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The US still has a large number (~12M) of largely skilled manufacturing jobs, and manufactures more product (~$2T) by $ value than anywhere else in the world but China. It just needs fewer workers per $ produced than it used to.

There's nothing about either of those trends that's unfortunate.

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And neither is unfixable, it will however impact cost and that's why I think that Tim Cook is not entirely honest here. You can get all this done locally, the skills are there. But those skills are expensive because the same skill level person in the US has a different pay than the person in China. Eventually that advantage will erode and then the locusts will move to the next available third world economy (likely India, or maybe even Africa).

Many companies are moving already to countries like Cambodia or Vietnam because China has become "too expensive".

But those skills are expensive because the same skill level person in the US has a different pay than the person in China.

I don't think that's true, or at least, not true for the vast majority of workers.

A typical US manufacturing worker is an order of magnitude more productive (a good, if imperfect, proxy for skill) than a Chinese one, and if anything is underpaid for the value they provide. China just has massively more labor available.

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