In my experience, and my kids', most teachers avoid raising political issues because it's a distraction from the subject being taught. There are some subjects where facts being taught may make some students uncomfortable. For example, I recall in one 'history of religion' course several students were quite irate when the class covered creation myths, showing how elements from the earliest cultures were retained or changed in later cultures' creation myths - they "knew" that the bible was true, so the idea that previous cultures had some of the same myths hundreds or thousands of years earlier, from which the Bible stories borrowed, was quite upsetting to them. But since we know that there were Babylonians, Greeks, etc., and those people recorded their myths on artifacts that pre-date the Bible (Torah...) the class certainly should have covered the material. If you've been taught incorrect things, learning the truth is _good_.
80% of the US population is Christian, so the majority of people who do anything in the US are Christians. Specific to abortion, most of them are members of churches that don't believe that abortion is murder - that's mainly Catholics and some flavors of fundamentalists. Most churches teach that abortions are unfortunate and to be avoided, but are a personal decision that should take many factors into account. And that's certainly what most Christians, and most Americans, believe.
Yes, on compliance training you have to pass a test demonstrating that you learned (some of) what you were taught. Based on your representations, I think you may have been so opposed to the idea of sensitivity training that you heard things that they didn't say. For example "the accused don't have rights" doesn't make any sense. And there are estimates of the percentage of sexual assault of college students as high as 40%, though the estimates vary wildly because sexual assault is under-reported in the US, both by the victims (who don't want to deal with making the issue public) and by the college (who generally avoid reporting anything that makes the college look bad).
They kill off things that aren't strategic. They just killed off their monitor business, presumably because they're better off having lots of strong third-party monitor support than selling Apple-branded monitors. They certainly could have kept selling Apple-branded monitors, and it's certainly profitable, but perhaps not strategic.
First, that's not how bitmapped printers generally work on the Mac - the computer renders everything, and the printer just has to receive, buffer and put the bits onto paper. The challenge Apple had was that while they were making a fortune selling printers (80% attach rate, over $1B/year revenue!) they felt that the Mac was locked into a "ghetto" of a limited number of compatible printers, which they felt limited Mac sales. So they gave up the $1B a year printer business, and in return got HP, etc., to add Mac support, so now Mac's could print with a huge range of printers, and Mac sales went up ($4B in revenue the next year). They didn't have to get out of the printer business - it was huge, growing, and highly proftable. But they felt it held the Mac computer business back, and made the strategic choice to maximize computer sales.
I didn't say that Apple's digital camera was the first, I said it was the first consumer-friendly camera than you could just take pictures, plug it into your computer, and the photo's automatically copied into your photo library. I used early digital cameras, and they were beasts - weird file formats, weird cables, weird software,... it could all be made to work (and I had a digital camera back strapped to an SLR back in the day) but it was a horrible user experience. The QuickTake was the first consumer digital camera with a good user experience. That showed camera companies what to do, and when enough of them copied the QuickTake, Apple killed the QuickTake and sold the Kodak, Canon, etc., cameras, because their goal wasn't to sell QuickTake cameras, it was to position the Mac as the creative platform for photographers. Which was a brilliant strategy that Apple sold a ton of computers with.
Yes, ethernet predated AppleTalk. But when AppleTalk came out, ethernet interfaces cost hundreds of dollars per device, and thick coax cabling used by Ethernet was very expensive and very fragile (bend with less than a foot radius, and you get to replace your $100 cable), and very hard to get working (with ringing, etc.). In contrast, AppleTalk was very easy, the interface was built into Apple computers and networked printers, and the cabling was cheap and easy to set up. When, after several generations, ethernet got as cheap and easy as AppleTalk, with cat-5 replacing coax, etc., Apple killed off their proprietary networking and adopted ethernet.
Apple's routers aren't targeted to network admins who want to configure every tweaky detail (and I know, I am one). Apple's routers are targeted to consumers who want to plug stuff in and have it work painlessly, which, despite your disdain, their app does a great job of. Normal people HATE linksys routers, and the like - it's by a wide margin the single biggest pain point in getting consumers onto the internet. They don't want to know about DNS and BGP, etc., they just want their stuff to work and be reasonably secure. And the latest generation routers are getting more and more consumer friendly, with (for example) mobile and web apps, to configure and control the router in ways that make sense for consumers who don't want to be network engineers. So while you and I like "real routers" don't forget that consumers really, really hate dealing with that complexity.
I'm surprised that you don't see the relationship between ADB and USB. Apple invented ADB as a bus for connecting devices like keyboards and mice, back when PCs were using serial ports (i.e. not a bus). This gave Mac's a cheap and easy way to plug in multiple human interface devices (keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc.). And when Apple and Intel developed and launched USB, Apple killed off ADB and switched Mac's ports to USB. The logic was similar to with printers - they killed off a proprietary port that was making them money selling peripherals, replacing it with an industry standard that gave Mac computers access to a wider range of peripherals.
As a plus, USB was also fast enough to be used for external hard drives, so Apple killed off SCSI to simplify Mac port confusion and improve the user experience.
Sure, Apple used components from Kodak and Fuji parts, but Apple integrated the end-to-end system. It was the first camera where you plugged it into your computer and your photo's automatically flowed to your photo library. They did it to jump start the consumer digital camera market, because they were focused on the consumer creative market. When the rest of the camera companies caught up, Apple didn't need to make the camera any more, and killed it, because any camera worked well with a Mac, so Apple didn't have to make cameras, they could focus on the part they care about, which is the computer.
Apple sold tons of printers, not just PostScript but also dot matrix (which outsold Poscript). When they killed off their printer business, they had an 80% attach rate, meaning that when anyone bought a Mac, 80% of the time they bought an Apple printer, which was a $1B business which was highly, highly profitable. I had a good friend in that division at the time. They got all the major PC printer companies to add Mac support in the box, so Mac owners could choose from any PC printer, and Apple got them to add the Mac support by killing their own printer line. This was ultimately better for Apple - they list a $1B revenue stream, but they grew the Mac business by working it into the mainstream.
Apple's killed off peripheral businesses in order to strengthen their core businesses before.
For example, Apple used to have a $1B/year printer business, which was highly profitable. They killed it, because doing so for them to get all the major printer companies to ship their standard printers with support for both PC and Mac, which ultimately grew Mac sales.
They used to sell a digital camera, the first consumer digital camera that was easy to use with a computer. When the digital camera industry developed some decent standards and became easy for consumers to use, Apple killed their digital camera, and sold Canon, Nikon, etc.
Same for AppleTalk -> EtherNet, ADB -> USB.
Apple introduced their routers when routers were extremely consumer hostile with horrible software, and Apple's routers are well made and very easy to set up and use, making it easy for Mac owners to get online. Now, routers have gotten a lot better, to the point where Apple doesn't need to invest R&D in making them usable.
Nobody said that automation would happen magically with no effort. So if you're offended by the claim that you imagined, you can stop. Rather obviously, it's a huge investment of effort/money to automate any complex process well, and that's invested because it makes the ongoing economics much better.
And while construction is harder to automate, there are companies automating construction. It's a complex collection of tasks to automate, and construction by definition is done in the field which complicates things, so it's not as far along as factory automation. But there are companies automating production of home components, for assembly on site, which does in fact make home construction much more efficient (and higher quality). And there are companies doing POCs with huge-scale 3D printing (using concrete) and pick-and-place (using bricks) to automate construction.
I'm not sure why you think that construction being fairly manual right now means that millions of other jobs aren't being automated out of existance. Or that construction jobs won't be increasingly automated.
Read what I wrote. I wasn't talking about line workers, I was talking about the line managers - you need experienced line managers in order to train and manage the line workers. The US trains a few hundred of those a year, and Apple needed thousands.
Right. The US still does small-scale manufacturing. It's the large scale stuff (e.g. tens of millions of units a year) that the US isn't capable of. Note that Apple makes their small volume products in the US (e.g. the Mac Pro), just not the cell phones and laptops that they sell millions of.
Nope. Apple was willing to pay above-average US wages. The problem was that the people they needed to hire, experienced manufacturing engineers, didn't physically exist in the US in sufficient numbers to staff a large scale consumer electronics manufacturing plant. They're all in China now, because that's where manufacturing is done.
No, they were willing to pay above-average US wages. There are very few experienced manufacturing engineers in the US, and schools train very few, so they don't exist. Apple would have had to spend years talking US schools into training people for jobs, then waiting years for those people to be trained, then hired them.
In contrast, FoxConn staffed the iPhone manufacturing line with experienced staff in weeks.
This is because US manufacturing destroyed itself. We no longer have that capability, because those companies all wiped out their US capacity and trained China to do their jobs, in order to get hire investor ROI. At least, until the Chinese companies wipe out the US companies. Look for example at how IBM trained Lenovo to make their laptops, then sold the whole business to Lenovo. That made IBM investors money, but wiped out an huge, successful US business. That is, it was bad for EVERYONE other than IBM's investors...
For most of history, anyone who was able and willing could find a job, because the vast majority of jobs could be done by nearly anyone with perhaps a few weeks' training. There are also skilled jobs, like doctors and engineers, based on deep training.
With automation, the large bulk of jobs can be automated, meaning that people who are able and willing can't get work because the work isn't done by people anymore. For example, look at coal mining - 90% of the jobs were eliminated by coal companies buying huge industrial equipment that can get the coal out at lower cost with 10% of the number of people. Those jobs aren't coming back. And many manufacturing jobs are being automated, because it's cheaper and produced more consistent output.
What that means is that people able and willing to work are unemployed, or at the very least get paid wages 1/2 what people were paid decades ago to do the work (in constant dollars).
And as automation continues to improve its capabilities, and gets cheaper and cheaper, more and more jobs will be automated.
GIven that society can produce things for 1/10th the cost, that means that we could easily provide everyone with food and housing for free. Sadly, in the US, some "Christian" people are so terrified of the idea of anyone getting anything for free, they'd rather force millions of people to be homeless and starve, just because their jobs were eliminated.
The profit on the iPhone does flow into the US economy. And, of course, they do all the engineering, and most of the marketing, etc., in the US. When you buy an iPhone that's where much of the money goes.
Apple's manufacturing lines are highly automated. People only do the parts that people are better at than robots. Last time I saw the number (a few generations back) human hands only touched the iPhone for a few minutes per phone. The rest is all robots - placing chips on PCB's, flow soldering, most of the assembly, etc., is automatic.
Production cost is not the entire cost of the phone, just the cost of the assembly. That's about $10 per phone, because Apple's manufacturing is highly automated - people just do the steps that humans are better than computers at. Adding $10 to the cost of the phone isn't going to kill anyone.
Apple wants to manufacture in the US, has made many products in the US, and still makes some low volume products in the US, and _tried_ to manufacture the iPhone in the US. But large scale consumer electronics manufacturing is dead in the US. There aren't enough experienced line managers to hire to train and operate enough production lines that can produce tens or hundreds of millions of units a year. It's not about US salaries at all - Apple could easily cover the few dollars per unit cost of higher US wages.
Assembly is highly automated. They only use people for things that robots aren't good at. The labor cost per phone is under $10. Paying US wages wouldn't make much of a difference in the cost of the phone.
Apple tried to manufacture the iPhone in the US initially. The reason they didn't wasn't wages - in highly automated mass production, wages are a tiny percentage of cost of goods. The "deal breaker" was that the US didn't have enough industrial engineers to manage the production lines. Apple would have had to hire 100% of the new graduates from all US universities for 3 years to have enough engineering management to run the lines. The secondary issue is supply lines. All of the suppliers manufacture in or near Foxconn in China, so they can iterate on designs in hours, rather than weeks (shipping). So, to be in market years earlier, and with maximum agility, Apple had to be in China. Manufacturing on a large scale in the US was killed long before the iPhone launched.
And most other analysts put Clinton 85-95% odds of winning. If you dig into 538's numbers, the polls average Clinton being up by 5%, and 538 shifts everything 2% in Trump's favor (their opinion: all polls are biased 2% towards Clinton, though it's not clear why they think so) then say that since it's only 3% gap, and individual polls typically have around a 3% "margin of error" for 95% confidence, it's possible that ALL polls are off by 3% in Clinton's favor. Mathematically true - but the odds of hundreds of polls all being off by the full margin of error in the same direction is not 35%, it's vanishingly small.
Apple helped invent and continues to lead the USB standards. Apple worked with Intel to get USB to the point where they could consolidate Thunderbolt into USB-c - the capability to run DisplayPort and Thunderbolt within the USB-c connector and protocol isn't an accident, it was Apple's intention, allowing them to kill off and old, less widely adopted technology, and consolidate multiple ports into one (the proprietary power connector, Thunderbolt (mini-DisplayPort, not quite proprietary but not widely adopted outside of Apple), and USB. That was the point of my post - Apple kills off old tech in favor of new tech, and in particular has a habit of innovating ahead of the market (Thunderbolt, the magnetic power ports) and then killing off those innovations when the industry catches up. And, even more impressive, Apple leads the standards that allow the market to catch up and displace Apple's innovations! That's pretty gutsy!
No, he said that they had emails that might possibly be pertinent. Given that the FBI had no access to the emails from the other investigation, and thus hadn't read them, he had no idea whether they were actually pertinent, much less relevant. Given that, it's completely unclear why he thought that he had to notify Congress of the emails. Particularly since doing so was violating the Hatch Act, a fundamental rule making it illegal for government employees to do anything that affects an election within 60 days of the election.
Apple's done this many times before. The introduce Apple-branded products (printers, monitors, digital camera, networking, etc.) where they do so to make a dramatic improvement over the state of the art, then they're willing to kill off their Apple-branded products in order to get third parties to support Apple.
For example, Apple's LaserWriter was the first consumer networked printer, with Postscript, and they also had a highly profitable line of lower-end printers. Apple killed off their entire line of printers because they got all the major printer manufacturers to support the Mac, so even though it cost Apple $1B/year in printer sales revenue, broader industry support ultimately benefitted the Mac platform's growth.
Apple introduced the first easy to use consumer digital camera, which triggered competitive innovation in the industry, which was Apple's goal, after which they killed their camera product and sold partner cameras.
Heck, they had the first cheaply and easily networked computer, and they killed off their proprietary technology in favor of Ethernet as soon as it was possible. Same with USB replacing their proprietary keyboard and mouse connectors.
They just replaced their Thunderbolt with USB (specifically, USB-C with the latest USB bandwidth), now that it's finally fast enough to drive monitors well.
I'm impressed that Apple is willing to innovate ahead of the marketplace, and then to kill off their innovations when, years later, the marketplace catches up. Even more, Apple usually actively works to advance the state of the art in order to be able to kill off their proprietary innovations, because it's ultimately best for customers.
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In my experience, and my kids', most teachers avoid raising political issues because it's a distraction from the subject being taught. There are some subjects where facts being taught may make some students uncomfortable. For example, I recall in one 'history of religion' course several students were quite irate when the class covered creation myths, showing how elements from the earliest cultures were retained or changed in later cultures' creation myths - they "knew" that the bible was true, so the idea that previous cultures had some of the same myths hundreds or thousands of years earlier, from which the Bible stories borrowed, was quite upsetting to them. But since we know that there were Babylonians, Greeks, etc., and those people recorded their myths on artifacts that pre-date the Bible (Torah...) the class certainly should have covered the material. If you've been taught incorrect things, learning the truth is _good_.
80% of the US population is Christian, so the majority of people who do anything in the US are Christians. Specific to abortion, most of them are members of churches that don't believe that abortion is murder - that's mainly Catholics and some flavors of fundamentalists. Most churches teach that abortions are unfortunate and to be avoided, but are a personal decision that should take many factors into account. And that's certainly what most Christians, and most Americans, believe.
Yes, on compliance training you have to pass a test demonstrating that you learned (some of) what you were taught. Based on your representations, I think you may have been so opposed to the idea of sensitivity training that you heard things that they didn't say. For example "the accused don't have rights" doesn't make any sense. And there are estimates of the percentage of sexual assault of college students as high as 40%, though the estimates vary wildly because sexual assault is under-reported in the US, both by the victims (who don't want to deal with making the issue public) and by the college (who generally avoid reporting anything that makes the college look bad).
They kill off things that aren't strategic. They just killed off their monitor business, presumably because they're better off having lots of strong third-party monitor support than selling Apple-branded monitors. They certainly could have kept selling Apple-branded monitors, and it's certainly profitable, but perhaps not strategic.
First, that's not how bitmapped printers generally work on the Mac - the computer renders everything, and the printer just has to receive, buffer and put the bits onto paper. The challenge Apple had was that while they were making a fortune selling printers (80% attach rate, over $1B/year revenue!) they felt that the Mac was locked into a "ghetto" of a limited number of compatible printers, which they felt limited Mac sales. So they gave up the $1B a year printer business, and in return got HP, etc., to add Mac support, so now Mac's could print with a huge range of printers, and Mac sales went up ($4B in revenue the next year). They didn't have to get out of the printer business - it was huge, growing, and highly proftable. But they felt it held the Mac computer business back, and made the strategic choice to maximize computer sales.
I didn't say that Apple's digital camera was the first, I said it was the first consumer-friendly camera than you could just take pictures, plug it into your computer, and the photo's automatically copied into your photo library. I used early digital cameras, and they were beasts - weird file formats, weird cables, weird software, ... it could all be made to work (and I had a digital camera back strapped to an SLR back in the day) but it was a horrible user experience. The QuickTake was the first consumer digital camera with a good user experience. That showed camera companies what to do, and when enough of them copied the QuickTake, Apple killed the QuickTake and sold the Kodak, Canon, etc., cameras, because their goal wasn't to sell QuickTake cameras, it was to position the Mac as the creative platform for photographers. Which was a brilliant strategy that Apple sold a ton of computers with.
Yes, ethernet predated AppleTalk. But when AppleTalk came out, ethernet interfaces cost hundreds of dollars per device, and thick coax cabling used by Ethernet was very expensive and very fragile (bend with less than a foot radius, and you get to replace your $100 cable), and very hard to get working (with ringing, etc.). In contrast, AppleTalk was very easy, the interface was built into Apple computers and networked printers, and the cabling was cheap and easy to set up. When, after several generations, ethernet got as cheap and easy as AppleTalk, with cat-5 replacing coax, etc., Apple killed off their proprietary networking and adopted ethernet.
Apple's routers aren't targeted to network admins who want to configure every tweaky detail (and I know, I am one). Apple's routers are targeted to consumers who want to plug stuff in and have it work painlessly, which, despite your disdain, their app does a great job of. Normal people HATE linksys routers, and the like - it's by a wide margin the single biggest pain point in getting consumers onto the internet. They don't want to know about DNS and BGP, etc., they just want their stuff to work and be reasonably secure. And the latest generation routers are getting more and more consumer friendly, with (for example) mobile and web apps, to configure and control the router in ways that make sense for consumers who don't want to be network engineers. So while you and I like "real routers" don't forget that consumers really, really hate dealing with that complexity.
I'm surprised that you don't see the relationship between ADB and USB. Apple invented ADB as a bus for connecting devices like keyboards and mice, back when PCs were using serial ports (i.e. not a bus). This gave Mac's a cheap and easy way to plug in multiple human interface devices (keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc.). And when Apple and Intel developed and launched USB, Apple killed off ADB and switched Mac's ports to USB. The logic was similar to with printers - they killed off a proprietary port that was making them money selling peripherals, replacing it with an industry standard that gave Mac computers access to a wider range of peripherals.
As a plus, USB was also fast enough to be used for external hard drives, so Apple killed off SCSI to simplify Mac port confusion and improve the user experience.
Sure, Apple used components from Kodak and Fuji parts, but Apple integrated the end-to-end system. It was the first camera where you plugged it into your computer and your photo's automatically flowed to your photo library. They did it to jump start the consumer digital camera market, because they were focused on the consumer creative market. When the rest of the camera companies caught up, Apple didn't need to make the camera any more, and killed it, because any camera worked well with a Mac, so Apple didn't have to make cameras, they could focus on the part they care about, which is the computer.
Apple sold tons of printers, not just PostScript but also dot matrix (which outsold Poscript). When they killed off their printer business, they had an 80% attach rate, meaning that when anyone bought a Mac, 80% of the time they bought an Apple printer, which was a $1B business which was highly, highly profitable. I had a good friend in that division at the time. They got all the major PC printer companies to add Mac support in the box, so Mac owners could choose from any PC printer, and Apple got them to add the Mac support by killing their own printer line. This was ultimately better for Apple - they list a $1B revenue stream, but they grew the Mac business by working it into the mainstream.
Apple's killed off peripheral businesses in order to strengthen their core businesses before.
For example, Apple used to have a $1B/year printer business, which was highly profitable. They killed it, because doing so for them to get all the major printer companies to ship their standard printers with support for both PC and Mac, which ultimately grew Mac sales.
They used to sell a digital camera, the first consumer digital camera that was easy to use with a computer. When the digital camera industry developed some decent standards and became easy for consumers to use, Apple killed their digital camera, and sold Canon, Nikon, etc.
Same for AppleTalk -> EtherNet, ADB -> USB.
Apple introduced their routers when routers were extremely consumer hostile with horrible software, and Apple's routers are well made and very easy to set up and use, making it easy for Mac owners to get online. Now, routers have gotten a lot better, to the point where Apple doesn't need to invest R&D in making them usable.
Nobody said that automation would happen magically with no effort. So if you're offended by the claim that you imagined, you can stop. Rather obviously, it's a huge investment of effort/money to automate any complex process well, and that's invested because it makes the ongoing economics much better.
And while construction is harder to automate, there are companies automating construction. It's a complex collection of tasks to automate, and construction by definition is done in the field which complicates things, so it's not as far along as factory automation. But there are companies automating production of home components, for assembly on site, which does in fact make home construction much more efficient (and higher quality). And there are companies doing POCs with huge-scale 3D printing (using concrete) and pick-and-place (using bricks) to automate construction.
I'm not sure why you think that construction being fairly manual right now means that millions of other jobs aren't being automated out of existance. Or that construction jobs won't be increasingly automated.
Read what I wrote. I wasn't talking about line workers, I was talking about the line managers - you need experienced line managers in order to train and manage the line workers. The US trains a few hundred of those a year, and Apple needed thousands.
Right. The US still does small-scale manufacturing. It's the large scale stuff (e.g. tens of millions of units a year) that the US isn't capable of. Note that Apple makes their small volume products in the US (e.g. the Mac Pro), just not the cell phones and laptops that they sell millions of.
Nope. Apple was willing to pay above-average US wages. The problem was that the people they needed to hire, experienced manufacturing engineers, didn't physically exist in the US in sufficient numbers to staff a large scale consumer electronics manufacturing plant. They're all in China now, because that's where manufacturing is done.
No, they were willing to pay above-average US wages. There are very few experienced manufacturing engineers in the US, and schools train very few, so they don't exist. Apple would have had to spend years talking US schools into training people for jobs, then waiting years for those people to be trained, then hired them.
In contrast, FoxConn staffed the iPhone manufacturing line with experienced staff in weeks.
This is because US manufacturing destroyed itself. We no longer have that capability, because those companies all wiped out their US capacity and trained China to do their jobs, in order to get hire investor ROI. At least, until the Chinese companies wipe out the US companies. Look for example at how IBM trained Lenovo to make their laptops, then sold the whole business to Lenovo. That made IBM investors money, but wiped out an huge, successful US business. That is, it was bad for EVERYONE other than IBM's investors...
For most of history, anyone who was able and willing could find a job, because the vast majority of jobs could be done by nearly anyone with perhaps a few weeks' training. There are also skilled jobs, like doctors and engineers, based on deep training.
With automation, the large bulk of jobs can be automated, meaning that people who are able and willing can't get work because the work isn't done by people anymore. For example, look at coal mining - 90% of the jobs were eliminated by coal companies buying huge industrial equipment that can get the coal out at lower cost with 10% of the number of people. Those jobs aren't coming back. And many manufacturing jobs are being automated, because it's cheaper and produced more consistent output.
What that means is that people able and willing to work are unemployed, or at the very least get paid wages 1/2 what people were paid decades ago to do the work (in constant dollars).
And as automation continues to improve its capabilities, and gets cheaper and cheaper, more and more jobs will be automated.
GIven that society can produce things for 1/10th the cost, that means that we could easily provide everyone with food and housing for free. Sadly, in the US, some "Christian" people are so terrified of the idea of anyone getting anything for free, they'd rather force millions of people to be homeless and starve, just because their jobs were eliminated.
The profit on the iPhone does flow into the US economy. And, of course, they do all the engineering, and most of the marketing, etc., in the US. When you buy an iPhone that's where much of the money goes.
Apple's manufacturing lines are highly automated. People only do the parts that people are better at than robots. Last time I saw the number (a few generations back) human hands only touched the iPhone for a few minutes per phone. The rest is all robots - placing chips on PCB's, flow soldering, most of the assembly, etc., is automatic.
Production cost is not the entire cost of the phone, just the cost of the assembly. That's about $10 per phone, because Apple's manufacturing is highly automated - people just do the steps that humans are better than computers at. Adding $10 to the cost of the phone isn't going to kill anyone.
Apple wants to manufacture in the US, has made many products in the US, and still makes some low volume products in the US, and _tried_ to manufacture the iPhone in the US. But large scale consumer electronics manufacturing is dead in the US. There aren't enough experienced line managers to hire to train and operate enough production lines that can produce tens or hundreds of millions of units a year. It's not about US salaries at all - Apple could easily cover the few dollars per unit cost of higher US wages.
Assembly is highly automated. They only use people for things that robots aren't good at. The labor cost per phone is under $10. Paying US wages wouldn't make much of a difference in the cost of the phone.
Apple tried to manufacture the iPhone in the US initially. The reason they didn't wasn't wages - in highly automated mass production, wages are a tiny percentage of cost of goods. The "deal breaker" was that the US didn't have enough industrial engineers to manage the production lines. Apple would have had to hire 100% of the new graduates from all US universities for 3 years to have enough engineering management to run the lines. The secondary issue is supply lines. All of the suppliers manufacture in or near Foxconn in China, so they can iterate on designs in hours, rather than weeks (shipping). So, to be in market years earlier, and with maximum agility, Apple had to be in China. Manufacturing on a large scale in the US was killed long before the iPhone launched.
And most other analysts put Clinton 85-95% odds of winning. If you dig into 538's numbers, the polls average Clinton being up by 5%, and 538 shifts everything 2% in Trump's favor (their opinion: all polls are biased 2% towards Clinton, though it's not clear why they think so) then say that since it's only 3% gap, and individual polls typically have around a 3% "margin of error" for 95% confidence, it's possible that ALL polls are off by 3% in Clinton's favor. Mathematically true - but the odds of hundreds of polls all being off by the full margin of error in the same direction is not 35%, it's vanishingly small.
Apple helped invent and continues to lead the USB standards. Apple worked with Intel to get USB to the point where they could consolidate Thunderbolt into USB-c - the capability to run DisplayPort and Thunderbolt within the USB-c connector and protocol isn't an accident, it was Apple's intention, allowing them to kill off and old, less widely adopted technology, and consolidate multiple ports into one (the proprietary power connector, Thunderbolt (mini-DisplayPort, not quite proprietary but not widely adopted outside of Apple), and USB. That was the point of my post - Apple kills off old tech in favor of new tech, and in particular has a habit of innovating ahead of the market (Thunderbolt, the magnetic power ports) and then killing off those innovations when the industry catches up. And, even more impressive, Apple leads the standards that allow the market to catch up and displace Apple's innovations! That's pretty gutsy!
No, he said that they had emails that might possibly be pertinent. Given that the FBI had no access to the emails from the other investigation, and thus hadn't read them, he had no idea whether they were actually pertinent, much less relevant. Given that, it's completely unclear why he thought that he had to notify Congress of the emails. Particularly since doing so was violating the Hatch Act, a fundamental rule making it illegal for government employees to do anything that affects an election within 60 days of the election.
Ford pardoned Nixon in order to prevent a trial which would have revealed too much about Nixon's illegal behavior for the GOP's comfort.
Apple's done this many times before. The introduce Apple-branded products (printers, monitors, digital camera, networking, etc.) where they do so to make a dramatic improvement over the state of the art, then they're willing to kill off their Apple-branded products in order to get third parties to support Apple.
For example, Apple's LaserWriter was the first consumer networked printer, with Postscript, and they also had a highly profitable line of lower-end printers. Apple killed off their entire line of printers because they got all the major printer manufacturers to support the Mac, so even though it cost Apple $1B/year in printer sales revenue, broader industry support ultimately benefitted the Mac platform's growth.
Apple introduced the first easy to use consumer digital camera, which triggered competitive innovation in the industry, which was Apple's goal, after which they killed their camera product and sold partner cameras.
Heck, they had the first cheaply and easily networked computer, and they killed off their proprietary technology in favor of Ethernet as soon as it was possible. Same with USB replacing their proprietary keyboard and mouse connectors.
They just replaced their Thunderbolt with USB (specifically, USB-C with the latest USB bandwidth), now that it's finally fast enough to drive monitors well.
I'm impressed that Apple is willing to innovate ahead of the marketplace, and then to kill off their innovations when, years later, the marketplace catches up. Even more, Apple usually actively works to advance the state of the art in order to be able to kill off their proprietary innovations, because it's ultimately best for customers.