Hacker News Reader

Comment by aardvarkr | Hacker News Reader

So do you know anything about what you’re talking about? Assembling iPhones is trivial. If that’s your idea of high end manufacture then I have news for you.

View on HN

> Assembling iPhones is trivial

I think it might be you who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Many startups have tried to enter the consumer electronics space because they thought assembly would be “trivial”, only to find that once the first EVT samples start coming back from China it is anything but trivial.

The tolerances on an iPhone are some of the best around. People don’t always appreciate just how strict the tolerances are for hardware assembly until they’ve tried to do it themselves.

Not to mention the scale of the operation allows them to fit parts with varying tolerances together in a way that causes the best fitment when put together while having less waste.

I think the size and complexity of FoxConn speaks for itself. Manufacture and assembly of an iphone with its constituent parts requires high precision, volume, high quality control, and massive supply chains - hence Tim Cook does not believe it could be done in the US.

They would figure it out if they had to. The technology is not lost and for all the hate it garners the military industrial complex keeps the seeds of industry alive in the US. They would grow if there was an economic demand niche to grow into. Nobody has the stones to make it happen, though.

The labor & environmental arbitrage mafia won the war, so fixing the problem is going to be an uphill battle, rather than merely preventing the market from rolling downhill.

> The labor & environmental arbitrage mafia won the war

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyJfOPSS2Uc

The problem seems to be that there was a loss of focus on high end manufacturing in the US. Germany and northern Italy are the counter examples but even those countries were not immune to globalization.

Also, it may be that globalization is coming for them next but that they are higher up the hierarchy.

There seems to be a reawakening towards manufacturing in the US with electric cars and rockets. It’s not just Tesla and SpaceX. It’s Rivian, Rocket Lab, Virgin Galactic, etc... I hope it strengthens.

I hope Rivian thrives. Downstate IL (where their factory is) is struggling and needs the manufacturing jobs to come bac.

The US has always done high end manufacturing. The difference from the 70s is that it requires a lot fewer humans. Manufacturing output in the US is up ~75% from 1998-2017:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/manu...

Yet employment is down ~4 million people in the same period:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP

Edit: Here's a FRED blog post talking about the same thing: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2014/12/manufacturing-is-gro...

Assembly != Manufacture. The US is not able to produce the screens or processors for a modern smartphone. Those are far from trivial.

Steve Jobs himself said these jobs aren't coming back to America

https://www.heraldtribune.com/article/LK/20120123/News/60519...

But Tim Cook said he would try, with details & results unclear:

https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/03/technology/apple-tim-cook-a...

This would be a good place to share that news. Right now all I see is a low-effort dismissal in response to a comment that might be flawed, but at least has some effort behind it.

Interestingly, many other parts of an iPhone are built in China. Is each of them trivial?

Lol

Reply on news.ycombinator.com