Trump wants Apple to make iPhones in the US. There is just one problem | Hacker News Reader

Trump wants Apple to make iPhones in the US. There is just one problem

smh.com.au

2 pointsarcticbull8 comments

I left this comment on the last thread about how it would be impossible to build the iPhone in the USA.

In and around 2004-2005, Nokia had the largest cell phone manufacturing plant in the world located in the Alliance Free Trade Zone in Ft.Worth, TX. They manufactured millions of phones out of that location. There is no reason why the iPhone can't be manufactured in the USA. Foxconn is looking to replace most of it's employees across all the products they manufacture. Will labor really matter in the next 10 years at the pace of automation? People continue to call the supply chain into question, well where are most of the parts coming from?

Here is a list of countries that provide the parts. As you can see sourcing is not a problem since China has to source these parts also.

https://www.quora.com/Where-is-the-iPhone-originally-made

This article is more opinion than fact.

I guess my gut feeling is that if there's no labor involved, what does it matter where the phone is manufactured? No jobs are created, and the wealth flows to the owning corporation one way or the other.

> if there's no labor involved

There will never be _no_ labour involved. As automation increases, there will be a smaller number of higher-paid positions, and those are definitely worth having in your country.

Immaterial quantities of labor, the real work is in the design and implementation of the systems and those are the jobs we should want. Assembly workers should be retrained or given basic income imo. Then products should be built where it’s most efficient - and if that means centralizing in one or two countries, that’s just fine.

It would be cool to have a phone that could be assembled 100% by a robot. You load all the parts and assemblies into the machine and out pops the finished product.

There is still a TON of opportunity to improve automation in modern manufacturing factories. Tesla is obviously trying to do this in a disruptive manner, and learning that in the short term it's not as easy as you might think.

However, I suspect with the model Y, they will focus on design-for-manufacturing-automation so that they don't run into the same problems as they have with the 3.

Foxconn is already replacing workers with robots ("Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11770463) and I'd argue so do car manufacturers for 50 years step by step. I don't know if they could reach 100%. In other industries, e.g. food processing, it seems humans are only needed to fill up the ingredients, watch monitors and do QA.

It was always my understanding that the raw cost of manufacture of a product in the US and China was comparable (while China has much lower cost of labor, their cost of energy is much higher [1]) - and that the reason that products are manufactured in China these days has much more to do with supply chain. That all products are made there so manufacturers only have to drive a truck from supplier to supplier and drop it all off at the final assembly facility before shipping it to the rest of the world.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/17/news/economy/china-cheap-la...

Just one problem?

I know a bunch of companies are packaging chips, displays etc in the US but are surely not even remotely at the scale Apple needs.

In reality the industry would probably need to re-tool multiple manufacturing capabilities involving multiple disciplines to the massive scale required. This is not impossible but it’s going to cost and it will take entire tech ecosystems and supply chains to be built. At least five years to a decade to be actually considered “operational”. Maybe this is the end goal: investment needs to occur and pressuring Apple is the way to start.

Maybe Trump is trying to get Apple incentivised to repatriate some of the ocean of cash they have.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com