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Apple CEO Tim Cook: We Want to Continue Making the Mac Pro in the United States
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That’s across the entire USA. It’s impractical to bus people from all over the country to a single manufacturing facility.
Where are you going to find a single city with 400,000 unemployed people willing to do long hours of repetitive low pay unskilled labour. I mean Amazon already has issues with its warehouses where staff are unhappy with working conditions. You will never have ideal working conditions with this sort of work. Repetitive menial work is best handled by machines.
Hate to break it to you, but a lot of them feel that way and that IS the only thing stopping a fair number of them. Its creepy, but nowadays they don't even bother to hide it.
I think you missed the point
the topic isn't bringing all 100% apple manufacturing over to the US
its' about the mac pro. we're talking a small warehouse and a few thousan employees.
localized regional assembly can easily be done in the US and is already being done by numerous tech companies.
And yes. PEOPLE WILL TAKE JOBS. I on't get this mindset that suddenly SOME types of jobs are beneath every american, when most of the jobs in the entire world tend to be lower pay scale and manufacturing has always been a staple of every economy.
you literally have people crawling aroun in dark mines. Flipping burgers. washing floors in strip joints.
yet suddenly manufacturing computers is beneath everyone. It is an argument that has zero basis in logic an is just an excuse.
basing on the fact that Tim Cook has never attributed on any earnings call a decline in sales due to supporters of the President. there hasn't been any indication where people are refusing to buy anything assembled in China for the past few years even though the president has said many times that Apple should be making iPhones in USA before he became president.
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stock value is priced by the investors. in order to get higher stock value, Apple must answer to shareholders, otherwise they'll sell and the stock price drops.
I actually suspect in the next ten years, Foxconn workers in china will be making on par with American minimum wage. They may already be close (when you take into account the additional living facilities, etc in the factory 'city')
The proximity is what Steve Jobs always said made American manufacturing (not end assembly) infeasible. It's the difference between getting a replacement order of parts the next day, vs waiting on them to come by ship and through customs.
So money can't solve everything? Interesting.
A user was telling me the other day that Apple has an endless supply of money and he was suggesting that something like that would allow Apple to do anything.
Good for you. Any customers in Europe or Asia feeling similarly generous? By assembling in the US, Apple would need to cover the additional labour costs AND the 25% Trump tax on all the imported parts, THEN pass on those costs, not just to US customers who would be 'happy to pay' (yeah, right), but all customers worldwide, who would be very much not happy to pay. How MAGA would it be to have a domestic version for the US and a 20% cheaper Chinese-made version for the rest of the world?
Apple can afford to pay people a good wage and sell their products at the same price, they don't even cost them 50 percent of what they charge to make.
Other things like reusable rocket boosters that come back and land as well. Haha
To import the parts. If they have to pay tariffs on the parts, they'll have to pass that price hike on to every customer worldwide. If they assemble in China instead, only US customers would need to pay the Trump tax.
Well according to the majority of the Americans I've been speaking to about all of this, certainly the majority appear to be happy to pay more for a product manufactured in the USA in the name of patriotism alone. If those same Americans are so passionate as to realise that in order to bring these jobs back to the States, that they will have to work for stupidly cheap rates - in the name of patriotism, the unemployment figures will plummet! However, when those people realise that there is no way that they will ever get their bills paid while doing that, it will soon come home to them that giving the jobs back to China might be the better option after all. Or else, in order to compete, the labour rate has to go up, the company bins half its staff and the rest have to work twice as hard.
As China begins to rise in class and its economy continues to prosper, its people will get richer over time. To the point where their price of labour increases. "making it cheap in China" will be a thing of the past then, as the people too rich to accept jobs like that. They'll be working in Starbucks for minimum wage instead... This is why I think China has been investing in African nations lately.. to make Africa the new 'China' that they can use for cheap labour and in the process maybe cash in on some of its natural resources. It's just one big cycle, isn't it?! But... can't blame Trump for trying. And similarly, can't blame Apple for choosing the cheapest place. Thing is, they could take a moral stance, but its competitors wouldn't, and it'd just be us paying the price.
^ This. Plus, Apple aren't going to move from China to the US to avoid tariffs. There are plenty of other Eastern countries that are far better equipped, in terms of labour at least, where production can move to. There was a thread on Trump's Facebook page proudly stating how companies are "seeing the light" and moving out of China - Yay! Couldn't pinpoint where they were moving to, but it sure as heck isn't the United States. Trump's going to have to tariff the whole of the Far East before America sees any action.
"You just get one out of every ten people living in the city of LA to start working at Foxconn, & your idea (If I can even call it such) will work fine." Not only in terms of unemployment, what about all the EMPLOYMENT currently being filled in the area? If a vast number of people were to quit to work for this fictional Foxconn, the number of Accountants, Bakers, Car Salesmen, Designers, Electricians (you get the idea) will dwindle. A Foxconn engineer can't sell you a car!!
I have no regard for it to be made in USA or China, but prefer it to be made in China. China makes top quality products with a very highly skilled and competent workforce. China has made Tim Cook and shareholders very rich and consumers have benefited with a relatively cheaper product for much better quality.
You are already paying the price. The Apple gadgets are sold with extremely high profit margins, and at the same time you actually invest in China's economy and development, while at the same time your own home country loses the capability and the know how and the work force to manufacture and assemble these products. Since your educational system is so broken and expensive, you have already been "importing" most of your intellectual work force (up to the higher and even C-grade management level) for decades. I'm not sure if Trump really understands what he's talking about, but at least his gut feeling is certainly right about this one: If you outsource your production, you kill your own industry, economy and future -- and build someone else's industry, economy and future instead. First Japan, now China has become "the factory of the world". First production in Japan became too expensive, now the same is happening in China already. Yes, history keeps repeating itself, because the economic mechanics are still the same. So maybe in a hundred years or so production will come back to the West, because by then we have sunken back to Third World status.
Agree. China is fully aware of this, as well as the US of course. The planning for a future cheaper and obedient workforce and a compliant government is already underway by both.
Ah, yeah. There was an article once here on Macrumors saying that the iPhone would only be USD 11 more expensive if it were manufactured in the US. With the gigantic profit margins that Apple has with the iPhone, they could simply be a bit less greedy than they are, consumers would not have to pay more money and the manufacturing facilities could come back to your home country. But hey -- let's give another standing ovation to Tim Cook for making the fistful of Apple shareholders a few bucks more at the expense of __everybody__ else, shall we?