Apple begins exporting India-made iPhones to European markets
m.economictimes.com
m.economictimes.com
We are eradicating it through education and technology to the extent possible, albeit at a slower pace than we would ideally like.
If it's of any comfort - corruption is alive and well in most other countries as well, they simply have more resources per citizen and as a result, it is better disguised.
The solution seems to be to raise the standard of living of everyone involved - corruption is not going anywhere, it seems to be a deeply rooted human trait.
It seems to me there might be some tradeoff between having a flexible society and having a just one, the more leeway any particular actor has, the more they can use that leeway to gain personal advantage. It seems at least possible that a thorough study of the factors affecting levels of corruption could improve the overall system to have both more personal freedom and less overall corruption.
It's a long way to go, but thankfully technology seems to be solving a human problem.
Every year that goes by where India doesn't raise its standard of living, results in millions of stunted childhoods and lives. India needs all the manufacturing growth it can get.
The equivalent to your comment would be Indians on this forum leaving gratuitious remarks about the West ruining the planet with its excessively polluting ways. Just because you cannot see it around you, doesn't mean its not happening.
I think to answer your question the best path forward is to continue as is with economic growth targets but also on a political level to be relentless in not accepting that what exists now is remotely good enough. Bring the problems up front and centre and never stop talking about them. Cuties inertia seemed to be particularly strong in India. That said India has some of the brightest minds in the world at the moment and has developed amazing capabilities so the problem isn't insurmountable if it is acknowledged and faced head on.
Instead of directly discussing the merit (or not) of this move by Apple, you chose to bring up an unrelated topic of general environmental problems in India.
Lets imagine the article was about Apple opening a new manufacturing facility in Texas. Would you have brought up other social/political/environmental challenges that Texas faces (oh i don't know, like racial equity, or floods)? My guess is that would be unlikely, since its kinda off-topic and would be clear you are trying to express some other gratuitous concern you may have about that region.
Yes. For examples, look at the top comments for the top three HN articles on Foxconn in Wisconsin.
1. I did a google search of "site:news.ycombinator.com Foxconn in Wisconsin", and opened the top 3 links.
2. first link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19037625. The top comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038615) seems to be about cronyism and corruption in the terms offered to Foxconn by the Wisconsis government? I could be a bit off, i haven't followed that story closely. But, and this is important, its not about generalized corruption, its about corruption on this Foxconn deal!
3. second link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18328772. here the top comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18329445) is directly quoting the article about Foxconn getting exemptions from the environmental laws in Wisconsin. This is directly relevant to the article posted, again not about generic environmental concerns.
4. third link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19630358. This one doesn't have much commentary, but here we see irrelevant comments which are not directly tied to the article, which are much in the vein of the original comment above.
Does that help clarify my position, and why comments of this nature are not helpful? Its totally fine to bring up environmental/social/political concerns, if they are relevant. They are not in this case.
Life here is safe and sound for us to think about climate change and other things. When people in India don't even have clean water or electricity they shouldn't give a shit about environment or other things.
It took the US 200 years of development before it started working about these things. And the US is / was a developed nation.
Of course they should be doing way, way more and support ways of cleaner development financially.
What makes the West the arbiter of such issues for other countries?
India really isn't much of an issue on that front. The 1.3 billion people living in India produce less than half the greenhouse gas emission of the USA, which has less than 1/4 of India's population.
These are all imagined, self-righteous concerns.
Leave a country to sort out its own misery in its own time. We have meddled and tortured enough out of these countries already.
If there is any priority or imposition, I would want to think like Bill Gates... His priorities are aligned with the well-being of the developing nations not the US.
I hope they have learned their lesson and these manufacturing won't bring as much pollution / unit. While I don't expect it to be zero pollution, I just hope improvement are being made, and since Foxconn is working with Apple, I believe they will surely force a few criteria.
It's a difficult tradeoff. Economic development seems to be the only parameter that matters, especially when there are so many in poverty.
Some all time top posts on r/urbanhell are from India (UNPLEASANT IMAGERY WARNING):
https://i.redd.it/n8sdntzy8bb11.jpg
https://i.redd.it/y7i3lb94b1021.jpg
(River Yamuna. This river was reasonably clean 20 years ago but now you can see this terrible foam from the pollution and intense garbage disposal into the rivers. And yes, that's people praying, as Yamuna is considered one of the holy rivers)
Hindu religion is not like Catholic Church. Unfortunately, in such issues, it is very fragmented and 'decentralized' with multiple different sects, castes, pontiffs etc.
Uttar Pradesh, where Ganga mostly flows has a lot of water heavy low-tech businesses. Leather tanneries is the first thing that comes to my mind. Illiteracy doesn't help either.
Things are changing. Ganga in Varanasi and a few other areas are much cleaner in the last couple years than they have been in the past!
"Ganga is so pure, it's literally impossible to make it impure and it has capabilities to wash off all our sins, then how can it possibly be polluted by people bathing/washing their cloths in it?"
I tried making people understand, the only way we've forward is making movies which show what can happen if we don't stop these activities then it will begin making sense to people who have no education background.
But the car sales slump, at least, is very well documented. There's been a drastic fall in demand and everyone is bandying about myriad reasons (fuel prices, ridesharing, etc.). I just think people don't have enough money
One easy way to bring these people out of poverty is to provide them with good economic opportunities (like factory jobs!). High-tech factories would demand cleaner, more stable power (natural gas, nuclear instead of coal, wood, cow dung).
2) India's totally overpopulated, agreed. One way to decrease the population growth is to bring these people out of poverty. Every developed country has seen their birth rate decline once they move to the middle class. These guys need jobs, college, etc, and people will start having less kids!
India's pollution levels are not industrial or vehicular - they are agriculture waste burning. And they are timed with agricultural harvesting cycles.
We have super fragmented farmlands who are really poor and this causes bad practices of disposal .
We are a service based economy - but to be able to bring the bottom of the pyramid out of poverty, we need to accelerate manufacturing and bring modernisation into agriculture. Not to mention education.
15 and 10 year is for privately owned vehicles
In cities like Delhi and Mumbai, none of these is major reason. Pollution from vehicles (especially diesel vehicles), crop waste burning (esp in areas around Delhi) and industrial pollution are the major reasons. These cities are too densed and yet too big.
The sad thing is that there are hundreds of laws to prevent pollution but law enforcement is not a thing in India.
India will have a special challenge from mosquitoes and diseases like dengue and malaria, but maybe the best approach to malaria will be turning mosquito-borne diseases into diseases of the rich. We probably can't fully appreciate the solutions a wealthy India (or wealthy Nigeria) would develop, applying new resources, the latest science, and metis to deal with the world's deadliest animal.
[0] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Factfulness#
[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Most-Lethal-Animal-Mosquit...
It seems like India is 9 times the size of Japan and 10 times the population. It's high but its not unmanageably high for a fertile piece of land with good weather for significant part of the year.
All your arguments about political system incapable of fixing problems quickly still stand though.
I think this pollution and all those sufferings are first step of industrialisation you might say what about current england or germany, I guess they suffered enough to make changes.
PCB assembly in particular, seems unlikely? The supply chains are all in China, and it’s a largely automated procsss.
[1] https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techn... I linked this article because the bit at the bottom:
> According to the foreign direct investment rules [...] “sourcing of 30 per cent of the value of goods purchased will be done from India, preferably from MSMEs, village and cottage industries, artisans and craftsmen, in all sectors”
They are either very cheap components, but you paid a massive r&d grant to have them designed for you, or they are very expensive components but you paid no r&d costs.
Choose whatever suits to best avoid taxes, quotas, fees, and regulations...
You can't say "this part is only worth $10" if it's costing you $100 to produce.
Line item on the PO or wrap it into the part costs.
You could definitely hide a lot of R&D within some form of limit, but it isn't a free pass for everything. At least from what I knew in the old UK's standard. There is a new what's labeled as UK's GAAP which I have no idea about.
Not if you’ve valued them very differently before in different tax jurisdictions. There’s definitely a certain degree of freedom in how the components of a finished product are valued when they have no, or very limited, alternative uses, but you can’t just pick a number arbitrarily out of a hat. Companies have to do internal cost accounting to figure out whether manufacturing a component to a certain quality, or in a certain place makes sense, and while there may not be exact equivalents on the open market there will be close ones in most cases. Worst comes to worst you can see how much an order of size X would cost from a manufacturer capable of producing the component. There are many degrees of freedom in transfer pricing but they’re finite.
That's a good point. The requirements seems to be about locally sourcing components, not locally manufacturing them. It's entirely possible for a Chinese company to have a subsidiary in India that's supplying components to Apple.
IIRC : isn't it Foxconn making the phones in India too ?
The trouble is that India has a social bootstrapping problem. India's governance depends on the leaders Indians elect, which means that the electorate sets the policy followed by the leaders. And this electorate is largely poor and illiterate. This means that vastly sub-optimal policies get followed than what would be ideal. Often religious, casteist and nationalistic tropes are an easier sell than those based on science, commonsense and reason. But it also has the advantage that draconian policies that oppress the citizens don't get implemented.
The wealthy south is a political wasteland despite all notions of "powerful southerners running things," while Henan has has mere county level cadres on the committee (an extremely unlikely posting)
In is both a blessing and a curse that the political process happens largely outside of here.
Interesting to note the article mentions iPhone 6, 6s and 7. I wouldn't have guessed these were still in production!
[1] https://singjupost.com/tim-cook-at-apple-wwdc-2018-keynote-f...
This trend honestly makes me feel dirty to work in software. If you only use a few core apps, iOS 12 looks and feels just like iOS 7, yet it needs several times the horsepower to work. And unlike on the web, we can't blame it on JavaScript ads. It's just shoddy engineering that aligns with Apple's incentives.
...
>Interesting to note the article mentions iPhone 6, 6s and 7
This is pretty much why Apple or other OEMs can't move all production out of PRC. Mainland supply chain and expertise is critical to rapidly refining and launching new products. Once manufacturing matures, the process can be exported to other countries. Apart from Indian, I don't think any other country can replicate Chinese scale and specific expertise, the latter being particularly limiting due to demographics. Both would take generations to develop.
For all it's 'courage' and self righteousness, Apple is a profit seeking entity like every other.
https://www.apple.com/environment/
https://www.apple.com/diversity/
https://www.apple.com/privacy/
https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/
Those are some fantastic values. It's our job as the public to demand companies stick to their values and to cause a ruckus if they act like hypocrites. And it's our job to pass laws to encourage better values. My 2 cents.
curious, what do you mean by that?
"China will spin up African manufacturing"
you think that will work? also, my limited understanding is that china is after africa's natural resources, infrastructure etc, not people.
Hardly, they're building it themself since there isn't any
As for Africa, they're already paying for the infrastructure, if resources is near by, it makes sense to consolidate manufacturing. And geopolitical it's preferable to boosting the development of India, an immediate regional competitor. Also Africa is fragmented and easier to negotiate with, have similar demographics to India (lots of young), more willing to learn mandarin. Alternatively, we're not even sure if massive manufacturing nations are viable with automation. Regardless there's
There are clear benefits for Apple here. China, as a manufacturing destination, has become less attractive due to rising wages and US-China trade war. Higher wages are good for Chinese people but not great for manufacturing. India is a cheaper destination and the recent government has been very business friendly. India now ranks 77th in the ease of doing business compared to 130th a few years ago. India has heavily invested in building out basic infrastructure like roads and power. It has also cracked down on corruption and a lot of government services have been digitized to reduce opportunities for corruption. Combined with a cheap labor force that speaks English is a great recipe for anybody looking to manufacture goods at a cheap price. Escaping the US-China trade war is a side benefit for Apple.
May-June : wooo. Chennai is parched.
just utter callous ruling that state .
I really don't want to start a political argument on HN but this is nonsense. How exactly was the central government fixing it?
> However it lacked sufficient support from the state
Since the state's Chief Minister Jayalalitha passed away, the state government has been in the central government's pocket. The central government could have gotten away with virtually anything. And the AIADMK is officially part of the NDA. So, there is no way I'm buying the 'no support' theory.
If USG wants more of these non-China phones in US markets, what concessions will Apple get in return?
There are many reasons for doing so. For one, we don't have colonies we can screw over - i.e., India's India - while enriching ourselves. Assuming we would want to do that at all.
We also don't have the window of opportunity that China had for becoming a manufacturing hub. That's been done and while we can compete for a percentage of the spoils, it will never be the gold rush that took manufacturing to China. The politics of globalization alone will ensure that.
Second, we don't have the luxury of several decades of uninterrupted "development" before thinking about the environment. Climate change is going to hit us hard well before that, and one look at the water crisis should tell you that the basic necessities of life will need to be carefully managed.
I have nothing against assembling iPhones in Bangalore. Or becoming the world capital of CRISPR technologies. However, those can't become the driving forces of a future India. We need to think boldly beyond those constraints. I am not saying returning to a romantic conception of an ideal past, but a detour around the mess that industrial capitalism is already creating and will continue to create if we don't think of alternatives.
Obviously China has some specific cultural issues but it might be hard for developing nations to resist the temptation to steal Western tech.
Why is this a concern?
IMO this contains a major misconception: that any country/region/etc that takes on a production role does not also intrinsically gain competency in that kind of production. If company X goes to country Y to produce a product, then X is "teaching" Y how to do that kind of production, period. No "stealing" necessary. This is a big part of a positive feedback cycle that has driven China's current manufacturing base. Not just China – I've seen it cited in a few places that Apple itself, by heavily relying on Samsung as an early iPhone supplier, helped significantly to establish Samsung as a major smartphone competitor.
The saving grace (in my opinion) is that India is vastly more susceptible to pressure from outside than China. Indian government can't simply impose a policy and expect the population to fall in line. If western sanctions make lives difficult for India's industry or the common citizens, the government will have to backtrack pretty much immediately.
Yes money will get filtered through politicians and corrupt machinery, but the people and their children will have the tools and education over time to course-correct their own country.
https://www.businesstoday.in/magazine/features/nokia-chennai...
I just want to say
Thank you to any and all corporations that are moving out of China. It will make my shopping easier.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.