Even with massive multibilion investments in fabs all over the place it's going to take years to bring up fab capacity - in the ideal case. And that's just for one component.
Apple doesn't even do manufacturing anyway - they outsource every step of the way. What US alternatives are there to Samsung displays or Foxconn assembly ?
Apple is too high up the chain to bring about this kind of change, best you could probably do is US assembly if you imposed India like tariffs. Not sure how the US consumers would feel about their iPhone jumping in price by 30%.
Even the outsourcing of capacity to PRC, didn't happen in a single year. It happened slowly motivated by margins, not due to some technical breakthroughs that were happening in PRC.
> Apple doesn't even do manufacturing anyway - they outsource every step of the way.
That's again a conscious choice because of margins. Apple used to manufacture stuff themselves in US.
No one is saying Apple has to make display tech as well. Buying stuff from allies like SK, Japan and Taiwan shouldn't be an issue.
> Not sure how the US consumers would feel about their iPhone jumping in price by 30%.
Last I checked Apple had over 40% margins on their iPhone. If Apple shared the same concerns as their parent country, they wouldn't work to maximize their profits, even if it comes from labour working in inhumane conditions.
The systematic destruction of US industrial capacity has been in chase of profits.
Modern Asian manufacturing scales up faster than USA has ever done outside of WWII. Large numbers of infrastructure and people.
Apple sells iPhones in Mexico at 30% over the US price and you still see iPhones everywhere, even considering the purchasing power of the average Mexican is about 1/10 of an American.
In the US apple is regularly above 50%, not to mention that the US market app store revenue per user should be higher as well. There's a reason Apple has segmented their products where they previously only sold flagship devices.
The most recent ones are even more expensive.
Many have gone on record and said even if they wanted to make them here the engineer volume and expertise are nowhere to be found except in China now. The speed with which they can deploy factories for new processes in China is unprecedented. You can’t match that here in the US. It’s not apples mistake, it’s the governments. And the people who vote for them. Which includes you if you’re American (and sitting in a liberal state voting democrat doesn’t count; if you care that much move to a swing state and vote there).
This is circular reasoning. We can't make them here because we don't.
Yes, obviously it would take time to build capacity, but it's silly to argue China is fundamentally capable of something that the US is not. This is purely a question of cost (and, therefore, motivation).
What should probably be countenanced, in my opinion, is "supply chain readiness": make _some_ of the iPhones domestically, so that if it becomes necessary, it is much faster to ramp domestic production. That hurts profits in the short term, but it probably does enhance long term expectation profits (conflict with China is less disastrous).
Unfortunately Wall Street is notorious for its emphasis on the short term -- and that has next to nothing to do with politics.
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/
It is like 1000$ more expensive than the China version of the same phone. Could Apple and their volume get their price down? Probably but it is still going to be significantly more expensive.
If the US was desperate, we could maybe switch to this phone in an emergency?
Though, most of these parts were first made in the USA so there's no doubt we couldn't do it if we wanted.
While it may not originate from politicians, politics and corporate short-sightedness have been so tightly coupled since at least the Reagan admin that distinguishing the two is arguably missing the forest for the trees.
But yes, the root problem is the people controlling the levers of Capital for short-sighted greed, as is often the case.
Short-sighted pursuit of profit is a failure mode inherent in capitalism in general, no cronyism required.
Take the example of processor, it is ARM, a British design company's spec followed by Apple, a US company to design their chip, which is made by TSMC, a Taiwanese company with equipments from ASML, a dutch company.
Can you elaborate? From my vantage point, the impetus of this was globalization and there are many hands in that pot.
Consumers like cheap goods. Manufacturers like cheap labor. Governments enact policies that effect both.
The result is an outsourcing of manufacturing over the last four decades. It's odd to me that you give a company a pass but seem to blame constituents and governments, exclusively.
Any company that takes on much higher costs than its competitors without getting some benefit in return will not be able to stay in business for long.
Now what benefits might you get by manufacturing in the US? Certainly, it could be good for marketing. And consumers, particularly those at the high end, might be willing to pay more for a product manufactured here. Apple has, in fact, tried to do this. Remember when they made a big deal about moving manufacturing of the Mac Pro to Texas in 2019 [1]? Unfortunately, this hasn't worked out as well as they'd hoped due to the expertise and supply chain issues that others have mentioned [2].
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/09/apples-new-mac-pro-to...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-09/this-is-h...
>Any company that takes on much higher costs than its competitors without getting some benefit in return will not be able to stay in business for long.
This gets to my earlier point. Voting at the ballot and voting with your wallet are both ways to evaluate what people value. Both individual consumers and businesses vote with their wallets. Have you never paid more for something because it better aligns with your value system? Or do you strictly make purchases solely on the input of price? I see many people on HN who refuse to buy Amazon Basic items precisely for this reason, even though they are often the cheapest option.
As I previously said, American consumers largely value cheap shit. Companies largely value profits. Both of these, taken to an extreme, can come at the expense of other things like economic stability or strategic independence. The difference is, I hold all three (individuals, companies, and governments) accountable for those choices. It just seems weird to me that so many people are willing to hold a subset of them to task while giving the other subset a free pass.
>Any company that takes on much higher costs than its competitors without getting some benefit in return will not be able to stay in business for long.
Let me reframe this. If I instead said, "Any politician who doesn't take millions of dollars from lobbyists will not be able to stay in office for long", would that make accepting of that money somehow justified in your mind? For most people the answer is no. The difference is we've been hoodwinked into thinking morally ambiguous or outright immoral behavior is somehow ok in one sphere while acknowledging a moral burden elsewhere.
I'm not arguing that we can simply start making things in America on the drop of a dime. Anyone who has been involved in manufacturing knows that there is a lot of manufacturing expertise that has left and can only be done (at the current time, at least) overseas. What I'm poking at is that this is the logical progression of offshoring manufacturing over the last half-century. That strategy is due in part to corporate influence on laws, as well as the government who put those laws in place, as well as the constituents who put those civil servants in place. I'm old enough to remember Ross Perot's quip about the "giant sucking sound" from jobs (and expertise) being sucked out of the country and to witness firsthand the decline of the rust-belt. To act like corporations are blameless in the undermining of local manufacturing is naïve IMO.
it's not weird - it's human nature. Holding the "government" to account absolves themselves of the individual responsibility and sacrifice. it becomes "someone else's problem" to solve - after all, why would I sacrifice my own self benefit?
Tip of the hat for a rare correct use of the word "factoid".
Everything you need to build an iPhone is in one city. This is quite a bit like Detroit of the 50s - where the manufacturer and the entire supply chain for it is geographically compact.
Today, it is hard to find a geographically compact industrial chain within the US.
http://free.sourcemap.com/maps/57d154a89ca3b16d44e95e5e
Compare that to, say, the supply chain for the Ford F150 - https://open.sourcemap.com/maps/582b47c785e240e442569015
> There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.
https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-...
Of course, he would say nice things about China like this so I take it with a grain of salt myself.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/06/09/159456/the-all-a...