* What type of jobs? - "The 20,000 additional jobs, Apple said, will focus on research and development, silicon engineering and AI."

* Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and skills? - "The company is opening up what it calls a manufacturing academy in Detroit, where it will help smaller companies with manufacturing. It already operates an academy for app developers in the city. It’s also doubling its manufacturing fund in the US to $10 billion." - Sounds like they are upskilling, and will count the employees of companies joining the academy as "jobs created"

* Does this mean moving to US based fabs for the M-series chips? - "[M-Series] chips themselves, however, continue to be produced in Taiwan.

* Is this actually profitable, or is this just a political move? - Define profitable. It is cheaper than paying tariffs.

I might be reading it wrong, but that's the 20,000 ADDITIONAL jobs, which is going to be R&D, engineering and "AI".

Those 20,000 people won't be staffing the production lines. So how many manufacturing jobs, especially low skill, entry level with decent pay, will this create? The whole thing is framed in a way that makes it sound like Apple is creating thousands of manufacturing jobs.

I seriously doubt it's cheaper than tariffs.

data labeling

And one more:

* Will this raise prices for customers outside the US for no justifiable reason?

The required people can just be imported from China?

And related to your last bullet point: will it actually happen or is floating this just a political move...

It will actually happen because it’s nothing new. The 500b is almost all wages for existing US-based employees. They are looking for a carve out from the new China tariffs (same as last time). Note - they made a very similar announcement 4 years ago https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-commits-430-bil...

> Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and skills?

doesn't matter because we have work visas

> Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and skills?

For 30 years, IT managers at blue chip US corporations have exploited the H1-B visa program by saying, "No," and then hiring a never-ending stream of barely-capable Java coders from programmer mills in India, take 5 times longer to make an app than it should have taken, get promoted, and leave everyone holding the bag with shitty web app that we all hate because it's too slow, too bloated, and doesn't work like it needs to. And the companies who can't get enough of that bullshit in-house just hire it out to sub-sub-contractors that do the same thing. Can we not invest in our native population and education systems this time around? I'm so tired of the fact that 90% of the IT staff in my Fortune 250 is Indian, and I know people who would be better at their jobs living in my home town. It hurts our community and our country, in the long run, and by the VERY same logic as re-homing our chip production.

Well, those Indians living in the US will have families of their own, and over time become part of the community you claim to be a part of. Very much like your ancestors did, except they likely didn't face the arbitrary constraints on immigration that Indians (and any other nationality) face today.

I would find it hard to believe that there weren’t racial prejudices involved at literally every point of immigration in American history

The same thing that happened in the UK will happen in America.

People in the UK who are against immigration are often talking about Poles who moved to the UK after the EU and not Indian families who have lived in those neighborhoods for generations.

The crazy thing is, it's not that long ago that Irish and Italian immigrants were not discriminated against. They didn't even consider Italian immigrants to be white.

This need to bend the argument back to the initial English colonization of America is stupid. These mediocre Indian IT drones are not putting everything they own in a boat and washing up here hoping to find a better life. They're the rich B students that could afford the process which become part of an idealized system that American corporations are now bending and exploiting to hire what are essentially indentured servants from a population of people who couldn't get the best jobs in their native country, so they settled on this backup plan.

And they DO have families of their own here (and bring over their in-laws), and a lot of them don't integrate well, for a variety of reasons. At least a third of my neighborhood is Indian. They glare at me on the sidewalk when I wave. And most of them remain inured in their caste system, and are difficult and unpleasant to work with.

Again, all the same arguments about developing our own chips domestically -- which I doubt many people have a problem with -- apply to developing our own, better education pipeline to fully develop domestic software engineers.

It sounds like you should be directing more of your anger to the C-suite than the people they’re hiring. If they couldn’t get even cheaper Indian immigrants you’d be complaining about code boot camp hires instead - what you need is a tech union which would give you the ability to push back against short-sighted decisions which make your life worse cleaning up messes.

It's weird that the comments are deflecting from the parent point. But yes, over time, it hurts the country.

> Does this mean moving to US based fabs for the M-series chips?

This is not really a practical option. A big part of the M-series success is TSMC's lead in cutting edge process nodes. And Taiwan does not allow export of technology for the latest nodes. It is available only there.

Most of the technology that TSMC uses was developed in the US and Europe.

Developed, sure. Successfully integrated and commercialized, no. Organizations in US and Europe has done a lot of the prerequisite tooling and research. But they haven't successfully integrated it into an operation capable of producing leading nodes, yet.