Some Apple iMacs "Assembled In America" 279
whisper_jeff writes "A number of newly-purchased standard units are showing an "Assembled in America" notation. While the markings don't necessarily mean that Apple is in the midst of transferring its entire assembly operation from China to the U.S., it does indicate that at least a few of the new iMacs were substantially assembled domestically."
But... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
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I wonder if they mean.. we take it out of bulk packaging and put it into consumer packaging ;-) (sarcasm)
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
The article goes into detail about how customs officials are not amused by things like that. "more than screwdriver assembly" is required.
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The article goes into detail about how customs officials are not amused by things like that. "more than screwdriver assembly" is required.
Not a problem when we're talking about new Macs. Where's the glue gun?
City of USA (Score:2)
TFA notes the language "Assembled in the USA" so that's pretty clear.
Back in the 1950s Japan was plowsharing the remainder of it's WW II manufacturing plants into manufacturing cheap stamped-metal toys and gadgets, largely for export. "Made in Japan" was synonymous with cheap and shoddy. (This was when they were bootstrapping themselves out of the rubble, before they adopted Demming principles and became noted for high-quality, instead, starting with optics and cameras.)
I hear that, during that time, a sm
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not sure what's your point? Is it a good thing or a bad thing that Apple is moving some parts of the manufacture of their computers to USA?
Oh, look, the ocean is wet and the sky is tall.
And why the hell is it modded informative?
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Seeing as you've been on slashdot a while, I'd expect you to recognize "angry agreement points" when you see them.
They just haven't gotten around to adding "+1 What He Said!" yet. ;)
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
they're labor cost are still inadequate compared to production
Unless Union members are the ones responsible for the increased productivity (as opposed to the robotics engineers, business process analysts, etc.), how could you possibly think they are due any increased pay based on their increased production? Even if Union members are responsible for some of the increases in productivity, if they were being paid by the company while they were devising ways to improve productivity then they are still not entitled to increased pay (other than raises based on merit, but Unions are generally against that).
If Unions were doing their own productivity research based on money obtained from Union dues, then I completely agree that Union members should share in the extra profit that comes from the increased productivity.
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An interesting outcome of this line of thinking is that at some point all human needs could be met by robot production: but all the production will go to the roboticists and businessmen who rolled them out, and not to anybody else.
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The Star Trek episodes presuppose some kind of distribution of that wealth, though. It's quite possible to have a dystopian version of a post-scarcity economy, where the technology exists to produce anything, but only one social class has control of it, and other people are basically their serfs. (In fact I'm pretty sure there are some good dystopian sci-fi books about this.)
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It's not something I've thought a lot about, but I wonder how that might happen. I guess that's what fiction is good for.
Star Trek obviously looked at it the other way, where the technology removed the issue of wealth distribution entirely. For a social class to maintain exclusive control of a technology with a low barrier to ownership would be pretty difficult, I'd think. For instance I'm trying to imagine our world, but where only a few, very wealthy people could maintain exclusive ownership and use of ou
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
Works of fiction dealing with this include ..
* Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" - not so bad, actually, the lower classes at least get free subsistence goods
Cory Doctorow
* Printcrime - short story, imprisonment for using your printer to print copyrighted goods
* Makers
Charles Stross
* Singularity Sky - deals with a society that deliberately withholds molecular manufacturing technology from it's people, and what happens when it drops from the sky one day (literally)
Mashall Brain
* Manna - short story, two possible outcomes of robot labour (internment camps for the poor, and the Star Trek type utopia)
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This is why we should have a political system in place that would include minimum wages and inflation correction on those minimum wages. The fact of the matter is that the government of a country has a duty to define what it thinks is a decent minimum standard of living for its citizens, and the accompanying infrastructure needed to uphold that.
In my view people should see their pay, at the very least if it's minimum wage, increase at the same rate as inflation across the board. This is the only way you can
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Or they the land was taken by force by an ancestor and inhereted. This argument stand as long as capital is the fruit of one's work. This might be the case, but no so aften I think...
It doesn't take work to take land by force? Warfare has done a pretty good job of ensuring that land is in the hands of more productive societies, since wars are generally won by the society that can fund a better army.
But like I said in my post, if they keep their argument purely based on morality then it is at least intriguing. I still disagree, but if you are a pacifist and believe that property taken and kept by force is not deserved, I do believe that is a valid point to be made.
And what does inherit
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Providing work is every bit as important as providing money. Without work there is no result, period.
I never said that labor is not valuable, but any blanket statemen saying that labor is more imporant, just as important, or less important than money is just silly. A year of my labor is far more valuable than a 1990 Ford truck. But it is far less valuable than a 4000 square foot home (in my neighborhood at least), or a 400 acre farm.
While it is true that without work there is no result, the exact same thing can be said for capital. My programming ability is useless without a computer. My ability to coo
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Over the past 30 years, wages in the U.S. have remained flat while productivity has doubled. So the average worker is producing twice as much for the same pay. Where do you think all of that extra free production capacity goes?
A problem is measuring productivity in monetary value. If prices go up and expenses down, it will look like a productivity increase.
Lead article the The Atlantic this month (Score:5, Informative)
This month the lead is Comeback: Why the future of industry is in America [theatlantic.com]
We saw this some years ago when NASDAQ started insourcing, after realizing they'd overshot when doing outsourcing. Now it's visible in companies like Emerson and Apple.
--dave
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So these ones will run, what? $8000 to offset Union Labor costs?
You have to pay the longshoremen's union to take it off the container ships whether the parts are assembled in the USA or China. And it doesn't say which state has the assembly facility; there ARE non-union states, actually. Anyway, the biggest reason computer parts are manufactured overseas (China) is the absolutely horrible pollution [chinahush.com].
But by shipping the parts to the USA to be assembled by some robots, people can get a warm fuzzy feeling for having bought a domestic made product.
RTW is defective: no employer unions are affected. (Score:2)
there ARE non-union states, actually
Which use that status to have work in forms (such as the employer's union of contract/temp/agency labor) that would not pass muster in worker-friendly - that is, non-RTW - states.
I wonder how much of a fan of RTW those states would be if they had to give employer unions(temporary, contract, agency labor) the same provisions of "not forced to accept as a condition of employment".
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WTF... Did you just call unions "worker-friendly"? Unions are only friendly to unionized workers. They exist to keep non members from working. Union strikes are effective only because people who would be happy to work are kept out by laws preventing them from being hired. Laws requiring union membership are the equivalent of Jim Crow laws.
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
Assembled in USA, not America - Big difference! (Score:5, Informative)
The summary and title are misleading. If you read the article, the pictures clearly shows "Assembled in USA". My first thought when I saw "Assembled in America" was that Foxconn has facilities in Brazil now - so perhaps it was really "Assembled in South America". But, no, it really is in the USA. Very cool, Apple.
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Let's hope it means "in the United States of America" and not some town in a faraway land named "usa" that they've chose to capitalize the letters.
Re:Assembled in USA, not America - Big difference! (Score:5, Funny)
Japan, not China... 1960's (Score:2, Informative)
There is a town in Japan named "Usa" [wikipedia.org] and back in the 1960's, transistor radios were made there and had a "MADE IN USA" label on them. They did not rename the town to USA, "Usa" was always been its name.
The fact that items made there were imported into the USA bearing the label is true. My parents ran a radio & television shop in the mid-late 1960's and I saw these little Japanese transistor radios with the "MADE IN USA" labels first-hand, and even owned one myself as a child.
Re:Japan, not China... 1960's (Score:5, Informative)
The fact that items made there were imported into the USA bearing the label is true.
FALSE.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/usa.asp [snopes.com]
Re:Japan, not China... 1960's (Score:4, Informative)
You should probably read the Snopes reference link from your wikipedia article, which makes it very clear that USA, Japan never exported anything as "Made in USA." That transistor radio may have been imported through Saipan thus getting the made in USA label, but it didn't get that label from USA, Japan. That was never done.
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[puts hands to mouth and whispers]
Jack Donaghy: orphans.
Re:Assembled in USA, not America - Big difference! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/usa.asp [snopes.com]
The Usa Shrine was built there in the 8th century so the time traveler who managed to name or rename it for such a nefarious plot had to have arrived somewhat earlier.
It's a very pretty place.
http://www.city.usa.oita.jp/ [usa.oita.jp]
Re:Assembled in USA, not America - Big difference! (Score:5, Insightful)
However, Apple ][, ][+, Macintoshes up to at least the SE and Mac II, were all made in the USA.
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They were much too far ahead of their time, so they were stored for a while until the world caught up to Apple.
Re:Assembled in USA, not America - Big difference! (Score:5, Informative)
From 1976-1981, Apple manufactured all Apple computers in the U.S. They had plants in Fremont, CA, Elk Grove, CA, and Carrollton, TX.
In 1981, they opened plants in Cork, Ireland, and Singapore to serve the European and Asian markets, respectively.
In 1984, a second plant was built in Fremont exclusively for Mac production. The Cork factory also switched over to making Macs.
In 1985, John Sculley took over from Steve Jobs and one of his first actions as CEO was to shut down the three original plants, leaving only the three in Fremont, Cork, and Singapore.
In 1991, Apple opened another new U.S. plant in Fountain, CO.
In 1992, the second Fremont plant was downsized and most of its operations were moved to Sacramento. That same year, a new plant was built in India, and the Elk Grove plant was doubled in size to accommodate a motherboard/logicboard factory. I recall that the last batch of Macs rolled out of Fremont in 1998 or 1999 before the plant itself was shuttered.
1992 is the watershed year. From then until 1994, Apple began downsizing its U.S. manufacturing and, in turn, expanding its operations in Ireland.
Today, all of the Apple-owned plants are gone, except for Elk Grove and Cork. Apple now relies on external vendors in several locations: Texas, Czech Republic, Singapore, South Korea, China, and Brazil.
I'm guessing that the new U.S.-assembled Macs are made in Elk Grove and by the contractor in Texas.
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Besides built-to-order machines, the 21.5-inch iMacs are some of the first known examples of an Apple computer being assembled in the U.S., according to Fortune.
Also, Fortune is wrong.
The "Apple I" is actually the first known example of an Apple computer being assembled in the US.
I remember, Apple hired US housewives to assemble their first computers.
Misdirection (Score:4, Insightful)
I couldn't care less about where it was assembled. The parts are still made in China, which is where the quality is real labor comes from. I'll be impressed if they open up actual factories here in the US, and stop using Ireland to funnel cheaper tax rates.
What are you typing on? (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't care less about where it was assembled. The parts are still made in China
If you cared about both things then you had better not be typing on a computer less than twenty years old.
Otherwise why are you harping on Apple for slowly shifting some assembly AND manufacture (remember they make chips in Texas) to the U.S. and giving every other company a free pass?
It's obvious it's going to take some time to move much of the whole process back to the U.S., if it can be done at all. At least Apple is trying.
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The reason that Apple gets singled out is because they go to such lengths to make sure you see the "Designed by Apple in California" every time you open one of their products, to trigger the "rah rah USA company!" emotional response. If they didn't go to such lengths to intentionally manipulate people, and also if they didn't position themselves as a premium brand when, in fact, their shit is made out of the same components and made in the same facilities as everybody else's shit, they might have a justifi
Re:What are you typing on? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they actually design their stuff in California, unlike every other brand?
Seriously, that chip on your shoulder? Doesn't it get heavy?
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Why bother labeling it at all? Apple's not the only one to design machines in the US. But they are, AFAIK, the only ones to label them accordingly.
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If you cared about both things then you had better not be typing on a computer less than twenty years old.
Gee, I don't know.. every computer I have owned for my entire adult life has been assembled in America, with American labor, and extremely reasonable work hours...
....on my kitchen table.
I *still* don't give a fuck where your computer was assembled.
Re:Misdirection (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure this is directed to all large multi-national companies and not just Apple, right? Or is the old adage, "Haters going to hate." in full effect here?
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What do you mean large multinationals? It's pretty difficult to buy diverse electronic parts manufactured outside Asia no matter who you are.
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I couldn't care less about where it was assembled. The parts are still made in China, which is where the quality is real labor comes from. I'll be impressed if they open up actual factories here in the US, and stop using Ireland to funnel cheaper tax rates.
I bet you the parts were actually made in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. If the iMac is anything like the iPad [economist.com], China has little high tech industry to contribute to it, just cheap human labor. Those three countries make most of the parts and get more money than China out of the purchase price. China gets all the crap because its the last stop before sale and has its name on the product.
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Apple do assemble in Ireland too. My iMac G5 with iSight says "Assembled in Ireland", as do many BTO products.
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A big step across a big ocean.
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The rest of the world has income taxes too, mostly much higher than in the US, especially on higher incomes.
VAT is additional. Of course most countries have public funding of health care, higher education, and other services that are mostly private in the US.
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Liar! Freightliners have more than 4 wheels!
Assembled in USA... (Score:3, Funny)
1. Design product in California ...
2. Outsource assembly to China
3. Import product
4. Assemble the BOX in America, stamp "assembled in the USA" on it
5. Put the chinese product in the US-MADE BOX !
6.
7. PROFIT !
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Given that Caterpillar will screw with their workers at the drop of the hat, no wonder they're low.
In addition, some of those low wages were a result of unionbusting firms that brought in desperate labor.
Nothing new for CTO (Score:5, Informative)
This has been the case for Configure-to-order (CTO) Macs for a long time.
Basically, bulk shipping across the Pacific is cheap; point-to-point shipping across the Pacific is expensive.
Stock-model PCs can be shipped on the proverbial slow boat en masse to a US distribution center, essentially in a convoy, and then unloaded and shipped UPS/Fedex to your door when you order them. You only have to wait for delivery from the dist center, since appropriately configured models are arriving every day.
When you CTO a Mac, a unit has to be specifically configured to your spec before it can be shipped to you. If this were done in China, it would have to be air-freighted directly to your address from China, which is horrendously expensive. (Shipping the unit by boat would take forever.)
I have seen this done even when the "configuration" is to include the full-format wired keyboard instead of the wireless compact keyboard. Apple's fulfillment process basically breaks down to not-custom-at-all (= China) or any-customization-no-mater-how-minor (= US) For US customers, at least. I think they also had a similar operation in Cork Ireland at one time.)
So instead, when you CTO, the manufacturer bulk-ships enclosures, motherboards, LCD panels, and such to a US fulfillment center, then snaps the right pieces together to complete your order. It is quite literally assembly of the system. (About as much work as building your own PC from components from Newegg, I would say.)
I would guess that most PC vendors do much the same thing, but since typical PC towers are much more easily configurable than an Apple iMac, they probably have to do even less work stateside.
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I've personally ordered four Macs, all build to order, over the last ten years. They've all been FedExed from Shanghai (to Alaska, flying over my head to Tennessee, then back to me). Ditto iPods, including some that were engraved.
It's also very unlikely that the kind of BTO options Apple provides would qualify for an "Assembled in the USA" marking. Adding memory, changing the hard drive, etc. are not sufficient.
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I'm pretty sure they use more hubs now, but the OP should know where it went, since he could see the tracking info.
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Shanghai => AK => Memphis, TN => ceoyoyo
ceoyoyo is somewhere between AK and TN.
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Re:Nothing new for CTO (Score:5, Funny)
Every house, particularly those with children, should have a globe. Mine are next to each other on the book shelf, about ten feet away at the moment.
Its great that they're reading the globe, but should you really keep your children on the book shelf like that?
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Air freight is expensive, unless you pre-allocate so much capacity that the operators give you amazing rates.
Apple are famous for one holiday season pre-purchasing so much additional air freight that PC manufacturers were left stranded because there were no more spots left on the planes.
Apple (historically) have used Singapore and then China as their manufacturing base and CTO machines are configured to your spec - quite literally, your order goes into a queue and the next machine off the assembly line is c
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but since typical PC towers are much more easily configurable than an Apple iMac, they probably have to do even less work stateside.
I think that's understating matters somewhat. Just to get the "case" open requires a heat gun, numerous guitar picks, and the patience of Jove to not damage anything. Replacing the RAM consists of a total disassembly of the entire system, removing every last piece, and there are several design decisions that the only explanation for is to make it more difficult for even the most experience disassembler to gain access to. With a PC case, the most you usually need is a phillips-head screwdriver, standard size
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... requires a heat gun, numerous guitar picks, and the patience of Jove to not damage anything.
Sounds like a comic super hero: Have no fear, IT Guitarman is here!
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While the markings don't necessarily mean that Apple is in the midst of transferring its entire assembly operation from China to the U.S., it does indicate that at least a few of the new iMacs were substantially assembled domestically. Besides built-to-order machines, the 21.5-inch iMacs are some of the first known examples of an Apple computer being assembled in the U.S., according to Fortune.
From the linked article [cnn.com]:
What's odd about Gong's iMac is that it was a stock, off-the-shelf, entry-level model, and not in any way made-to-order.
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US robots now cheaper than Chinese workers! (Score:5, Funny)
I knew this time would come.
Welcome to USA, China (Score:2, Funny)
That is a million dollar idea - rename one of the manufacturing towns in China to "USA"... god, the amount of cheap stuff you could sell to patriotic 'Mercins with that sticker.
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Well of course the US requires the product to be stamped with the nation, not the town/city. Although there's already an urban legend about something similar done in Japan [snopes.com].
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Interesting. Well the "Made in America" versus "Made in USA" makes me wonder...
good (Score:2)
Just keep printing dollars like crazy, and soon you should have all the production back.
First? (Score:3)
"Besides built-to-order machines, the 21.5-inch iMacs are some of the first known examples of an Apple computer being assembled in the U.S., according to Fortune."
I would think that in the past, they were all assembled in the US, at least the Apple II was made in the US. I'm not sure when they started making everything in China, but all of the manufacturing moved there pretty recently. The Apple II was made at the time that stuff was still manufactured here.
CMs for protoproduction. (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they mean "Litigated in the USA" . . . ? (Score:2)
Design, components and construction are not important in products any more. It's all about patents and patent litigation.
So maybe the USA is not the cheapest and best quality for production. But the patent lawyers, courts and juries in the USA are second to none!
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Yeah, because Apple hasn't made much money lately selling products.
Outsourced (Score:2)
Sprayers making a comeback, too (Score:2)
Maybe Apple has set up manufacturing in Saipan? (Score:3)
Apparently, stuff imported from The Northern Mariana Islands [wikipedia.org] qualifies for a "Made in USA" label even though there are reports that the stuff actually comes from China. There's even a catchy name for this game: The Saipan Scam [bmwe.org]
RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
I'm going to assume that they mean "assembled in the USA" in the same way that Levis means "made in the USA," which is to say they are fabricated in China, then a tiny sticker or a single screw or some such is applied in the US so that they can legally say the product was made in the US.
RTFA, which quotes the FTC regs on what is allowed to be labeled "USA."
And no, nobody else does that either. Go look; your clothes say "made in Bangladesh" or wherever. The whole "put in one screw" thing is an urban legend from the '60s or something.
Re:We apply the Apple logo in the US (Score:5, Informative)
There are very strict rules (the FTC enforces them) about the terms "Made in the USA" and "Assembled in the USA".
The former means that all or virtually all of a product is made in the US. Obviously, the iMac doesn't quality for this (the FTC proposed defining it as 75% of manufacturing costs were spent in the USA AND the product was "last transformed" in the USA).
"Assembled in the USA" means that it's made up of foreign parts, but the last substantial transformation (or assembly) of the product is done in the US. Interestingly, "screwdriver" assembly of foreign parts does not count. This could easily mean that the iMac was more than importing the parts into the US and put-together there - perhaps the case assembly was produced from US manufacturing processes (including say, the friction-stir-welding), then the rest of the parts (which are China and foreign made out of supply-chain necessity)
Do not confuse the two terms "Made in USA" and "Assembed in USA" as they are significantly different in meanting. The FTC enforces the terminology and has found companies liable for violating "Made in USA" rules. Heck, I think some companies dubiously put "Made in USA from domestic and foreign parts"....
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Re:We apply the Apple logo in the US (Score:4, Informative)
Just FYI, AC's user ID is 666.
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out side of the usa health insurance is not part o (Score:3)
out side of the usa health insurance is not part of the job so that hurts US jobs.
But having manufacturing in the usa makes it easier for the design team to work with the manufacturing team when issues come up and it can also make so some who has done the manufacturing can help the design team with ideas based on doing the job from there side.
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Steve Jobs said it best: it's not about wages, it's not about OSHA, it's not even about the government.
Americans won't live 20 to a dorm room where they can be woken up at 3AM to make phones in a facility paid for by the government [heraldtribune.com].
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"The reason is components. The components are made in asia and shipping costs, export/import duties combined with labour expenses in US or Eu for that matter rises costs so much that it's not feasible to haul parts and build devices elsewhere."
Can't believe I'm responding to this but... wrong. Otherwise why Foxconn plants in Mexico and Brazil? Why does Corning make glass here and ship it to China?
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They choose Mexico and Brazil because their import duty for foreign assembled products is so high. Look at products such a s cars. Foreign assembled and manufactured cars are luxury even though people in Brazil should be able to afford BMWs, Audis, or American/European Fords. They can't so they manufacture their own cars which do not share any likeness from platform, chassis or styling. A ford Focus is not the same as Euro/American versions.
As for Corning glass. Why is fish caught in the UK waters shipped t
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The only reasonable way to measure it is dollars, and the U.S. is manufacturing more than ever. We just dont use nearly as much manual labor now.
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American manufacturing is incredibly productive. Why? Automation. We can crank out expensive, precision goods with tight tolerances and great yields. Problem is, robotic assembly lines don't lead to huge employee headcounts. I'm not sure what happens when automation makes people so productive that the design team hands their blueprints off to a fully automated factory, but I suspect that the result is something that could be descr
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I point you to Honey Boo Boo.
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A future where minimal human effort is needed to survive doesn't really mesh well with Capitalism. That's a major change that many people can't comprehend.
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I wasn't aware that USA stood for United South America
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Well now you know.
Re:I suspect.... (Score:4, Interesting)
My god. You really think that? What is wrong with you people?! A company does something that is in the right direction, and it's because they feel guilty?
And if they don't, it's because they are assholes.
Talk about a catch-22.
What about your other electronic equipment? Where are they designed and manufactured and assembled? Why do they get a fucking free pass?
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Also if you reread the comment you replied to, he was referring to the consumers guilt, not Apple's.
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Businesses should not choose locations on the basis of nationalist prejudice, but on the basis of the relative virtues of each potential location.
Bullshit. It should always be decided by efficiency metrics. Period. Less efficiency is always less optimal.