that puts "In God We Trust" on its currency and inserts "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and has a chaplain begin each Senate session would conveniently ignore Matthew 7:12 just to make or save a couple of bucks.
--
--
=8^
This means Apple might not do the heavy laying-off it had planned to do at its Cork facility. Since layoffs suck in general, that would rule. :)
... they're doing it, but it'll take time.)
To those scum who would consider this disaster a good thing --- don't forget that Apple, like any other company, carries insurance. This is only a blip in the upward-curving MacOS trend.
(We could really do far worse than to have MacOS X dominate the user desktop and Linux the server. KDE and Gnome have a lot of catching up to do
I think what irks most people so much about Apple is the arrogance of the established user base.
Compare the relative level of arrogance of the Mac user base with the Linux user base. Oops!
(Of course most Mac users would say "I like my Mac because it just works and I don't have to spend all day munging plug n play or reading technical documentation.", where as most Linux users would say "I like my Linux box because it has a distributed display protocol system and when that locks up I can telnet in from another computer to a fully programmable command environment in order to restart the display system without affecting my uptime statistics.")
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
What is with all the anti-Apple sentiment?
They are as much a legitimate competitor, innovator, and supplier of PCs as Intel, Alpha, IBM, M$, etc., though I guess enemies of each firm would pop out if a disaster struck any of them...
It's not as if Apple has some overwhelming market share, and is pushing profit-oriented market decisions on us, or is taking advantage of its market share to push into other markets.
Perhaps people are upset that Apple doesn't exactly target the geeky crowd... or that Apple is too trendy, or something. Whatever happened to rooting for the underdog and being anti-establishment? As pompous or arrogant as Apple is sometimes, they really are in the position of underdog... and they do have a good chance to fight their way back into greater relevance.
It's not even as if Apple isn't useful or hasn't innovated in the market. If I am not mistaken, they still are unprecedented for the level of support they offer for desktop publishing, what with hardware level color pre-press technology, software and OS level support for color calibration among monitors, computers, printers, scanners, etc., even as PCs are just catching up. Likewise they introduced the market to high performance subsystems with SCSI, compared to the PC's IDE/EIDE, or high color graphics vs 256 color, and simple peripheral hookup, though today a PC has access to all of them, and the PC OS of the averaged desktop, Win9x, has effectively caught up and surpassed the Mac OS. Though it was saddled with the Win3x series for the longest time.
Perhaps I'm biased too, because Apple comes from my hometown, but they are still pushing innovation, at the risk of failure. See the Newton, a few years back? Its a shame they halted development on it. Or FireWire, today, to replace/supplement any host of slower more expensive connections? Or, and this is a big gamble, a stable, Unix based, consumer grade, competative OS?
Ah well, c'est la vie, or something like that.
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Although I think the Imac is a pretty sucky piece of machinery, I hope this doesn't spell the end of it - compeition is always good, and the Imac certainly made computers look cool. Besides, even if I hated the Imac, this isn't how I would want it to die - I'd rather see it die by loss of market rather than some fire.
:-)
BTW - Bill Gates wasn't seen in the area with a can of gas, was he?