Apple is very tied to Chinese manufacturing in a way that is hard to replicate in US.
They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government, but if it goes as well as last time, they will stop as soon as they can.
In china they were often able to iterate on designs and have custom screws and other parts made and ramped up in very short times. Something about having the whole supply chain in one place and very motivated and it all fell apart when tried to move to US.
So things that took weeks became hard on anytime line.. per Apple in China book.
> Something about having the whole supply chain in one place
I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines. The companies that process the raw materials are located mostly inland, then the companies that form those raw materials into metal and plastic stock are next door, and then the companies that take that stock and make components are next door to them, and the companies that input those components and output subassemblies are next door to them, and so on all the way down to the harbor where the companies that produce finished products output directly onto the loading docks where the ships await.
The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation. How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean?
That guy is so annoying his subpar analysis has become such a trope. America used to build things too. Lawyers have been part of the founding and fabric of both societies. Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.
I've only listened to one interview with Dan Wang, but I understood him to be particularly talking about the politicians, not the country as a whole.
I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.
And that was true when we built things too. So what point are you making? If only FDR was an engineer then maybe we would have ramped up production and taken on the Axis across two oceans. But oops he was educated as a lawyer I guess we're doomed now. Like I just don't get it.
Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism. As a part of a government delegation he studied agriculture, even bringing him to stay abroad in Iowa of all places. The world is too complicated for this type of analysis, sorry. I don't even think it is remotely the right data point to focus on or compare.
Dan Wang does the same spiel on every podcast and it is always terrible and seems predicated on credulous hosts who know little about the history of either country and certainly not enough about both who just use his lame analysis to engage in this current fad of Western self-pity. Instead of reform and asking hard questions let's just throw soft balls at Dan Wang's cheap analysis that anyone with a Wikipedia level education would know is absurd so we can keep propping up the same impoverished China v America tropes.
Why don't we demand better honestly we should be ashamed that one guy can just come up with such a dubious thesis suddenly appear everywhere and no credible debate or pushback once. The only thing Dan Wang convinces me of is the poverty of the modern intellectual environment.
Coincidentally, FDR's predecesor was an engineer and we know how that presidency went (not that it was entirely his fault, but he didn't make things better either)
These people are just trying to find an alternative narrative because the vast majority of the population have been rejecting neoliberalism for a good 30 years now. So they spin up the foreign enemy is better than us, so we need to deregulate more and not hold monopolies accountable.
If we broke up Google or Amazon, suddenly we're just as bad as China!
I worked at a dev company, and we got bought by an IT company. Much pain and friction, all around. Is that a reductive representative of the company differences? Yeah, but it's still a useful mental model that helps one understand the differences. And I think the lawyer vs engineer trope is useful. Yeah we have both. Both my companies had both IT and developera, but the stakes & priorities were different enough that that lense became extremely helpful.
It gets repeated because we actively incentivize repeating it.
It's a popular trope that confirms the audiences bias's and when you do that the monkey brain gets rewarded by seeing the number in the top right go up.
Indeed. “Used to” is the key observation. In the wake of WW2, the U.S. had both dynamism and the ability and will to act collectively. This combination led to rising standards of living, the space program, Silicon Valley, the internet, etc.
The U.S. economy is still relatively dynamic, but the will to collective action has completely failed.
What point do you think you're making? That's not the question. You're just repeating the same obvious geopolitical comparison everyone regurgitates these days.
The question is about whether any of that can be meaningfully attributed to some lawyer vs engineer divide. Your question doesn't answer that in the slightest and thus I have no idea why you are asking it.
It's not about the specific degree the leaders hold. Thanks to Communism, China (and the Soviet Union before it) had a profound belief that society can be engineered, and that people and nature are both raw material that can be shaped to fit the needs of society.
The US, on the hand, is obsessed with individual rights, and any sort of collective action that threatens those rights is extensively litigated.
This is really what Wang's thesis boils down to, and which of course it's an oversimplification, there is a kernel of truth in there.
and the hidden implication is that there's a correct trade off to be made (because engineering is about trade offs).
So what happens to those people whose gotten the bad end of the deal? If china builds a damn, the villages downstream gets moved (with small compensation that is not commensurate with the value of the dam being made).
It's also why the high speed rail in california is costing so much in the US vs something similar in china.
>Thanks to Communism, China (and the Soviet Union before it) had a profound belief that society can be engineered, and that people and nature are both raw material that can be shaped to fit the needs of society.
You don't need to brand efficiency and structure-at-scale as "authoritarian"; how painfully American of you. I know it's a completely foreign concept for anyone that has grown up in America, but it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing. Typically this is evidenced by tremendous social progress, which we see in evidence with the rapidly rising standard of living in China over the last few decades.
It's easier when your government is proposing "hey, let's build all the factories the best way we can" and not "hey, let's impose illogical and continually-changing tariffs on everything and let Howard Lutnick's kids steal all the proceeds". You're right as an American to be skeptical of the government - it's not operating in your best interests unless you're one of the elite insiders. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.
You're providing much too much credit to China's government, the dynamic is simpler:
China just hasn't calcified yet after workers press for better standards of safety and quality of life and maybe they won't because that's where being authoritarian comes into play. They will crush that in a way we have moved away from.
We used to build great things in the US and then we decided the blood price of 30 lives for the Brooklyn bridge or 100 for the hoover dam wasn't worth it. It's really not hard to build anything when you ignore any second order questions of impact. Why do you think certain people here want deregulation and for the EPA to go away.
A quick google shows China prioritizes speed over safety something we've decided here in the US is not acceptable.
> We used to build great things in the US and then we decided the blood price of 30 lives for the Brooklyn bridge or 100 for the hoover dam wasn't worth it. It's really not hard to build anything when you ignore any second order questions of impact. Why do you think certain people here want deregulation and for the EPA to go away.
Because wouldn't it be just totally awesome for our rivers to burn again?
> In 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948 and 1952 the river caught fire, writes Laura La Bella in Not Enough to Drink: Pollution, Drought, and Tainted Water Supplies. Those are some of the incidents we’re aware of; it’s hard to say how many other times oil slicks may have ignited, as press coverage and fire department records were both inconsistent. But not all the fires were as innocuous as that of 1969. Some caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage and killed people. But even with the obvious toll on the landscape, regulation of industry was limited at best. It seemed more important to keep the economy booming, the city growing and people working. This attitude was reflected in cities around the country. The Cuyahoga was far from the only river to catch fire during the period. Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Buffalo and Galveston all used different methods to disperse oil on their waters in order to prevent fires.
for 2023 us vs china workplace fatalities per 100.000 are 3.5 vs 3.0 in favor of china. (quick ai query)
in regards to calcification of china your position is unclear. you say that china advances due to pressure from workers but at the same time claim that pressure from workers is irrelevant because government can crush them at will. you cant have the cake and eat it too...
For all the progress, you lose me immediately with the "social credit" system. If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent.
Only need to look to the recent changes in Hong-Kong and the obviously hostile takeover of a democratic government to see how "pure" these changes really are.
> If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent.
This makes no sense. It is possible for a totalitarian government which is threatened by dissent and concepts like "democracy" to also work in the interest of improving overall quality of life.
Yes there is. Why deny it? It's pretty public. In this french documentary, which was later aired on the parliamentary tv channel, the author films his daily life with his chinese wife, who has a social credit account, and interviews officials speaking openly about it. It's 4 years old.
There is no so-called social credit system you western guys have in mind. There is a credit reporting system. It's not that different from the US credit reporting system. But it has far less of an impact on our daily lives than the US system on Americans. For example, no one asks for your credit report when you want to rent a house.
i dont have.. and nobody talks about it.. in china.
this remind me one of the ep of the TV show <newsroom> when they found so many evidence of a massacre using chemical weapons and broadcast it.. and then found out its all fake.
If no one talks about it, why is this .gov.cn article discusses the problems currently posed by the existing social credit system? There isn't indeed a nation-wide score, but given the size of Chinese municipalities (often larger than most countries in the world), it's far from anecdotal.
There is a credit reporting system, similar to the one in the US. However, most people are not affected by it in their daily lives. Only those who are in serious financial trouble and cannot pay off their debts are placed on a blacklist, which restricts them from traveling by high-speed rail or flights.
there is no score at all. even this article didn't talk about anything about 'score'. its no different compare to many other countries. soical credit system is a general concept.
I do wish everybody outside of china have your mindset. then we have nothing to worry about.
Dude come on, the US already has a social credit system. Where do you think China got the idea of credit scores from? Try getting a good loan in the US if your credit score is under 400. You're barred from having certain jobs if you don't have a good credit score.
Get some new talking points, you're like 40 years out of date.
It's not just loans and banking. Bad credit severely limits your housing options, even rooms for rent are running credit checks these days. Some employers too, even in roles where you aren't directly handling money or anything close to it.
The difference between a social credit score and a credit score is when you criticize the president, your social credit score goes down, but your credit score stays the same.
I understand this, but I meant that the data sources used to build credit scores are mainly banking/debt related. Jaywalking ore saying slurs online won't affect it, unlike in China.
If that were the true secret sauce of the economic success in China, why had it not taken off before the 2000s? Like, they have been that "aligned" and "want the same thing" and "run by engineers" since the 50s, no?
It kind of did. GDP per capita grew at around 6% per year from 1952-1980. It was starting from such a low base that it was still pretty low in 1980, but it was much improved. And Mao was not an engineer.
6% compared to the post-2000s is mediocre, especially given the low baseline. Not remarkably better than other high-income democratic countries like Japan and West Germany. Even the US can have ~4% growth at the time.
As an engineer, I do think there’s some mild but noticeable correlation in bulk. But there are other categories which would be much more predictive. And most of the correlation with engineers are actually a confounder effect from things like multigenerational socioeconomic status, or religion.
If you were to control for other variables I doubt there’d be much correlation. After filtering out engineers who belong to other categories with stronger associations to authoritarianism, you’re more likely to be left with the hyper-individual-freedom types than the hyper-authoritarian types.
Eh. Maybe. But I do see people who are pretty consistent when they have power. It may be somewhat unpredictable before they get power, but somewhat more predictable once you’ve seen how they act with it.
This principle of relative consistency is baked into how I test employees for management and friends for trust, and in the past, roommates as well. Though I do acknowledge potential for growth as well, but in my older age I generally also need to see evidence of motivation to give strong benefit of the doubt wrt possible trajectory.
Except in 21st Century America, where libertarian is really just masked authoritarian. Essentially, that means “free to do whatever you want as long as it’s our way.”
Libertarian principles encourage relationships built on mutual consenting parties rather than coercion. This implies that both parties have the freedom to choose. Imagine being stuck with a small dating pool of undesirable partners, the choices may not be good but that doesn't make it authoritarian.
I think what the person you're replying to is referring to is the fact that, in contrast to the US, many senior politicians in China literally have engineering backgrounds, or at least engineering degrees. Although this has actually been less true in the past 10-15 years. This article gives a bit of an overview - https://www.chinausfocus.com/2022-CPC-congress/chinese-techn...
Sorry, but this sounds more like a myth, or at least heavily exaggerated. Similar to how Japan often gets romanticized.
Organizing the entire chain geographically at the scale you described (inter-city) doesn't bring huge cost advantages by itself. In China labor has historically been cheap, so the transport cost between regions was never the dominant factor anyway.
Most industrial clusters in China formed organically over time just like the rest of the world. Aside from some exceptions like mining, there isn't some master plan laying out entire cities as linear supply chains to the ocean It's not SimCity.
One thing you're right about is that there is less bureaucratic friction or 'lawyers' in the way when it comes to economic development. For the former, it's because economic growth is THE metric for the government, especially at the local level, so they do whatever it takes to make it happen. For the latter, it's because… well, in China no one sues the government, period. I'm not sure it's a good thing.
Is the labor cheap in China or are you comparing it US salaries?
Can a person working in a Chinese tech factory for a major US company afford a reasonable place to live a reasonable distance, food, some entertainment, and have savings?
I'm not comparing it to US anything, I'm comparing it to other cost components like raw materials and parts, whose prices are often global.
The point is that transportation within China isn't a dominant factor in industrial cost or efficiency. So the idea that major manufacturing cities are laid out like giant assembly lines isn't nearly as important as OP suggests.
China still has many advantages over the US in manufacturing. I just don't think this is a major one, even if there's a grain of truth to it.
So, there’s a decent amount of electronics manufacturing in Anhui Province which is pretty far from the well-known hub of Shenzhen. Anhui is generally more known for their mining industry.
So, to your query, maybe somewhat? But not strictly.
It's a network effect though, if 80% have zoning then you may as well be a tiny island country.
The other issue is minimum wage and workers rights. It should be possible to have Chinese workers making widgets on US soil instead of Chinese soil, for $0.5/hr more than they can make in China. But that's illegal many times over.
Then people wonder why manufacturing is dying across the West. If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete, it's extremely basic. That might be acceptable but at least be honest about the trade-off you've made, and don't pretend you can patch it up with hacks.
Died a long time ago and went to hell in handbasket :(
>If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete
Houston had always been less expensive than Detroit, LA, Chicago, New England and just about anywhere else in the US for this kind of thing, but it was really the cheapness of the foreign labor that made it irresistible to Wall Street. It had always been that way but didn't really matter until after the value of the dollar had been dropped so low that they had to pay workers what amounted to exorbitant sums while the labor still ended up with less discretionary cash, and that was at the lower-value dollar.
You should have seen Houston in 1979 when the Nixon Recession was raging worse than ever, long after he had sailed into the sunset. It was no Pittsburgh[0] but there were still two steel mills and of course one of them was US Steel where they had expanded to the industrial suburb of Baytown Texas specifically because the labor was cheaper than up north.
Wall Street took that differential to the bank and lit their cigars with $100 bills :\
Eventually led to champagne and caviar with each round of layoffs.
Nixon "opened up" China, but Reagan was not yet here to put the nail in the coffin.
I agree it would take a whole lot more unfair advantages just to get closer to a level playing field.
The way to real manufacturing growth is to build much higher-value-added products per worker.
The difficult problem to overcome is that most of the low-cost raw materials have been coming from China for so long, and the ideal thing would have been coming from more than one place the whole time.
But no, the absolute cheapest must be sought.
Mexico could have been ready by now but they would have had to do it on their own in an organized way like China and India so it pales by comparison, especially high tech in spite of all the brilliant Mexican engineers and innovators.
Lower-cost labor in India might be abundant enough but it'll take a while before the supply chain can compare to what China has built with all the dollars they have had in their hands for so long.
[0] Made up for it with oil, as heavy industry goes.
You know, I think the bigger issue is Tillman Fertitta scuttling the other UT research campus they wanted to set up in Houston because it would screw up his status as chairman of the University of Houston board or something. I guess Houston’s gonna have to make do with these tech jobs.
Apple as a company that does not pay taxes should at least invest in the country they are located in. *Designed in Cupertino, Taxes paid no where, profit leveraged in the US
> I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines.
... like Factorio, just in real life.
> The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation.
A lot of that is to prevent our cities from looking like China did before they haphazardly cleaned up shop before the Olympic Games. Remember all the smog alerts? Athletes being afraid the smog and pollution would impact their performance?
> How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean?
There's a tool for that, it's called tariffs - basically, make it uncompetitive for manufacturing moving off to a country that systematically undercuts pricing even at the cost of its environment.
Unfortunately, the current administration doesn't even have the concepts of a plan on what they want to achieve with tariffs. It's mind boggling to watch.
And, to be clear about one thing (which I believe is also raised in the book): Much of this is the direct result of Apple investing literally a quarter trillion dollars and exporting critical western IP toward developing Chinese advanced manufacturing capability (among other American technology companies). The story of startups only being able to manufacture in China is a cute tale that is true for startups. For Apple, investing in the strategic capabilities of America's geopolitical rivals was an active decision Tim Cook and other Apple leaders made.
A big change from Steve Jobs' dream of a California factory where sand and other raw materials came in one end, and finished computers went out the other --- the NeXT factory was an excellent exemplar of early automation (greatly assisted by Canon, an early investor).
A company like Apple has very little incentive to care about geopolitics, other than by current or future government laws and regulations (a government mandate, tariffs, etc). In the absence of government intervention, Apple has determined that investing a quarter trillion dollars is the cheap choice; getting the same result in the United States would probably need much much more than a quarter trillion dollars worth of investment. If the United States thought that such investments by Apple would have undesirable geopolitical implications, Congress should have acted a long time ago.
Your learned helplessness is defeatist and boring. We need not be Moloch's subjects; Apple's business priorities are not the result of some natural and unstoppable force, and their leadership is not exempt from responsibility because of your belief that it is. Someone, sometime, in a surprisingly boring room, wearing a surprisingly boring suit, made decisions like those which opened a factory in China instead of Texas.
I do not have learned helplessness. Nor have I claimed Apple’s business practices are the result of a natural force. Nothing is natural here. I said that Congress could have acted. Is Congress part of the nature now?
In contrast you have provided no arguments for why Apple’s leadership bears responsibility rather than Congress.
Texas would need to train its people. And the people would need to be as hungry as the Chinese were, and are to a certain extent. You should read the book the OT is talking about, it shows how the U.S. didn’t stand a chance in manufacturing, even going back to the 80s. Literally just not getting back to potential clients for two weeks and saying X or Y can’t be done, while Southeast Asian companies were jumping at the chance to build stuff.
There’s a giant cultural shift that needs to happen in the U.S. to get that back—not sacrificing labor laws, like China does, but the same idea that X or Y CAN be done, and actually jumping at the chance to build stuff instead of feeling entitled to it.
We do have agency, but the agency actually starts in the U.S., in education and culture, and not with a company like Apple.
It doesn't seem like money is the only issue. Infinity dollars won't help if the culture is radioactively toxic and shitty. (Arguably if you had infinity dollars you could spend it on therapists and counselors to fix the culture.)
Dell ate Compaq’s lunch with a BTO model. It’s pretty clear Tim Cook decided to put the factories out of reach after that experience. Putting the supply chain close to major customer markets is cheapest but invites competition.
> Acompany like Apple has very little incentive to care about geopolitics, other than by current or future government laws and regulations (a government mandate, tariffs, etc).
Isn't that massive? You make it seem like it's not important but look at Trump's tariffs that are connected to geopolitics. The US's relation with China could worsen to a point where certain imports are banned.
> Much of this is the direct result of Apple investing literally a quarter trillion dollars and exporting critical western IP toward developing Chinese advanced manufacturing capability (among other American technology companies).
Really love your 1990s style western centric view.
Care to explain how fancy western IP is not leading in more and more techs fields, e.g. drones, EVs, renewable energy, robotics, fighter jets etc.? because western companies invested in China and gifted fancy western IPs they don't even have to China?
Just as manufacturing in China took time manufacturing in the US will take time. The US has lost much of its skilled labor and mom and pop parts shop. If we have any hope of re-invigorating this some large company is going to have to bite the bullet. Chicken and egg problem imo. I'll leave whether this is worth it or not up to the economists.
No, US didn't lose it, we collectively decided that whenever we buy something, the price was the most important aspect.
It's like everybody forgot that their neighbour's job depend on them.
We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys.
What you're describing literally is us losing it. We lost in the market. Price was above all for the market and we didn't adapt and lost. I agree with the point you're trying to make but we did lose it in the sense that we do not have the manufacturing capacity we once did
Choosing the lowest price is rational for the consumer. Setting the trade policy that allowed that lowest price -- the USA has less protection for the semiconductor industry than it has for textiles -- was the mistake.
Free trade does result in the best prices but it has other, negative effects, and it is when we think as policy makers -- as citizens, not consumers or business owners -- that we are accountable for those effects.
>We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions
Are you talking about the small mom-n-pop shops that are only open when most people are at work, while with online shopping you can do it any time 24/7? The same mom-n-pop shops that refused to take returns, and had poor selection and would take weeks to order something for you, at a ridiculous price?
There are a lot of really good reasons online shopping has put so many stores out of business.
> We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys.
A huge part of that is rents. Basically, a store that owns their property outright or even on mortgage has far less worries when business turns down during a crisis. Take Covid - a year or two, depending on where you were, in more or less lockdown conditions.
A store that was owner-owned? No big deal. Staff was paid for by government assistance, not much ongoing cost for the building. Owned but mortgaged? Cut a deal with the bank, no bank wants to go through a 2007ff event again and they also got assistance for loans. But a store that was rented? Yeetie yeetie. Commercial renters have zero protections anywhere, and landlords are nonforgiving - especially when they are backed by REITs and other investment vehicles.
Recent history is filled with examples of investment funds that behave like vultures - seek out a company that has sizable owned real estate, buy stocks, force the management to sell off the real estate in a heavily biased sale-and-lease-back maneuver, put the acquisition debt on the company's ledgers, sell off the real estate and let the husk of the company wither.
Our political/ruling class wanted more of the pie for themselves, dropped the trade barriers protecting American industry, and gorged themselves on the arbitrage as manufacturing flowed to our chief geopolitcal rival, who was quite happy to accept such a generous gift.
That's true, but we also collectively decided to buy cheap stuff from Walmart instead of buying from the local town store, creating a race to the bottom.
Ya, because the same item was way more at other stores and people didn't understand why. Most of it was logistics at first and not just cheap items. That and buying in very very large lots. It was over time that the hunt for more profits started chasing cheap items.
Really the mom and pop store was set to die in the US because of car culture. You'll pay a bit more to walk to the closest store, but if you're already driving there is very little cost in driving to a store a little farther is almost nothing.
Or did stagnant wages drive Americans to buy what they could afford instead of products that would last?
We also have many US manufacturers moving sourcing their subcomponents from overseas to save a few cents per unit, there's no way to prevent that, nobody is going to check the BOM from everything they ever buy.
I think collective behavior is a large component but it is not quite right to declare it as the primary driver.
What if people could have purchased American made goods but this means that they would have had to have less or what they did get wouldn't be as good.
For example, I get a 40inch TV instead of a 65 inch or I buy a set of American made screwdrivers but then I can't get a bottle of Vodka.
Most people have their basic needs met. They just want as much as possible for their money even if it harms other Americans. At the same time, if they happen to work at a factory making extension cords, they'll want people to buy their US made cords to protect their job.
Because most people are selfish when it comes to people who aren't family or friends.
The college educated white collar professionals who are grossly over-represented in policy discourse?
Middle america, the formerly industrial northeast and the former bulk industry west have been complaining about this shit policy for over a generation.
Implicitly shuttering our manufacturing and heavy industry by subjecting it to policy that we knew would make it increasingly noncompetitive at the margin and would prevent continuing investment was a macro/federal level economic policy choice that was actively pursued for approx 50yr.
What government policies are you referring to? Businesses moved manufacturing to China because their goal is to make as much money as possible. The only potential barrier is if US citizens would care that it wasn't made in America. Products are labeled and most people don't care.
This is an American quality where a person who works in a factory that makes extension cords and needs their job to survive would buy the cheaper lamp even though it's made in China.
Most people aren't willing to make financial sacrifices to help people they don't know EVEN if they might be affected by another person having the same belief.
> Businesses moved manufacturing to China because their goal is to make as much money as possible.
There used to be other times and more honorable businessmen. Then came the Dodge Brothers who managed to get a court judgement asserting shareholder supremacy over long term interests [1].
The only thing I never understood is how in god's name Amazon got away with reinvesting profits and never dishing out to shareholders for decades.
There is no contingent in the US federal government that has a coherent plan for doing what you're talking about.
The investment in capability that is necessary to build the next generation of manufacturing capabilities in the US is simply not within the public imagination.
I don't think it's something that can be centrally planned well.
If the US changes their environmental regulations to match China, lowered their tax-to-GDP ratio to match China, changed their worker regulations to match China, and then opened up free immigration from Mexico for cheap factory labor then the "free" market would likely take care of opening up quite a bit more manufacturing.
china did not synthesize shenzhen through having poor environmental regulations and cheap labor, nor would one expect to have a shenzhen appear spontaneously in the us if the us allowed in unlimited migrant labor and abolished all environmental law.
Hell, don't even match it. Split the difference and it would unleash a torrent of economic activity.
It will never happen because there's too many industries and jobs that only exist because of all that regulation and will fight tooth and nail to avoid a short term haircut.
He’s at least getting companies to pretend like they’re going to try. That’s a starting point. Before, the best you’d get out of these CEOs is “LOL those jobs are never coming back, learn to code or whatever else hasn’t been outsourced fully yet.”
His predecessor worked with Congress to actually bring microchip manufacturing back to the US and tried to keep us competitive with EV manufacturing (not to mention the infrastructure investments that are necessary for any serious manufacturing effort). Those were real commitments.
Extorting CEOs to announce investments (like the Zuckerberg hot mic incident) is not worth anything to me. Meanwhile the US has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for the last year.
No amount of time will let the U.S. - a country of 348 million people - replicate what China - a country with 1.4 billion people - a can do with manufacturing.
This isn't "working harder".
This isn't "rebuilding infrastructure".
This isn't "training people in trades".
The numbers are so cartoonishly lopsided as to be a non-starter for categorically replacing Chinese manufacturing.
600 million people live in North America. 1 billion people live in the Americas. Another billion live on the Pacific rim in non-Chinese countries.
Establishing regulatory harmony across all those countries is obviously not possible in the same way it is in a single authoritarian state, but if the US made it a priority to create a trade bloc capable of replicating China’s manufacturing capacity, it probably could.
Establishing regulatory harmony is not only not possible but the current regime is working in exactly the opposite direction.
If the US wants to take on China, and actually needs Canada's help to do it -- I can assure you they just set themselves back 10-20 years from achieving that. We no longer have any interest.
The labour forces of Mexico and Canada are not at the US's disposal for these kind of games anymore. For several decades we have been exploited by the US for low wages and cheap resources -- and now there's a regime that's making cheap political points by accusing us of the opposite while trying to emmiserate our populace. So, yeah, no thanks.
we don't have to entirely replace Chinese manufacturing to build back American manufacturing that's a false dichotomy.To compete we'll just have to be more revolutionary than the manufacturing industry already is.
Well, once AI takes over most of the white collar jobs, people will have to do something to put food on the table, and not all of them can be gig workers. Or do you see ideas like Universal Basic Income as an alternative for the US?
That's argument is a bit rough given manufacturing is one of the areas seeing the most automation progress and success. One of the main reason it's not more successful is labor costs can be lower than automation that wouldn't be true if we wanted to replace the income of white collar workers in the US.
If we end up in a place where AI and automation take over then yeah I think we start looking at alternative income sources and economic system. Just like star trek predicted we would do after WW3.
Why is that the only way to accomplish that? We'll have to restart manufacturing while also keeping wages livable and the work the US does competitive. As I said above we'll just have to be more revolutionary than the manufacturing industry already is.
There’s no world in which large scale manufacturing is returning to the US. Not only are our labor costs dramatically higher than in east asia, but we also lack the logistics infrastructure to quickly produce components and get them to their next stage of assembly quickly. And we can’t just build that stuff because we don’t have a totalitarian government that can just bulldoze farms and houses to run a highway or railway. We also are less interested in pollution, which raises the sticker price on US manufacturing.
If we’re serious about it, we are going to have to commit ourselves to economy-tanking tariffs (like thousands of percents) for many decades until the US worker is as poor as the Vietnamese worker.
In spite of no totalitarian government and things like environmental regulations the US still is able to be one of the most innovative nations on the planet. I don't think we need those things to be able to have manufacturing in the united states. We had it at one point and we can do it again. It's not going to be easy and it's going to need some real breakthrough ideas before we can actually compete. Apple here is the first step.
We never had manufacturing within an order of magnitude of China's scale in the US. Probably not within two orders of magnitude. When the US was a manufacturing powerhouse, we had far cheaper labor, far fewer environmental regulations, far fewer labor regulations, and far simpler supply chains.
> Apple here is the first step.
Pretty sure the much-touted Foxconn plant in Wisconsin was the first step, and just like this one it will be scaled down to a few hundred jobs as soon as possible.
American business leaders have (had?) an obsession with gross margin and tech "advancedness." They thought they would be the winner as long as they occupied the high-tech sectors in the supply chain. So they discarded the high-volume, low-margin, low-growth, low-tech businesses like assembly lines and outsourced them. But the reality is that the proximity of the assembly lines creates a cost advantage that attracts more upstream suppliers to surround it. Even Intel was seeking to build more fabs in China before being stopped by the US government.
>> Something about having the whole supply chain in one place and very motivated.
This is the legacy of Tim Cook before Jobs passed. He was the guy who put immense pressure on Chinese factories to deliver on the insane quotas and timeframes he forced on them. He essentially blackmailed companies in order for them to his bidding - threatening to go to competitors if they didn't deliver exactly what he wanted.
The stuff Apple got away with in China could never be repeated here. I mean, you think you can regularly push so many workers to commit suicide, you have to put nets around the buildings in order to dissuade them from jumping off buildings? Yeah, not happening here. Which is why Apple does business there. Its why Tim Cook was able to abuse Chinese labor laws to get them to deliver the impossible, time and again, regardless of the human cost.
Not happening here? Foxconn's per capita rate during the peak of their suicide cluster was like 1.4-1.8 per 100k, America as a whole averages closer to 12-15 per 100k.
Well put. I tried to explain this to someone years ago after they asked a question like "why don't they just build a factory here?". I was like "you need more than _a_ factory, you need a whole ecosystem of manufacturing". I guess I didn't make my argument clear enough based on their response.
I think the USA has been very clear based on our actions over the past 4 or so decades: we don't want this kind of labor in this country. I don't see any material changes despite the recent puff pieces and political grandstanding.
It is really unclear why you think that either the political interest or strategic logic of not wanting to rely on manufacturing in China, and having some on the value being created here goes away, or is some idle whim.
Sure, if it took decades of slow patient effort to create the current situation, it might take decades to unwind it. And, sure, the US political system is exceptionally bad at industrial policy.
But, at the end of the day, the political and military logic is, and will be for the forseeable future, get your supply chains out of China. Just because it is slow and difficult doesn't there is any reason to believe the pressure will relax. (Putting aside the possibility of an AGI/robotics revolution)
They won’t just have custom screws, they will sort them by incredibly small amounts of manufacturing error and make those correspond with devices that have similar amounts of manufacturing error, so it matches(like a slightly too large screw going with a slightly too large hole).
On production lines.
Obviously this is not plan A, but their ops team is insane.
> sort them by incredibly small amounts of manufacturing error and make those correspond with devices that have similar amounts of manufacturing error
I spent a little while unsuccessfuly trying to recall the jargon or the anecdotal company-name here, but IIRC there was an early pioneer in this where a company making radios (?) tried to develop a software system that would categorize non-conforming parts so that the flaws in different pieces would cancel out.
I don't think it worked for them, at the time it was far more efficient to just spend money on improving the quality and tolerances of the parts.
Came here with a similar comment, pasting here to avoid another top-level comment tree.
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I bought a mac mini a year ago for $599. Personally, I'm pretty sure I would pay another $50 if it said "Made in the USA" on it. Maybe $80. Not sure I would pay $100.
But I worry this will prove to be like when Daimler bought Chrysler and shipped the Crossfire fully assembled except the rims, which were bolted on in the US so they could say it was "made in the USA". They only sold 76,014 and now Daimler extracted itself from Chrysler, so maintaining them has become a bespoke hobby.
Crossfire was an interesting car - looked at them for a bit, but needed a 4-door..
If I was in the apple ecosystem (I prefer PCs with Linux, Android), I would pay $100-200 more for a mac mini made in the USA if there were actual benefits, like most of the additional cost went to paying domestic labor, better parts availability, better repairability, etc.
Well, um.. Forgive me for not being in the market for a showerhead in the last few years and / or not knowing about this one company that I didn't see at Home Depot/Lowes when I did buy a couple of them?
I admit I'm probably an outlier, but in terms of durable goods, I'd pay 30-50% more for lots of things if they were "made in the USA" or "made in Canada" (any western country) and it meant something - like, better parts availability, repairability, documentation, support, etc. Not all of them, but something - AND, it was paying domestic imports / reducing imports.
I'm not living paycheck to paycheck, but I'm not wealthy.
You’re not alone. I’m a self-funded startup founder and I still buy Made in USA goods (clothes, appliances, tools, supplies, equipment, etc). For me the price isn’t the main factor, it’s simply that I want to support the countries I like. Been doing this for 10 years now. Based in London so I also buy Made in England things too. Never ever support authoritarian regimes!
I haven't heard of the brand either, they just happened to actually run the experiment. I think you'd just have to pretend that both options are presented in a hardware store next to each other: identical product, company, warranty, support phone number, etc. Are we really buying the more expensive one just because it's made in USA or will we just say that we will do that and act in our own best interests by saving our money?
> and it meant something - like, better parts availability, repairability, documentation, support, etc.
But remember, this bit isn't related to the country that assembled the product, it has much more to do with the company and brand doing the post-sales support, marketing, and the rest of the customer-facing stuff. The Mac mini isn't getting a better post-sale experience just because it's going to be assembled in Houston. The product and company are identical.
Finally, I think it may be worth recognizing that there's a growing perception that Chinese products are the best ones, just like how people felt about many American products built in the post-WW2 era. I would subscribe to this perception that Chinese products are more likely to be good than products made in many other countries. They just have the ecosystem and the most expansive, skilled high volume manufacturing on the planet.
Good point about the supply chain; and it seems like most responses mistakenly disagree with you.
Thomas Friedman talks about this after his most recent visit to China. Where China excels is through rapid supply chain development by fierce regional competition among several (state-supported/sponsored/seeded?) competitors.
I get fatigue when everyone claims that all these Chinese businesses are state sponsored.
Do we not recognize that western governments do this too? Do we not recognize that western banks and VC firms are quasi-state institutions? Do we not see western countries continually subsidize businesses by lowering corporate tax rates and giving out cheap loans?
The US government was giving out $7500 per car to buy EVs and the US carmakers still got demolished by better Chinese products.
It’s like the western zeitgeist can’t accept that China is simply out-competing them on pure merit.
It’s not possible for China to have every business be state-subsidized and running a loss. At some point the truth is that China is getting wealthy by selling the most competitive goods. It doesn’t matter that the state “subsidizes” it because the money for the subsidy comes from selling the best and most competitive products.
China is not state-subsidized / running at a loss on materials so much (although they probably get cheaper rare earth minerals) - they're running at a loss on wages. There's no "loss" there - the state doesn't have to buy labor and sell it to the companies to put into the product at a loss - the companies simply pay less overall in terms of labor, because that's the prevailing rate.
Even if you paid 5% more for materials for an iphone but could pay 50% less for labor than China, you could probably beat China.
How does the state sponsoring come in? The state represses the people and the wages and prevents them from leaving for greener pastures in many cases, which benefits the corporations.
Factory wages in China are almost $2 more per hour than factory labor in Mexico.
I don't buy this argument.
Sure, labor protections in China are weak, but let's use our mirrors: the US has no guaranteed paid time off of any kind, it has unions on paper only, 1 in 10 Americans have no health insurance, and it's nearly the only country where medical bankruptcy exists as a concept. The largest employer in the US runs a scheme where their workers are intentionally kept part-time with low enough wages to need SNAP assistance and other social safety net programs, as well as avoiding any obligation to provide health insurance, effectively subsidizing their corporate profits with tax dollars. America's middle class has been shrinking via housing, healthcare, and education cost inflation while China's middle class has been growing as its industries have continually moved further up the value chain.
"China is just cheap labor" is a last-Millennium viewpoint. China is a manufacturing ecosystem where you can walk into a physical marketplace and find rows of vendors with skilled technicians who all know how to work on electronic or machinery or other manufacturing skills, where they offer services like chip-level NAND upgrades where they solder on storage upgrades to your iPhone while you wait.
China is now a country where you would pay a price premium to buy their products over competitors.
Yeah but China is a low cost economy, rent, food and things like transport and electricity are cheap. That means employers simply can pay workers less than the USA because the cost of living is so high in the USA.
The US government absolutely does not do what China does in this case. But the reason for my paranthesis and question mark was that I was not sure what call it.
> It’s like the western zeitgeist can’t accept that China is simply out-competing them on pure merit.
With a 400m head start in a 1600m race. It's a whole lot easier to out-compete somebody when you know the government will backstop you even if you misstep.
Solar and battery technology were two of those areas. China absolutely dumped cheap, mostly inferior solar cells on everybody else to wipe out competing manufacturers until they caught up. And China absolutely subsidized local battery consumption until their manufacturers had critical mass and market share. Even now, the RISC-V ecosystem mostly relies on China funding students to do the grunt work of porting everything over.
This is a smart thing. We used to do stuff like this in the US. (See: VHSIC, VLSI project, Sematech, etc.)
And now, BYD appears to be, at this point, simply a superior manufacturer and it doesn't appear to be close. It absolutely grinds my gears that I have to root for BYD to come into the US and bankrupt the automotive companies to finally move their asses, but we have been here before--back in the 1970s with Japan producing better cars.
The term for China's manufacturing advantage is agglomeration. The US is never going to be successful with these manufacturing initiatives until the US government gets its act together and starts rebuilding all the infrastructure that has been destroyed over the last 50 years. That requires more than just tariffs. It requires actual investment. Investment in infrastructure, people education, power, everything. It's actually why silicon valley is so successful because it is an agglomeration of the tech industry. We need the same for manufacturing if we ever expect to do it again.
it's probably a good thing to have domestic advanced manufacturing if only to have real-world testbeds for development of advanced automation technology.
it's cool and all that boston dynamics can do what they do, but i wonder if one reason why the chinese robotics industry is so advanced is because they've been able to test in production on real production lines, experiment with dark factories and learn a ton in the process.
it's kind of funny when you think about it. both the west and east are facing down the same set of potential problems that come with real automation of industries that have served as true economic dynamos for decades.
> it's probably a good thing to have domestic advanced manufacturing if only to have real-world testbeds for development of advanced automation technology.
Yes, it's a good thing to have domestic advanced manufacturing, but this probably doesn't qualify.
According to the article, it's a site where they already assemble servers for Apple's own use, and will now start assembling Mac Minis as well. Electronics assembly is, for the most part, a pretty low-value part of the supply chain.
It's not nothing, but it pales in comparison to the scientific and technological sophistication and financial value of wafer fabs and IC test and packaging facilities. (I worked at Intel's flagship fabs in Oregon, and have worked as a consultant with other semi fabs around the world.)
The press release says they’ve been making their own servers there successfully so it doesn’t seem like there is a reason they would stop Mini manufacturing quickly.
They did the exact same thing with Mac Pro in 2019. I notice they don't say they'll stop manufacturing the Mac Mini anywhere else. This is a political thing and will change with the political winds.
> They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government
They'll also hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony with maximum fanfare, at which they'll be sure to fawn over Donald Trump, let him ramble at length, and maybe give him some sort of shiny award.
Let's call it The Steve Jobs American Technology Greatness Prize. It'll be a blindingly flashy PVD-gold-plated 12" silicon wafer with a Mount Rushmore-style portrait of Jobs and Trump etched into it.
This is the part that blows my mind. People seem to think the US is incapable of and does no manufacturing. It is the second largest manufacturer[1], and has a capacity about 65% of what China does. Which is 350% of the next largest manufacturing country.
What they stopped manufacturing was menial and low-end product; because it's not price-effective to have 100 Americans sit on an assembly line and solder SMT components for $7-18/hr. Instead, those potential workers pivoted into service jobs and office work.
There are synergies to having the high end stuff and the low end stuff in the same place. The story of IBM developing System 360 mentions the benefit from the ladies who wound the wire core memory and the guys who designed the computer on the same campus in New York. We gave that up when we outsourced the “menial” stuff abroad.
Your entire blurb doesn't prove an inaccuracy, it simply proves that China has diversified it's manufacturing. Which only reinforces why it has double the capacity the US does, not why the US no longer does low end manufacturing.
China at this point is hard in automation, beyond anything the US has. China is well past the peak of sweatshops.
As someone in the manufacturing space in the US, the biggest issue we have in the US is that manufacturing continues to die. Any manufacturing we have left is the old guard dying off. It comes from a range of issues from companies refusing to invest in younger employees, to the cost of real estate (both buy or rent) for commercial properties being absurd..
The US manufacturing situation is much worse than you suggest, and is top heavy with low margin boring industrial stuff. Largest sector for US manufacturing is Chemicals, which includes fertilizer, petrochemicals, pesticides, and some pharma. The second largest sector is Tobacco, Food, and Beverages.
I think some more "low margin" computer and chip manufacturing would be healthy.
It is apparently economic to do so in China and apparently any other place you want to outsource it to. Does smaller and one-off productions have as high of margins as high speed automated stamping machines running 24/7? No. But that doesn't mean it isn't profitable at all.
And quite frankly, who gives a fuck if top owners and investors get maximum returns, boo hoo they got 4% return instead of 8%, that is still far better than the average working class's deal. Our entire problem is a suffering middle and lower classes that need decent work, they will still be happy even if the product they make is a bit lower margin because they are paid hourly, not paid by dividends and stock options which is where all the higher margins profits go. Average citizens pay has not correlated with increased company profits, and increased company profits isn't what makes society stable, so the investor class is going to have to suck it up and take the hit unless they want their entire house of cards to collapse.
Yes you’ve hit on the reason. Very few people understand this.
The reason we don’t invest in manufacturing is because of requirements for return on capital.
Ask yourself why GM is doing massive stock buybacks in the era of global transition to electric cars. Why aren’t they using these huge sums of cash to invest in the next generation of products and instead literally just sending the money out the door?
Mac mini is a relatively low volume product for Apple, the margin hit would not be consequential to their bottom line. I'll believe it when they start making iPhone in the US.
Helene survivor here. What's wild to me is that, regardless of the small scale of this facility, it's only a few hundred meters from a 1% flood zone: https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search
The address I found for the facility is 9101 Windmill Park Lane Hudson, TX 77064
This seems ill advised given recent events like Hurricane Harvey
Industrial buildings are typically built at dock height. Even if they don't do any grading, that would put the building well above any plausible flooding in that area.
My point is that we really don't know what "plausible" is anymore with these storms. That much is clear in the data. It seems silly to be so close to a flood zone with your very expensive DUV/EUV machines. There are probably other places they could have placed this facility.
The price of the carried inventory is still significant; the scale they mention reaching towards is thousands per day. That's not including the backlog of components they would have onsite to ensure production uptime.
Absolutely, but they are not losing a billion+ in EUV machines with year+ lead times in a flood. It'll hurt for sure though and doesn't appear to be the smartest overall move.
It also turns out that for insurance purposes you are allowed to use infill to get the corner of a property that's below the high water mark above it. At least in some states.
Some of the calculus is not about if it will flood it's about if you'll lose your investment if it floods. If an underwriter is willing to cover it, you might go for it anyway.
No, my YouTube recommendation algorithm just vacillates erratically between recommending esoteric engineering clips from 15 years ago and trying to push me down an alt right reactionary pipeline.
I don't know what the topography of houston is like, but here in toronto, a few hundred meters would move you from the bottom of a deep river valley to the top of it. I would imagine they made sure they could get insurance before building and wouldn't have picked any place with a significant risk.
They will build to a much higher standard than normal US residential construction, as they do with most commercial buildings. Many people do not understand the vast difference between residential construction quality and the quality that mega corps get. I personally watched Apple build their new campus in Austin (I have daily progress pictures of the construction site, I work there), everything is solid concrete. These buildings can withstand any type of hurricane.
Flooding is also something which can be mitigated: build foundations to be taller, work with the topography to avoid the path of water, and build drainage solutions. You should see the drainage field that Apple built for their campus in Austin, it's absolutely massive and can divert an incredible amount of water.
> Many people do not understand the vast difference between residential construction quality and the quality that mega corps get.
It’s not limited to mega corps. Commercial construction is built to a higher standard. Some times you can buy commercial grade hardware and materials for your house if you want.
Larger buildings are also more robust at the foundation because it needs to be so much stronger. That thick concrete is necessary, not a luxury.
Likely a combination of business-friendly policies (low tax, no employer payroll tax, etc.) and proximity to ports. Houston is the 6th [1] largest port in the USA.
Apple also managed to build a Houston factory quickly there, it was announced in Feb 2025 and was starting production by August which is pretty impressive.
I moved from TX to west coast a few years back. Property taxes down, all other taxes and expenses up; total cost of living much higher now. It's also business friendly enough to make deals on taxes as needed, I can't imagine that will be a problem. I get the hate on TX but tbh outside of the heat, it can be a pretty great place to live across many dimensions.
Isn't this something where there is clear and easy to obtain aggregate data. What is the average tax burden for someone in Wi vs Tx instead of comparing a single data point from each? I have a feeling it's going to contradict you
In the video there are Chinese characters on the clothing above the front pocket area. In a picture of her later on in the news article the Chinese writing is gone.
Has it been photoshopped out for the press release images?
That's wild that Apple, the ultimate tech image company, left that in there considering this is whole thing is all lip service and PR anyway, not a real change in the global manufacturing mix. Their entire campaign lost all credibility for me in a matter of seconds. I'm not even an Apple hater, I like my Apple products.
Is no one else interested in the "assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S." in the pictures? Are they using nvidia GPUS? Their own silicon? Is there any data out there on what these servers are like? I don't think we've ever seen a picture of them before.
It looks like they're cramming 32 Apple Silicon SOCs into each server - they're on upright daughterboards attached to both sides of the heatsinks. That's a lotta chips.
"advanced manufacturing center" which is 20k sqft, about 1/7 the size of a typical Costco. I wouldn't hail this as the great revival of american manufacturing
> Why does the video show them assembling rackmount servers and not the Mac Mini?
Because the video is of the workers in that specific factory, and they’ll only start producing the Mac mini there later in the year. It’s in the title. You can’t show real video of something which hasn’t happened yet.
It's the same situation as the Hyundai battery plant in Georgia last year. The foreign experts come to the US to teach us modern manufacturing. It's more accurate to describe it as Foxconn outsourcing to the US (for tax reasons), not Apple bringing manufacturing back home.
Apple PR did what they could with the art they had available and the need to pander to a gov't administration, but weren't inspired to do it more genuinely?
It's in the post: "In Houston, workers assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S."
I'm curious what "logic board production" really means. My suspicion is it means "soldered a thing onto a motherboard" where all the individual pieces were shipped from Asia and the soldering is done by robots.
Any modern circuit board is fully assembled by robotic equipment. It really isn't possible for humans to reliably assemble something like the PCB in your phone: things are just too small. A large pick-and-place robot can do it very quickly.
Are you suggesting Apple is engaged in a massive subterfuge where they imported Black and Hispanic actors and hung a US and Texas flag on the wall in a Chinese factory as a staged photo op? Maybe the factory is really a sound stage.
If they’re built anything like AWS’s servers, their cryptographic key chip that’s required for boot will be destroyed the moment it’s removed from the rack it’s in, rendering it useless. They’ll be scrapped.
My first job was for a startup created by Henk Rogers (Tetris). He was an avid photographer (our company set out to make photo management easier) and so he had a lot of photos. In the center of the office we had a server closet and it was the first time I ever saw xserve and xserve-raid racked up in person. I believe they were 100% dedicated to storing Henk's photo collection. Really really gorgeous hardware.
Mac minis are sold out in NYC these days because everyone gets them to try out openclaw. Even if this move by Apple is unrelated to the recent demand, it certainly was timed right for the policy and market makers.
It's so funny to me that HN seems convinced that artists have a sudden renewed interest in desktop computers, when LLMs have been driving mac mini sales for more than a year
I'm a product exec now but used to be designer and lead UX teams. Even though I don't use those skills as much nowadays it's still a almost daily hobby of mine.
Like the rest of HN (maybe it's HN's fault!) I managed to convince myself that I not only needed a Mac Mini desktop but also a 4090 rig for AI.
The 4090 hasn't been booted up in 9 months and the Mac Mini is now the world's most amazing 10GBE NAS server. My older M1 Max Macbook Pro and underpowered newer Macbook Air are the only things I use.
I mean, I'll take the 4090 if you don't want it :)
It's funny how we convince ourselves we need things. I bought myself a 3080 Ti a few years ago because I wanted a gaming computer, but then I ended up buying a Playstation 5 and not using my computer for anything more intensive than Factorio. More recently though I have been using my 3080 for Comfy UI image generation and messing around with local models, so I guess it's getting use now.
It's so funny to me that X users think OpenClaw represents more than 1% of Apple's desktop sales because it's what their timeline says is true.
If you want to humiliate me conclusively, throw me some numbers. LLMs have moved trillions worth of hardware value, but only a fraction of it is Apple branded.
Macs have "unified memory" meaning the GPU uses the same memory as the CPU and minis can have up to 64 gigs. So its a lot faster than running on a CPU and a lot cheaper than any other GPU based rig with similar memory.
Everything about that makes me feel very uncomfortable. Google made and spent a fortune on getting people's data, and now people are just handing it out for free by the GBs.
Apple is amazing at marketing to make 1990s technology sound cutting edge. I'm sure they change something for plausible deniability, as a nominalist, not even 2 of the same computers are the same.
The Mac mini has a very good value for money if you need raw performance in a small silent package. Frequently available for between $399 - $499 discounted.
A VPS that can perform like a Mac mini will likely cost the same as a Mac mini in 12 months time.
claws are run mainly by rich american programmers. The only computer they have is a macbook. The only brand they know is apple. The only cloud they know is serverless
US manufacturing will not take off without fully autonomous robots because Americans don't want to work 18 hour days for pay that is competitive with Asia, and labor laws make it difficult anyway.
> It doesn't say the Mini will be exclusively produced at this US facility.
What's likely to happen is Mac minis for North America will be made in Houston. Otherwise, the ones for the rest of the world will be made at the same facilities they are now.
Just like iPhones for the US are made in India; iPhones for the rest of the world are made in China.
I imagine iPhones for India are also made in India. India has a lot of programs to promote production within the country, and IIRC, Apple moved production there to take advantage of that. Given they have production in India, it makes sense to use that production for shipments to the US given better tariff rates for things produced in India vs China.
Really looking forward to seeing how this ends up, especially over the next few years. I knew about their recent Arizona TSMC chips in iPhones, but this is nice to see.
To all critics . This is something good going on in the country. It’s national interest protection .
Together with robotics push , it has a chance , and even they do small things . Today they make body , tomorrow cpu , etc it’s a good thing going on regardless of politics
The US has no national interest in the Mac Mini, or the Mac Pro for that matter. Homeland security isn't reliant on Apple datacenters. The Mac comprises less than 10% of Apple's yearly revenue, almost lower-profit than the iPad. Manufacturing Macs in the US doesn't even secure your pension.
The iPhone comprises a minor national interest corollary to Apple's stock price, but that's never being onshored. Apple would go bankrupt paying Americans to assemble the iPhone, and if you don't believe me then Google the leaked BOMs.
China's secret to rapid industrial growth in tech has been to invest in the low end, not the high end. Trump has it all backwards. An Apple factory in Texas may be good politics for Trump, but it has zero or negative impact on the competitiveness of the US and creates/amplifies existential risks companies face due to US political forces.
The government is slowly waking up to how important chips are and how far behind domestic sources have fallen from foreign (mostly Chinese and Taiwanese) sources. That's what the 2022 CHIPS act was about.
These things just take a lot of time, there are tremendous headwinds to fight, and the US government + US media increasingly seems unable to see through projects past the next election cycle.
What folks don't talk about, is that the reason for all the offshoring, is good old-fashioned American Greed™.
Lots of billionaires in the US, got that way, by exporting all their production to China. Because they did it, lots of lower-tier people had to do the same, or go out of business.
Since we worship billionaires, that little bit never seems to get mentioned, as it makes them look bad.
The only cure is to cost some of those billionaires money.
The money is not coming out of the billionaires’ pockets. Tariffs are ultimately a tax on American consumers and small businesses. Large businesses owned by billionaires just increased prices. Now, if the government is forced to repay tariffs, then they will be refunded to the companies. Consumers and small businesses who were forced to close will get no benefit. In the end, whether the tariffs are kept or the tariffs are struck down, the consumer gets screwed and the billionaires get richer.
While shopping I look where items are produced and by whom company. When I see an item is manufactured in Texas I put it back on the shelf and keep walking. That State is too politically corrupt for me to financially support, same with Florida.
Nothing against American ingenuity, but when situations like this occur, quality often declines for a time. The process may be replicated from its original source, but the key difference lies in the workers’ experience—something the Chinese have already mastered.
Didn’t know they were also pushing education so heavily, I mean it makes sense, but still great to see that they don’t expect skills and knowledge to appear out of thin air and is putting money to improving it.
I understand apple's push for US manufacturing in general but what do they mean by AI servers? I thought apple's current AI strategy is using other AI models?
Thanks! I wonder how they enforce retention of personal data if a user adds identifying data and they use a model from anthropic or wtv like others said. maybe that is the wrong question at all if they are using their own models but i thought they didn't. Apple's AI strategy on the whole sounds coherent to me but the specifics are super confusing.
They are using M workstation class chips for inference on their own blades since Google's models are meant run on TPU's it would not have been difficult to port it.
They also use Anthropic internally (code/marketing/sales) which runs their models on Cerebras so they also seem to be agnostic so runs on the same Apple hardware.
This has undoubtedly been in the works since before Trump took office. Construction for manufacturing has taken a nose dive since Trump won the election, though, so even if this particular factory was because of him, the overall picture isn’t any good.
> Apple's work on a new Mac mini factory in Houston wasn't a quickly-conceived plan to appease President Donald Trump. The reality is that Apple had a plan ready to do this long before the demands started.
Because it’s important to have the domestic capacity to build the most sophisticated products. Political power is downstream of manufacturing capacity. The countries that have sophisticated enough centrifuges that they can refine weapons grade plutonium derive an incredible amount of political power from that fact.
Remember that, after World War I, the U.S. had most demobilized its military. The Japanese had more aircraft carriers than the U.S. in 1941. That’s why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor—it thought it could win!
But while the U.S. was weak militarily, it had been the largest industrial producer since the late 19th century. Within a couple of years of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had built a bigger air force and navy than the rest of the world combined.
That’s why it’s better to be able to make Mac Minis in Houston. Because you can repurpose those facilities to produce electronics for warships instead of having to buy parts from countries you might be at war with.
My wild guess is that Cook cut a deal with the IRS so that they build in the US, but get tax benefits other companies don't get, so that it looks good on the administration - like the tariffs are working - and still benefits Apple.
I don't think Apple wouldn't find a cheaper place to manufacture Macs than the US. The US is literally the most expensive place to build.
That, or the Mac Minis are 100% asembled by robots, which is also a possibility.
Legally no, but in practice the president has been trying to assert the power to unilaterally levy taxes, even in spite of the supreme court ruling that you need the legislature to pass a tax. People still paid the tariffs. I would be extremely suprised if that's the only place this admin is trying to tax by fiat, and tax policy enforcemetn is far less visible than consumer tariffs.
We already know exactly what the deal is, no need to speculate. Apple got large tariff exemptions in exchange for supporting Trump's "Made in America" agenda:
No. But you have to understand that American political rhetoric only allows for things to be made either in the US or China (and occasionally Mexico). In that framework, yes the US is the most expensive place to make things.
Good but they should be named 'Mac Donald' or Trump Mini or something and it should be engraved with gold letters. And they are too small, they should be huge
They’re literally opening a new 20,000 square foot facility I Houston. So I’m not sure what your comment implies, but it takes time to build things like that.
This is to appease pumpkin potus and his merry band of idiots
Update: For the record I do hate the POTUS. He’s ruined our reputation around the world. Allowed things like USAID to die removing aid from millions leading to many deaths. He’s incompetent and very stupid which will likely get us killed either in some war or in the next pandemic. Tarrifs are a tax. Congress raises taxes. If you support his right to tax without congress then go live under a king. I’m an American. We don’t want kings. Need I go on?
And hating POTUS for what he’s doing to the country is my right as an American. We weren’t perfect. But we were at least respected. Now the world laughs at us.
He works for me. And you. And he’s doing a garbage job at his job. Why continue to give him a free pass. Would you give someone like this in your team a pass?
Here’s hoping his managers (congress) fires him (impeaches) him.
Your ability to rationalize would make you a king in a true failed state where might makes right and appeasement actually works. Stand for something or you’ll fall for anything like justifying the moron in chief.
So what? Even if you hate who the president is, it is in the best interest of everyone that the president does a good job. Wanting the president to fail and millions to suffer is scorched earth hatred, not strategy.
This President isn't doing a good job on really any level. Its not that I want anyone to fail, it's that the President today is currently in a state of failure, and those failures like enriching himself can have long term devastating effects on our society.
Now, you might disagree on whether blocking immigration from unsuccessful countries is a good thing or not. Maybe you disagree that those immigrants will bring the problems of their home countries to the U.S. But many prior Presidents have promised to do this and until Trump they have all failed.
Obama managed to deport many without the vitriol or the killing of American citizens. Are you a one issue voter? Just showing a blind eye to everything so long as no brown folks cross into this country?
According to the LA Times, that statistic is misleading: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-deportations-2014... (“A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data… On the other side of the ledger, the number of people deported at or near the border has gone up — primarily as a result of changing who gets counted in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s deportation statistics.”).
I believe that the premise of the immigration laws is correct—that exceeding certain levels of immigration harms society for various reasons that have nothing to do with protecting sunscreen sales—just as Clinton and Obama claimed to do.
Again, you can disagree with the premise. But my entire life I saw presidential candidates promise to fix this particular problem, and Trump succeeded.
Haha very telling that this is what you find laudable. Onshoring manufacturing … it’s a low margin low skill (relative) industry compared to the services and things of the modern economy. We import goods made cheaper in other countries and benefit from it in consumer surplus… that the educated here on HN can invert a tree or whatever the latest leet code garbage is being asked in interviews but never took and economics class or basic ethics is beyond me.
If you were correct, it would be trivial for Apple to reshore the manufacturing. But it’s not. Because what China has proven is that, when you outsource the “low margin low skill” stuff, everything going up the chain will follow. China used its low-margin low skill work to bootstrap the rest of the stack, and now they can make air to air missiles with range exceeding US missiles: https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/china-first-close-...
Margin is the wrong way to look at it. Law and finance are high margin work. But lawyers won’t help you win a war.
We’ve got to get you some better sources, mate. This is a straight-up Russian propagandist pretending to operate out of the UK while having a mailing address in South Korea.
Business will continue to business. POTUS is a failed businessman many times over who only increased his wealth by whoring himself to our enemies be extorting our allies.
The M4 is from 2024, the 5800h is from 2021. You should be comparing against the M1 or M2, which was Apple's actual competitor at that performance bracket and time period.
You bought the 5800h last year, and provided last year's price paid for it. That makes the 2024 Mac mini more relevant than the models that weren't being made or sold last year. Unless you'd like to dig up what that 5800h system cost back in 2021, to put that into context against a Mac mini from back then?
The Beelink mini PC I bought MSRPs at $600, but it comes with a 500GB NVMe drive. In Apple's pricing scheme, that puts it equivalent to a $800 Mac Mini configuration.
To reiterate, this is absolutely a comparable machine to the Mac Mini in terms of performance. Maybe not your ideal configuration, but I had $300 and a limited patience for Asahi development.
> To reiterate, this is absolutely a comparable machine to the Mac Mini in terms of performance.
Reiterating is not the appropriate response after someone has already detailed many ways in which the performance a 5800h is not in the same league, none of which you have even attempted to refute.
The more truthful claim you could have made is that you don't need the extra performance (far more plausible, given that you bought a new machine with a four year old chip), or that you needed storage capacity more than you needed performance.
This is not for Clawdbot, this is a re-run of the 2019 strategy where Apple promises to manufacture a low volume of high-margin PC enclosures on US soil.
They mention Mac mini! They have like 3 other desktop lines going, and they mentioned the mini!
Also: "In Houston, workers assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S."
I think there was a rush during the early Intel transition because they were dirt cheap computers you can upgrade yourself and even dual boot Windows. I feel like there was another big bump for them as a set top boxes to run XBMC or something. Might be wrong though. M1 release also saw the Mini's be a cheap entry point to seeing what Apple Silicon could do.
The first Intel Mac minis came out in the era of Front Row, Apple's attempt to turn every Mac into a media center computer. They had IR sensors and remotes. I had one hooked up to my TV, which was a big step up from the first gen AppleTV.
Plex started as a Mac-only XBMC fork during this era. There were also apps like Remote Buddy which let you control pretty much everything with the simple remote that came with the Mac. Apparently Remote Buddy still exists and works with the current gen Siri Remote.
I was happy to see that x64 mini computers have really come along. Some of the units from China are really impressive with some exposed full PCI-E buses.
Arm64 is still limited for sure, but with Snapdragon and Windows finally committing to ARM I think the future is bright for that. Just not here yet.
A thunderbolt 3 connector is 4 PCIe lanes, isn't it? I know there can be compatibility gaps, but there are definitely TB-connected enclosure boxes available. NVMe connectors are also 4 PCIe lanes, and I believe any of those can be broken out and used for whatever (m.2 cellular data modems for example).
Are you thinking of plugging in actual consumer expansion cards, or are you wanting the lanes broken out on some kind of riser where they can go to hardwired stuff on a carrier board?
Thunderbolt isn't literally four PCIe lanes; Thunderbolt can encapsulate and carry PCIe traffic, and Thunderbolt controllers are typically connected with four PCIe lanes, though the amount of PCIe traffic a Thunderbolt link can carry is not necessarily as much as four PCIe lanes.
Directly exposing literal PCIe signals cuts out the pair of expensive Thunderbolt controllers.
Was it such a sin that our electronics were made in the East? Was the west truly deprived and the east really abused? It’s nearly the end of of our lifetime (+-100 years is a margin of error), so the fact for our lifetimes is that our electronics got made there.
"Sin" is the wrong framing, but outsourcing most of your capability to actually make stuff can definitely cause problems for a country.
For example, on a military level, the US is concerned about how rapidly China is catching up in naval capacity, China is building new warships far faster than the US can. And it's hard not to notice that China's overall shipbuilding capacity is more than 200x higher than America's.
The US has a lot of pride over having been "the arsenal of democracy" in WW2, and it's well known that a huge part of why the US was effective in that war was sheer mass: the US simply made much more war 'stuff' than any other combatant. But if the US was to get in a shooting war with China today, it would likely be China that would enjoy an advantage in production scale, with the US trying to make do with fewer vehicles and munitions.
Tactical error then. I suppose I was hoping someone would make the human plea that the barter was mostly a net good for our lifetimes. Our neighbors made our clothes. You suggest tactically this a problem, but I’m wondering if we managed to live peacefully and goodly this way?
They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government, but if it goes as well as last time, they will stop as soon as they can.
In china they were often able to iterate on designs and have custom screws and other parts made and ramped up in very short times. Something about having the whole supply chain in one place and very motivated and it all fell apart when tried to move to US.
So things that took weeks became hard on anytime line.. per Apple in China book.
I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines. The companies that process the raw materials are located mostly inland, then the companies that form those raw materials into metal and plastic stock are next door, and then the companies that take that stock and make components are next door to them, and the companies that input those components and output subassemblies are next door to them, and so on all the way down to the harbor where the companies that produce finished products output directly onto the loading docks where the ships await.
The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation. How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean?
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-a...
I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.
Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism. As a part of a government delegation he studied agriculture, even bringing him to stay abroad in Iowa of all places. The world is too complicated for this type of analysis, sorry. I don't even think it is remotely the right data point to focus on or compare.
Dan Wang does the same spiel on every podcast and it is always terrible and seems predicated on credulous hosts who know little about the history of either country and certainly not enough about both who just use his lame analysis to engage in this current fad of Western self-pity. Instead of reform and asking hard questions let's just throw soft balls at Dan Wang's cheap analysis that anyone with a Wikipedia level education would know is absurd so we can keep propping up the same impoverished China v America tropes.
Why don't we demand better honestly we should be ashamed that one guy can just come up with such a dubious thesis suddenly appear everywhere and no credible debate or pushback once. The only thing Dan Wang convinces me of is the poverty of the modern intellectual environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover#Mining_engineer
If we broke up Google or Amazon, suddenly we're just as bad as China!
I worked at a dev company, and we got bought by an IT company. Much pain and friction, all around. Is that a reductive representative of the company differences? Yeah, but it's still a useful mental model that helps one understand the differences. And I think the lawyer vs engineer trope is useful. Yeah we have both. Both my companies had both IT and developera, but the stakes & priorities were different enough that that lense became extremely helpful.
It's a popular trope that confirms the audiences bias's and when you do that the monkey brain gets rewarded by seeing the number in the top right go up.
Indeed. “Used to” is the key observation. In the wake of WW2, the U.S. had both dynamism and the ability and will to act collectively. This combination led to rising standards of living, the space program, Silicon Valley, the internet, etc.
The U.S. economy is still relatively dynamic, but the will to collective action has completely failed.
Europe can act collectively but lacks dynamism.
Which country, today, demonstrates both traits?
The question is about whether any of that can be meaningfully attributed to some lawyer vs engineer divide. Your question doesn't answer that in the slightest and thus I have no idea why you are asking it.
The US, on the hand, is obsessed with individual rights, and any sort of collective action that threatens those rights is extensively litigated.
This is really what Wang's thesis boils down to, and which of course it's an oversimplification, there is a kernel of truth in there.
and the hidden implication is that there's a correct trade off to be made (because engineering is about trade offs).
So what happens to those people whose gotten the bad end of the deal? If china builds a damn, the villages downstream gets moved (with small compensation that is not commensurate with the value of the dam being made).
It's also why the high speed rail in california is costing so much in the US vs something similar in china.
Isn't that a trait of the left in general?
It's easier when your government is proposing "hey, let's build all the factories the best way we can" and not "hey, let's impose illogical and continually-changing tariffs on everything and let Howard Lutnick's kids steal all the proceeds". You're right as an American to be skeptical of the government - it's not operating in your best interests unless you're one of the elite insiders. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.
China just hasn't calcified yet after workers press for better standards of safety and quality of life and maybe they won't because that's where being authoritarian comes into play. They will crush that in a way we have moved away from.
We used to build great things in the US and then we decided the blood price of 30 lives for the Brooklyn bridge or 100 for the hoover dam wasn't worth it. It's really not hard to build anything when you ignore any second order questions of impact. Why do you think certain people here want deregulation and for the EPA to go away.
A quick google shows China prioritizes speed over safety something we've decided here in the US is not acceptable.
Because wouldn't it be just totally awesome for our rivers to burn again?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...
> In 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948 and 1952 the river caught fire, writes Laura La Bella in Not Enough to Drink: Pollution, Drought, and Tainted Water Supplies. Those are some of the incidents we’re aware of; it’s hard to say how many other times oil slicks may have ignited, as press coverage and fire department records were both inconsistent. But not all the fires were as innocuous as that of 1969. Some caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage and killed people. But even with the obvious toll on the landscape, regulation of industry was limited at best. It seemed more important to keep the economy booming, the city growing and people working. This attitude was reflected in cities around the country. The Cuyahoga was far from the only river to catch fire during the period. Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Buffalo and Galveston all used different methods to disperse oil on their waters in order to prevent fires.
in regards to calcification of china your position is unclear. you say that china advances due to pressure from workers but at the same time claim that pressure from workers is irrelevant because government can crush them at will. you cant have the cake and eat it too...
Only need to look to the recent changes in Hong-Kong and the obviously hostile takeover of a democratic government to see how "pure" these changes really are.
This makes no sense. It is possible for a totalitarian government which is threatened by dissent and concepts like "democracy" to also work in the interest of improving overall quality of life.
It's the same category as: Why would a company with happy well paid workers be worried about unions and try to stop them forming.
Have you met people?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma6txLM_LLs
There is no so-called social credit system you western guys have in mind. There is a credit reporting system. It's not that different from the US credit reporting system. But it has far less of an impact on our daily lives than the US system on Americans. For example, no one asks for your credit report when you want to rent a house.
this remind me one of the ep of the TV show <newsroom> when they found so many evidence of a massacre using chemical weapons and broadcast it.. and then found out its all fake.
https://credit.fgw.sh.gov.cn/xyyj/20220902/8693d5ba378d4f578...
there is no score at all. even this article didn't talk about anything about 'score'. its no different compare to many other countries. soical credit system is a general concept.
I do wish everybody outside of china have your mindset. then we have nothing to worry about.
Get some new talking points, you're like 40 years out of date.
If you were to control for other variables I doubt there’d be much correlation. After filtering out engineers who belong to other categories with stronger associations to authoritarianism, you’re more likely to be left with the hyper-individual-freedom types than the hyper-authoritarian types.
It's not really so much one's belief system as it is what happens when one gets power -- and that's hard to predict regardless of the ideology.
This principle of relative consistency is baked into how I test employees for management and friends for trust, and in the past, roommates as well. Though I do acknowledge potential for growth as well, but in my older age I generally also need to see evidence of motivation to give strong benefit of the doubt wrt possible trajectory.
Too often libertarian means liberty for me and not for you. That's authoritarian.
Organizing the entire chain geographically at the scale you described (inter-city) doesn't bring huge cost advantages by itself. In China labor has historically been cheap, so the transport cost between regions was never the dominant factor anyway.
Most industrial clusters in China formed organically over time just like the rest of the world. Aside from some exceptions like mining, there isn't some master plan laying out entire cities as linear supply chains to the ocean It's not SimCity.
One thing you're right about is that there is less bureaucratic friction or 'lawyers' in the way when it comes to economic development. For the former, it's because economic growth is THE metric for the government, especially at the local level, so they do whatever it takes to make it happen. For the latter, it's because… well, in China no one sues the government, period. I'm not sure it's a good thing.
Disclaimer: I'm Chinese living in China.
Can a person working in a Chinese tech factory for a major US company afford a reasonable place to live a reasonable distance, food, some entertainment, and have savings?
The point is that transportation within China isn't a dominant factor in industrial cost or efficiency. So the idea that major manufacturing cities are laid out like giant assembly lines isn't nearly as important as OP suggests.
China still has many advantages over the US in manufacturing. I just don't think this is a major one, even if there's a grain of truth to it.
So, to your query, maybe somewhat? But not strictly.
The other issue is minimum wage and workers rights. It should be possible to have Chinese workers making widgets on US soil instead of Chinese soil, for $0.5/hr more than they can make in China. But that's illegal many times over.
Then people wonder why manufacturing is dying across the West. If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete, it's extremely basic. That might be acceptable but at least be honest about the trade-off you've made, and don't pretend you can patch it up with hacks.
Died a long time ago and went to hell in handbasket :(
>If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete
Houston had always been less expensive than Detroit, LA, Chicago, New England and just about anywhere else in the US for this kind of thing, but it was really the cheapness of the foreign labor that made it irresistible to Wall Street. It had always been that way but didn't really matter until after the value of the dollar had been dropped so low that they had to pay workers what amounted to exorbitant sums while the labor still ended up with less discretionary cash, and that was at the lower-value dollar.
You should have seen Houston in 1979 when the Nixon Recession was raging worse than ever, long after he had sailed into the sunset. It was no Pittsburgh[0] but there were still two steel mills and of course one of them was US Steel where they had expanded to the industrial suburb of Baytown Texas specifically because the labor was cheaper than up north.
Wall Street took that differential to the bank and lit their cigars with $100 bills :\
Eventually led to champagne and caviar with each round of layoffs.
Nixon "opened up" China, but Reagan was not yet here to put the nail in the coffin.
I agree it would take a whole lot more unfair advantages just to get closer to a level playing field.
The way to real manufacturing growth is to build much higher-value-added products per worker.
The difficult problem to overcome is that most of the low-cost raw materials have been coming from China for so long, and the ideal thing would have been coming from more than one place the whole time.
But no, the absolute cheapest must be sought.
Mexico could have been ready by now but they would have had to do it on their own in an organized way like China and India so it pales by comparison, especially high tech in spite of all the brilliant Mexican engineers and innovators.
Lower-cost labor in India might be abundant enough but it'll take a while before the supply chain can compare to what China has built with all the dollars they have had in their hands for so long.
[0] Made up for it with oil, as heavy industry goes.
... like Factorio, just in real life.
> The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation.
A lot of that is to prevent our cities from looking like China did before they haphazardly cleaned up shop before the Olympic Games. Remember all the smog alerts? Athletes being afraid the smog and pollution would impact their performance?
> How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean?
There's a tool for that, it's called tariffs - basically, make it uncompetitive for manufacturing moving off to a country that systematically undercuts pricing even at the cost of its environment.
Unfortunately, the current administration doesn't even have the concepts of a plan on what they want to achieve with tariffs. It's mind boggling to watch.
In contrast you have provided no arguments for why Apple’s leadership bears responsibility rather than Congress.
There’s a giant cultural shift that needs to happen in the U.S. to get that back—not sacrificing labor laws, like China does, but the same idea that X or Y CAN be done, and actually jumping at the chance to build stuff instead of feeling entitled to it.
We do have agency, but the agency actually starts in the U.S., in education and culture, and not with a company like Apple.
And what's "radioactively toxic and shitty"? Not wanting to slave away for low wages in bad working conditions?
Business apologists like to slander American workers, and it's tiring. Most of the "radioactively toxic and shitty" culture is management culture.
Isn't that massive? You make it seem like it's not important but look at Trump's tariffs that are connected to geopolitics. The US's relation with China could worsen to a point where certain imports are banned.
Really love your 1990s style western centric view.
Care to explain how fancy western IP is not leading in more and more techs fields, e.g. drones, EVs, renewable energy, robotics, fighter jets etc.? because western companies invested in China and gifted fancy western IPs they don't even have to China?
It's like everybody forgot that their neighbour's job depend on them.
We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys.
Free trade does result in the best prices but it has other, negative effects, and it is when we think as policy makers -- as citizens, not consumers or business owners -- that we are accountable for those effects.
Hmm, I don’t like the sound of that.
Are you talking about the small mom-n-pop shops that are only open when most people are at work, while with online shopping you can do it any time 24/7? The same mom-n-pop shops that refused to take returns, and had poor selection and would take weeks to order something for you, at a ridiculous price?
There are a lot of really good reasons online shopping has put so many stores out of business.
A huge part of that is rents. Basically, a store that owns their property outright or even on mortgage has far less worries when business turns down during a crisis. Take Covid - a year or two, depending on where you were, in more or less lockdown conditions.
A store that was owner-owned? No big deal. Staff was paid for by government assistance, not much ongoing cost for the building. Owned but mortgaged? Cut a deal with the bank, no bank wants to go through a 2007ff event again and they also got assistance for loans. But a store that was rented? Yeetie yeetie. Commercial renters have zero protections anywhere, and landlords are nonforgiving - especially when they are backed by REITs and other investment vehicles.
Recent history is filled with examples of investment funds that behave like vultures - seek out a company that has sizable owned real estate, buy stocks, force the management to sell off the real estate in a heavily biased sale-and-lease-back maneuver, put the acquisition debt on the company's ledgers, sell off the real estate and let the husk of the company wither.
Our political/ruling class wanted more of the pie for themselves, dropped the trade barriers protecting American industry, and gorged themselves on the arbitrage as manufacturing flowed to our chief geopolitcal rival, who was quite happy to accept such a generous gift.
Really the mom and pop store was set to die in the US because of car culture. You'll pay a bit more to walk to the closest store, but if you're already driving there is very little cost in driving to a store a little farther is almost nothing.
We also have many US manufacturers moving sourcing their subcomponents from overseas to save a few cents per unit, there's no way to prevent that, nobody is going to check the BOM from everything they ever buy.
I think collective behavior is a large component but it is not quite right to declare it as the primary driver.
For example, I get a 40inch TV instead of a 65 inch or I buy a set of American made screwdrivers but then I can't get a bottle of Vodka.
Most people have their basic needs met. They just want as much as possible for their money even if it harms other Americans. At the same time, if they happen to work at a factory making extension cords, they'll want people to buy their US made cords to protect their job.
Because most people are selfish when it comes to people who aren't family or friends.
The college educated white collar professionals who are grossly over-represented in policy discourse?
Middle america, the formerly industrial northeast and the former bulk industry west have been complaining about this shit policy for over a generation.
Implicitly shuttering our manufacturing and heavy industry by subjecting it to policy that we knew would make it increasingly noncompetitive at the margin and would prevent continuing investment was a macro/federal level economic policy choice that was actively pursued for approx 50yr.
This is an American quality where a person who works in a factory that makes extension cords and needs their job to survive would buy the cheaper lamp even though it's made in China.
Most people aren't willing to make financial sacrifices to help people they don't know EVEN if they might be affected by another person having the same belief.
There used to be other times and more honorable businessmen. Then came the Dodge Brothers who managed to get a court judgement asserting shareholder supremacy over long term interests [1].
The only thing I never understood is how in god's name Amazon got away with reinvesting profits and never dishing out to shareholders for decades.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
The investment in capability that is necessary to build the next generation of manufacturing capabilities in the US is simply not within the public imagination.
If the US changes their environmental regulations to match China, lowered their tax-to-GDP ratio to match China, changed their worker regulations to match China, and then opened up free immigration from Mexico for cheap factory labor then the "free" market would likely take care of opening up quite a bit more manufacturing.
It will never happen because there's too many industries and jobs that only exist because of all that regulation and will fight tooth and nail to avoid a short term haircut.
Extorting CEOs to announce investments (like the Zuckerberg hot mic incident) is not worth anything to me. Meanwhile the US has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for the last year.
This isn't "working harder".
This isn't "rebuilding infrastructure".
This isn't "training people in trades".
The numbers are so cartoonishly lopsided as to be a non-starter for categorically replacing Chinese manufacturing.
Establishing regulatory harmony across all those countries is obviously not possible in the same way it is in a single authoritarian state, but if the US made it a priority to create a trade bloc capable of replicating China’s manufacturing capacity, it probably could.
If the US wants to take on China, and actually needs Canada's help to do it -- I can assure you they just set themselves back 10-20 years from achieving that. We no longer have any interest.
The labour forces of Mexico and Canada are not at the US's disposal for these kind of games anymore. For several decades we have been exploited by the US for low wages and cheap resources -- and now there's a regime that's making cheap political points by accusing us of the opposite while trying to emmiserate our populace. So, yeah, no thanks.
it could be less economical, so Apple has to innovate to be competitive on pricing - with automation, robots, etc.
If we end up in a place where AI and automation take over then yeah I think we start looking at alternative income sources and economic system. Just like star trek predicted we would do after WW3.
If we’re serious about it, we are going to have to commit ourselves to economy-tanking tariffs (like thousands of percents) for many decades until the US worker is as poor as the Vietnamese worker.
> Apple here is the first step.
Pretty sure the much-touted Foxconn plant in Wisconsin was the first step, and just like this one it will be scaled down to a few hundred jobs as soon as possible.
This is the legacy of Tim Cook before Jobs passed. He was the guy who put immense pressure on Chinese factories to deliver on the insane quotas and timeframes he forced on them. He essentially blackmailed companies in order for them to his bidding - threatening to go to competitors if they didn't deliver exactly what he wanted.
The stuff Apple got away with in China could never be repeated here. I mean, you think you can regularly push so many workers to commit suicide, you have to put nets around the buildings in order to dissuade them from jumping off buildings? Yeah, not happening here. Which is why Apple does business there. Its why Tim Cook was able to abuse Chinese labor laws to get them to deliver the impossible, time and again, regardless of the human cost.
I think the USA has been very clear based on our actions over the past 4 or so decades: we don't want this kind of labor in this country. I don't see any material changes despite the recent puff pieces and political grandstanding.
Sure, if it took decades of slow patient effort to create the current situation, it might take decades to unwind it. And, sure, the US political system is exceptionally bad at industrial policy.
But, at the end of the day, the political and military logic is, and will be for the forseeable future, get your supply chains out of China. Just because it is slow and difficult doesn't there is any reason to believe the pressure will relax. (Putting aside the possibility of an AGI/robotics revolution)
On production lines.
Obviously this is not plan A, but their ops team is insane.
I spent a little while unsuccessfuly trying to recall the jargon or the anecdotal company-name here, but IIRC there was an early pioneer in this where a company making radios (?) tried to develop a software system that would categorize non-conforming parts so that the flaws in different pieces would cancel out.
I don't think it worked for them, at the time it was far more efficient to just spend money on improving the quality and tolerances of the parts.
This becomes less of a problem as the product matures.
The Mac Mini is a good example of a design they likely stabilized a while ago.
====
I bought a mac mini a year ago for $599. Personally, I'm pretty sure I would pay another $50 if it said "Made in the USA" on it. Maybe $80. Not sure I would pay $100.
But I worry this will prove to be like when Daimler bought Chrysler and shipped the Crossfire fully assembled except the rims, which were bolted on in the US so they could say it was "made in the USA". They only sold 76,014 and now Daimler extracted itself from Chrysler, so maintaining them has become a bespoke hobby.
If I was in the apple ecosystem (I prefer PCs with Linux, Android), I would pay $100-200 more for a mac mini made in the USA if there were actual benefits, like most of the additional cost went to paying domestic labor, better parts availability, better repairability, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43787647
You can't compare different products across different brands, the whole point is to compare the exact same product made in two different locations.
I admit I'm probably an outlier, but in terms of durable goods, I'd pay 30-50% more for lots of things if they were "made in the USA" or "made in Canada" (any western country) and it meant something - like, better parts availability, repairability, documentation, support, etc. Not all of them, but something - AND, it was paying domestic imports / reducing imports.
I'm not living paycheck to paycheck, but I'm not wealthy.
> Never ever support authoritarian regimes!
(Speaking as an American)... you sure about that?
> and it meant something - like, better parts availability, repairability, documentation, support, etc.
But remember, this bit isn't related to the country that assembled the product, it has much more to do with the company and brand doing the post-sales support, marketing, and the rest of the customer-facing stuff. The Mac mini isn't getting a better post-sale experience just because it's going to be assembled in Houston. The product and company are identical.
Finally, I think it may be worth recognizing that there's a growing perception that Chinese products are the best ones, just like how people felt about many American products built in the post-WW2 era. I would subscribe to this perception that Chinese products are more likely to be good than products made in many other countries. They just have the ecosystem and the most expansive, skilled high volume manufacturing on the planet.
Apple (and all the other multinationals) are tied to manufacturing in nations with cheap labor.
China is far from the only nation with cheap labor.
> India now accounts for approximately 25 percent of global iPhone production, up from single digits just a few years ago.
https://manufacturing-today.com/news/apple-moves-quarter-of-...
https://preview.redd.it/always-loved-the-design-of-the-mac-m...
so maybe that's the reason they chose it. They just designed a new iteration in 2024, so maybe they don't expect much change for a while.
Thomas Friedman talks about this after his most recent visit to China. Where China excels is through rapid supply chain development by fierce regional competition among several (state-supported/sponsored/seeded?) competitors.
Also he talks about this on The Ezra Klein Show.
https://archive.ph/vGBjd
Do we not recognize that western governments do this too? Do we not recognize that western banks and VC firms are quasi-state institutions? Do we not see western countries continually subsidize businesses by lowering corporate tax rates and giving out cheap loans?
The US government was giving out $7500 per car to buy EVs and the US carmakers still got demolished by better Chinese products.
It’s like the western zeitgeist can’t accept that China is simply out-competing them on pure merit.
It’s not possible for China to have every business be state-subsidized and running a loss. At some point the truth is that China is getting wealthy by selling the most competitive goods. It doesn’t matter that the state “subsidizes” it because the money for the subsidy comes from selling the best and most competitive products.
Even if you paid 5% more for materials for an iphone but could pay 50% less for labor than China, you could probably beat China.
How does the state sponsoring come in? The state represses the people and the wages and prevents them from leaving for greener pastures in many cases, which benefits the corporations.
I don't buy this argument.
Sure, labor protections in China are weak, but let's use our mirrors: the US has no guaranteed paid time off of any kind, it has unions on paper only, 1 in 10 Americans have no health insurance, and it's nearly the only country where medical bankruptcy exists as a concept. The largest employer in the US runs a scheme where their workers are intentionally kept part-time with low enough wages to need SNAP assistance and other social safety net programs, as well as avoiding any obligation to provide health insurance, effectively subsidizing their corporate profits with tax dollars. America's middle class has been shrinking via housing, healthcare, and education cost inflation while China's middle class has been growing as its industries have continually moved further up the value chain.
"China is just cheap labor" is a last-Millennium viewpoint. China is a manufacturing ecosystem where you can walk into a physical marketplace and find rows of vendors with skilled technicians who all know how to work on electronic or machinery or other manufacturing skills, where they offer services like chip-level NAND upgrades where they solder on storage upgrades to your iPhone while you wait.
China is now a country where you would pay a price premium to buy their products over competitors.
The US government absolutely does not do what China does in this case. But the reason for my paranthesis and question mark was that I was not sure what call it.
With a 400m head start in a 1600m race. It's a whole lot easier to out-compete somebody when you know the government will backstop you even if you misstep.
Solar and battery technology were two of those areas. China absolutely dumped cheap, mostly inferior solar cells on everybody else to wipe out competing manufacturers until they caught up. And China absolutely subsidized local battery consumption until their manufacturers had critical mass and market share. Even now, the RISC-V ecosystem mostly relies on China funding students to do the grunt work of porting everything over.
This is a smart thing. We used to do stuff like this in the US. (See: VHSIC, VLSI project, Sematech, etc.)
And now, BYD appears to be, at this point, simply a superior manufacturer and it doesn't appear to be close. It absolutely grinds my gears that I have to root for BYD to come into the US and bankrupt the automotive companies to finally move their asses, but we have been here before--back in the 1970s with Japan producing better cars.
You mean like how the US government constantly bails out and props up the American car companies?
Um, yes? Did I stutter? Do you have bad reading comprehension? Are you using an AI?
Precisely what part of "we have been here before--back in the 1970s with Japan producing better cars" did you miss?
This isn't going to happen. The US government these days does not care about investment in things like infrastructure or education.
it's cool and all that boston dynamics can do what they do, but i wonder if one reason why the chinese robotics industry is so advanced is because they've been able to test in production on real production lines, experiment with dark factories and learn a ton in the process.
it's kind of funny when you think about it. both the west and east are facing down the same set of potential problems that come with real automation of industries that have served as true economic dynamos for decades.
Yes, it's a good thing to have domestic advanced manufacturing, but this probably doesn't qualify.
According to the article, it's a site where they already assemble servers for Apple's own use, and will now start assembling Mac Minis as well. Electronics assembly is, for the most part, a pretty low-value part of the supply chain.
It's not nothing, but it pales in comparison to the scientific and technological sophistication and financial value of wafer fabs and IC test and packaging facilities. (I worked at Intel's flagship fabs in Oregon, and have worked as a consultant with other semi fabs around the world.)
https://toolguyd.com/malco-eagle-grip-locking-pliers-final-u...
If I was interested in "performative local manufacturing" I'd also build my own servers, it has the least economic impact.
They'll also hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony with maximum fanfare, at which they'll be sure to fawn over Donald Trump, let him ramble at length, and maybe give him some sort of shiny award.
Let's call it The Steve Jobs American Technology Greatness Prize. It'll be a blindingly flashy PVD-gold-plated 12" silicon wafer with a Mount Rushmore-style portrait of Jobs and Trump etched into it.
Yes.
That’s what rebuilding capability looks like.
China built dense supply chains over decades. Of course iteration was faster.
Hard isn’t a reason not to do it.
It’s what happens when you’ve optimized for margin and optics and performance instead of resilience.
The US does a lot of manufacturing, second only to China, but not low margin stuff that isn't economic.
Trying to "bring back" that sort of thing is idiotic and is entirely performative and induced by the current incompetent administration.
China is a genuine threat but the right solution is to move it to other friendlier countries instead of losing money trying to do it in the US.
Stupid is a reason not to do it.
What they stopped manufacturing was menial and low-end product; because it's not price-effective to have 100 Americans sit on an assembly line and solder SMT components for $7-18/hr. Instead, those potential workers pivoted into service jobs and office work.
1 - https://www.safeguardglobal.com/resources/blog/top-10-manufa...
This statement is as inaccurate as the comment you’re trying to debunk. The fact is that China leveraged it’s low-end manufacturing work to work its way up the chain and now is the leader in many areas: https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outper.... E.g. China has been investing heavily in radar technology and as a result has air to air missiles with comparable range to the U.S. https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/why_the_us_is_alar...
There are synergies to having the high end stuff and the low end stuff in the same place. The story of IBM developing System 360 mentions the benefit from the ladies who wound the wire core memory and the guys who designed the computer on the same campus in New York. We gave that up when we outsourced the “menial” stuff abroad.
China at this point is hard in automation, beyond anything the US has. China is well past the peak of sweatshops.
As someone in the manufacturing space in the US, the biggest issue we have in the US is that manufacturing continues to die. Any manufacturing we have left is the old guard dying off. It comes from a range of issues from companies refusing to invest in younger employees, to the cost of real estate (both buy or rent) for commercial properties being absurd..
The reason we can’t do manufacturing is because Wall Street demands capital light business models.
That, in turn, is an outcome of being the global reserve currency.
Not at the (AI) moment.
I think some more "low margin" computer and chip manufacturing would be healthy.
And quite frankly, who gives a fuck if top owners and investors get maximum returns, boo hoo they got 4% return instead of 8%, that is still far better than the average working class's deal. Our entire problem is a suffering middle and lower classes that need decent work, they will still be happy even if the product they make is a bit lower margin because they are paid hourly, not paid by dividends and stock options which is where all the higher margins profits go. Average citizens pay has not correlated with increased company profits, and increased company profits isn't what makes society stable, so the investor class is going to have to suck it up and take the hit unless they want their entire house of cards to collapse.
The reason we don’t invest in manufacturing is because of requirements for return on capital.
Ask yourself why GM is doing massive stock buybacks in the era of global transition to electric cars. Why aren’t they using these huge sums of cash to invest in the next generation of products and instead literally just sending the money out the door?
The address I found for the facility is 9101 Windmill Park Lane Hudson, TX 77064
This seems ill advised given recent events like Hurricane Harvey
Some of the calculus is not about if it will flood it's about if you'll lose your investment if it floods. If an underwriter is willing to cover it, you might go for it anyway.
All this tracks. Anyone else getting bombarded with WSJ youtube videos about Apple manufacturing?
Flooding is also something which can be mitigated: build foundations to be taller, work with the topography to avoid the path of water, and build drainage solutions. You should see the drainage field that Apple built for their campus in Austin, it's absolutely massive and can divert an incredible amount of water.
It’s not limited to mega corps. Commercial construction is built to a higher standard. Some times you can buy commercial grade hardware and materials for your house if you want.
Larger buildings are also more robust at the foundation because it needs to be so much stronger. That thick concrete is necessary, not a luxury.
[1] https://pangea-network.com/busiest-and-biggest-ports-in-the-...
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/economy/article/ap...
I grew up in DFW.
My house in WI is assessed at a significantly higher value than my siblings house in Ft Worth.
My 2025 property tax bill ~$5k, my 2025 state income tax - not gonna publish it here but not all that significant.
Sibling in Texas property tax bill: ~$14k. Significantly higher than my state income tax + property tax.
Also, I don't have to live in Texas.
Steve Jobs would have fired someone over that obvious broken window situation, and he'd have been (mostly) right to do so.
In the video there are Chinese characters on the clothing above the front pocket area. In a picture of her later on in the news article the Chinese writing is gone.
Has it been photoshopped out for the press release images?
512 with M4 Max is only a little above a dual Epyc with 192 cores each though.
Is that assembly really in the US? Asking because the woman in the first shot appeared to have Chinese letters on the left side of her uniform.
Because the video is of the workers in that specific factory, and they’ll only start producing the Mac mini there later in the year. It’s in the title. You can’t show real video of something which hasn’t happened yet.
I have seen exactly that, thanks to AI...
We're going to have to teach our children this concept about discerning the AI slop their grandparents flood Facebook with :')
Foxconn bought it last year: https://communityimpact.com/houston/cy-fair-jersey-village/d...
EDIT: a screenshot from the video: https://imgur.com/a/X3t4crC
"Think Different" -> "Think Indifferent"
Increasing for sure with different uses and possibilities.
I'm excited for these to fall into collectors hands in a decade or two.
Like the rest of HN (maybe it's HN's fault!) I managed to convince myself that I not only needed a Mac Mini desktop but also a 4090 rig for AI.
The 4090 hasn't been booted up in 9 months and the Mac Mini is now the world's most amazing 10GBE NAS server. My older M1 Max Macbook Pro and underpowered newer Macbook Air are the only things I use.
It's funny how we convince ourselves we need things. I bought myself a 3080 Ti a few years ago because I wanted a gaming computer, but then I ended up buying a Playstation 5 and not using my computer for anything more intensive than Factorio. More recently though I have been using my 3080 for Comfy UI image generation and messing around with local models, so I guess it's getting use now.
If you want to humiliate me conclusively, throw me some numbers. LLMs have moved trillions worth of hardware value, but only a fraction of it is Apple branded.
Apple is amazing at marketing to make 1990s technology sound cutting edge. I'm sure they change something for plausible deniability, as a nominalist, not even 2 of the same computers are the same.
A VPS that can perform like a Mac mini will likely cost the same as a Mac mini in 12 months time.
Gosh I wish I could hire their marketing company.
Both my fortune 20 company and my buddy got these for LLMs... and the champion/my buddy had the look of shame when it wasnt usable.
What's likely to happen is Mac minis for North America will be made in Houston. Otherwise, the ones for the rest of the world will be made at the same facilities they are now.
Just like iPhones for the US are made in India; iPhones for the rest of the world are made in China.
Together with robotics push , it has a chance , and even they do small things . Today they make body , tomorrow cpu , etc it’s a good thing going on regardless of politics
The US built a high margins service economy.
This is two steps backwards, no step forwards sort of a deal.
The US has no national interest in the Mac Mini, or the Mac Pro for that matter. Homeland security isn't reliant on Apple datacenters. The Mac comprises less than 10% of Apple's yearly revenue, almost lower-profit than the iPad. Manufacturing Macs in the US doesn't even secure your pension.
The iPhone comprises a minor national interest corollary to Apple's stock price, but that's never being onshored. Apple would go bankrupt paying Americans to assemble the iPhone, and if you don't believe me then Google the leaked BOMs.
These things just take a lot of time, there are tremendous headwinds to fight, and the US government + US media increasingly seems unable to see through projects past the next election cycle.
Lots of billionaires in the US, got that way, by exporting all their production to China. Because they did it, lots of lower-tier people had to do the same, or go out of business.
Since we worship billionaires, that little bit never seems to get mentioned, as it makes them look bad.
The only cure is to cost some of those billionaires money.
Ain't gonna happen.
But that was the entire point of the Trump tariffs? Or am I missing something here?
If "can't have been made in any capacity in Texas" is your criteria that might be pretty difficult.
They also use Anthropic internally (code/marketing/sales) which runs their models on Cerebras so they also seem to be agnostic so runs on the same Apple hardware.
Either of these devices (per watt of computing power) could become a home appliance pretty easily.
> Apple's work on a new Mac mini factory in Houston wasn't a quickly-conceived plan to appease President Donald Trump. The reality is that Apple had a plan ready to do this long before the demands started.
Remember that, after World War I, the U.S. had most demobilized its military. The Japanese had more aircraft carriers than the U.S. in 1941. That’s why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor—it thought it could win!
But while the U.S. was weak militarily, it had been the largest industrial producer since the late 19th century. Within a couple of years of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had built a bigger air force and navy than the rest of the world combined.
That’s why it’s better to be able to make Mac Minis in Houston. Because you can repurpose those facilities to produce electronics for warships instead of having to buy parts from countries you might be at war with.
I don't think Apple wouldn't find a cheaper place to manufacture Macs than the US. The US is literally the most expensive place to build.
That, or the Mac Minis are 100% asembled by robots, which is also a possibility.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
> https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-invest-american-manufacturing...
> https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/08/06/apple-exempt-from...
Apple Manufacturing Academy opens in Detroit on August 19 — https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/07/apple-manufacturing-a...
Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud — https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Screw
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/09/apples-new-mac-pro-to...
This is not in response to OpenClaw. It takes a long time to plan a new manufacturing facility.
The Mac Mini is a natural place to start training at a new facility because it's their simplest product.
Mac Minis are also around 1% of Apple's device sales. Even with an OpenClaw-inspired burst of sales, it's still a small part of their volume.
Apple doesn't break out the Mac sales by product, but the latest estimates is it's 5% [1] of total Mac sales.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/23/mac-mini-us-manufacturi...
Right, but it's closer to 1% of total device sales like I said in my comment.
Macs are only part of their device lineup, of course.
Update: For the record I do hate the POTUS. He’s ruined our reputation around the world. Allowed things like USAID to die removing aid from millions leading to many deaths. He’s incompetent and very stupid which will likely get us killed either in some war or in the next pandemic. Tarrifs are a tax. Congress raises taxes. If you support his right to tax without congress then go live under a king. I’m an American. We don’t want kings. Need I go on?
And hating POTUS for what he’s doing to the country is my right as an American. We weren’t perfect. But we were at least respected. Now the world laughs at us.
He works for me. And you. And he’s doing a garbage job at his job. Why continue to give him a free pass. Would you give someone like this in your team a pass?
Here’s hoping his managers (congress) fires him (impeaches) him.
As stated, it is offensive
You need to do appeasement as needed. Business is business.
Now, you might disagree on whether blocking immigration from unsuccessful countries is a good thing or not. Maybe you disagree that those immigrants will bring the problems of their home countries to the U.S. But many prior Presidents have promised to do this and until Trump they have all failed.
I believe that the premise of the immigration laws is correct—that exceeding certain levels of immigration harms society for various reasons that have nothing to do with protecting sunscreen sales—just as Clinton and Obama claimed to do.
Again, you can disagree with the premise. But my entire life I saw presidential candidates promise to fix this particular problem, and Trump succeeded.
Margin is the wrong way to look at it. Law and finance are high margin work. But lawyers won’t help you win a war.
We’ve got to get you some better sources, mate. This is a straight-up Russian propagandist pretending to operate out of the UK while having a mailing address in South Korea.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/military-watch-magazine-bias/
I’m on the right side of history. Are you?
Great performance, quiet, efficient.
It would be tough to get a windows machine at that price that gets anywhere close on performance, especially if you consider the cost of electricity.
Great parent/grandparent machines, home servers.
Not that tough. I paid $299 for a Ryzen 5800h mini PC last year, which roughly lands in the same performance bracket.
Would have considered the Mac Mini, but the AMD box has much better Linux support.
Not really. And this is before the M5 Mac mini which ships later this year.
Putting it together in desktop‑mini form factors:
- Raw CPU: M4 is much faster single‑core, generally faster multi‑core at lower power.
- GPU: M4’s iGPU is roughly 2×+ Vega 8 and more modern.
- Memory subsystem: M4 has far higher bandwidth and unified memory, ideal for integrated GPU and many modern workloads.
- Efficiency/noise: M4 wins by a large margin; much higher perf per watt.
- Compatibility: 5800H wins if you need bare‑metal x86 OSes like FreeBSD or specific x86‑only software stacks.
- 5800H: 35–54 W configurable TDP in laptops; mini‑PC implementations often run it fairly hot to maintain clocks.
- M4 in Mac mini: ~24 W base TDP, ~40 W boost, but getting clearly higher performance per watt.
The mini would save $87/year. That's a 3.5y breakeven assuming no reinvestment.
To reiterate, this is absolutely a comparable machine to the Mac Mini in terms of performance. Maybe not your ideal configuration, but I had $300 and a limited patience for Asahi development.
Reiterating is not the appropriate response after someone has already detailed many ways in which the performance a 5800h is not in the same league, none of which you have even attempted to refute.
The more truthful claim you could have made is that you don't need the extra performance (far more plausible, given that you bought a new machine with a four year old chip), or that you needed storage capacity more than you needed performance.
Also: "In Houston, workers assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S."
Advanced AI servers!
Mac Mini is their simplest product. It's the natural place to start training at a new facility.
> Advanced AI servers!
Yes, they have their own AI servers.
How can it be simpler than the Apple TV?
Apple invented Advanced AI Servers! So much more advanced!
Just like in the 2000s when the G4 Mac was a "supercomputer".
Seems to me this part of the PR release is a reference to claudbot/openclaw. What else could it be referring to?
If you genuinely can't find out what they are referring to, you've been on HN too long.
Plex started as a Mac-only XBMC fork during this era. There were also apps like Remote Buddy which let you control pretty much everything with the simple remote that came with the Mac. Apparently Remote Buddy still exists and works with the current gen Siri Remote.
Arm64 is still limited for sure, but with Snapdragon and Windows finally committing to ARM I think the future is bright for that. Just not here yet.
Are you thinking of plugging in actual consumer expansion cards, or are you wanting the lanes broken out on some kind of riser where they can go to hardwired stuff on a carrier board?
Directly exposing literal PCIe signals cuts out the pair of expensive Thunderbolt controllers.
What is the final judgement about this?
For example, on a military level, the US is concerned about how rapidly China is catching up in naval capacity, China is building new warships far faster than the US can. And it's hard not to notice that China's overall shipbuilding capacity is more than 200x higher than America's.
The US has a lot of pride over having been "the arsenal of democracy" in WW2, and it's well known that a huge part of why the US was effective in that war was sheer mass: the US simply made much more war 'stuff' than any other combatant. But if the US was to get in a shooting war with China today, it would likely be China that would enjoy an advantage in production scale, with the US trying to make do with fewer vehicles and munitions.