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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious what Apple, Nvidia, and AMD are using this plant to build. AFAIK none of these have assembly lines in America. I doubt they’re going to be shipping those chips from the US to China/India/Vietnam for assembly (from a supply chain delay and cost perspective alone). Is this just for taping out initial designs? Are they planning on onshoring assembly lines? What customer markets would those onshored assembly lines even service in a way that would compete with 3p resellers from abroad (assuming assembly cost would meaningfully differ).

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My bet is they shift to Mexico, at least for some products. Also, if anything is cheap to fly across the world, I'd say it's a chip?

This shit isn’t flown anywhere. You ship it by boat / rail using the absolute cheapest mechanism you can because you’re building tens of millions of these. The first batch of assembled products might be drop shipped if you’ve fucked up your dev schedule and you need to meet some sales deadline but that’s a totally different thing.

Apple ships components from all over the world to China for assembly already. This would just be one more.

Can you give an example of which ones? AFAIK every single component comes from Asia.

100% of the FaceID component in iPhone comes from Texas. According to Apple.

Edit: Oh and I think the accelerometer comes from Germany, but I would need to look it up, it might be a German company.

It’s Bosch. AFAIK The chips themselves aren’t coming from Germany but are gabbed in Asia and shipped within Asia. Are you sure it’s manufactured in Germany? I don’t know enough about the mechanics of Finisar but I would be fairly surprised to learn that Apple is shipping 1 component from Texas to China for manufacturing. Of course there may be logistical reasons why that works out for that particular component (maybe the laser scanning doesn’t change much so it’s not hard to just keep pumping them out all year round so lead time for a new line isn’t as relevant). I remain highly skeptical this is done for the accelerometer as I think that changes every year (unless it’s matured enough that they don’t bother anymore but I would doubt that’s the case). This seems even less likely, to me at least, for the CPU that definitely changes significantly each year and is co-designed and brand new along with the rest of the phone (ie shipping times are critical to make sure you can set up the assembly line on time).

Apple posts annual lists of all their suppliers and where the manufacturing is done on their page here. https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/

When I worked there I got to see a few presentations on the iPhone supply chain and they do indeed source and ship single components from countries and companies. Remember though that even a single component for iPhone will end up being huge volumes of parts.

Any supplier with locations outside of Asia ALSO has locations in Asia AFAICT. It’s unclear what manufacturing occurs outside of Asia and Apple doesn’t categorize what is getting manufactured. It could be things like assembly line equipment is manufactured outside Asia and the components themselves within Asia or prototypes are manufactured outside Asia with mass manufacturing inside Asia.

Do you have a concrete example of any mass manufactured electronics component coming from outside China? Heck, I’m not even convinced that Gorilla Glass is made outside Asia because Corning is listed as having 3 locations and 2 are in Asia so it would be supremely strange to be mass manufacturing some part of the iPhone in Corning.

All the glass, all Gorilla Glass in fact, is made in Kentucky.

This page is a bit out of date, but I don’t think that the sourcing of parts has changed all that much. https://u.osu.edu/iphone/fsdfsdff/

Corning is listed as having locations in Kentucky, Taiwan and South Korea [1]. Why would they be making mass manufactured components in Kentucky if they have plants in Taiwan and SK? Most likely Kentucky is only responsible for initial engineering samples and/or creating equipment for mass manufacturing.

From your link, this is what’s said:

> While the iPhone is mostly designed by the Apple team in the US, its components are provided by many countries around the world.

This is claimed to be supported by [2] so let’s follow that chain. Here’s all the link says:

> Still, reports are coming in that US companies involved in the Apple supply chain are beefing up their US production facilities and many of the components that go into the iPhone are actually made Stateside and shipped to China for assembly.

No attribution. No evidence. Just an unsubstantiated claim.

Your source also says this:

> Several companies around the world also contributes to the making of iPhone. For example, the French-Italian company STMicroelectronics manufactures iPhone’s gyroscope that allows people to change the display from vertical to horizontal. The Dutch company NXP Semiconductors provides the M7 Motion Coprocessor that can gather the motion data and use it to measure health and fitness.

But again. Those devices are getting designed in those countries but they get mass manufactured inside Asia. The evidence for that hypothesis is that Apple’s supplier list contains manufacturing locations in Asia for those suppliers. Maybe they do local manufacturing for development samples they deliver to Apple or they manufacture various supporting machines for the assembly line (eg calibration machines for audio and sensors) but the components themselves almost certainly are made in Asia.

[1] https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-FY21...

[2] http://financesonline.com/how-iphone-is-made/

They will ship them to India.

That’s a bold claim and would be a first. There are 0 components in an iPhone that are manufactured outside of Asia. You think they’re going to start manufacturing tens of millions of CPUs per year in the US just so they can pay the transport costs of shipping them to India. And forget the transport cost. The lag time to ship it is insane and the likely prohibitive reason I would think. Shipping to India is slower and more expensive than shipping to China I would think.

Overall, I agree with the sentiment of this post. However, I think "[zero] components in an iPhone that are manufactured outside of Asia" is a strong claim. I tried to Google about it. A bunch of hand wavy stuff with few hard facts. I cannot believe there zero parts in iPhone manufactured in Germany, Austria, Switzerland or US. Mittlestand in DACH has _so_ many small companies producing ultra-specialised goods that might appear in an iPhone. And surely the machines that make the parts are largely from Germany, Austria, Switzerland or US (and Japan/Korea, but they are in Asia).

Side story: I remember attending a museum about the history of spinning cotton in Hongkong. The whole exhibit was full of manufacturing equipment made in Germany, Switzerland, and Japan. I had a laugh to myself about that... as the museum was touting the ingenuity and business prowess of the local cotton spinning industry. In my eyes, they were doing little more than running machines with very cheap labour and zero import tariffs. As soon as China opened even a little bit, that whole business ran over the border.

Edit: Replace "bold" with "strong". It sounded condescending when I re-read my post. That is not my intent.

Zero electronics components. As someone noted, the glass comes from New York.

> And surely the machines that make the parts are largely from Germany, Austria, Switzerland or US (and Japan/Korea, but they are in Asia).

Those are one-off machines that are part of the assembly line (often times tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars). It’s different when you’re handling a continuous volume of tens of thousands of units each day.

I have 0 knowledge of this for Apple but I worked generally on mobile phones and worked with the assembly line engineers in other companies and supply lines into China was a real thing which is why China was where assembly moved to in the first place - in addition to cheap labor, it was right beside SK for RAM/flash, Taiwan for all your chip manufacturing, Japan for display, etc.

>There are 0 components in an iPhone that are manufactured outside of Asia.

I'm pretty sure this is false. For one, Gorilla Glass is manufactured in New York.

Gorilla glass is not an electronics component (which I recognize isn’t what I wrote but is what I had in mind). The display is made in Asia.

It may not be an electronics component, but it's an extremely vital part of the device. Modern phones would not be what they are without Gorilla Glass: the slightest mishandling would smash the screen.

Electronics components are materially different in the supply chain. If Corning fails to deliver their next gen glass on time, I suspect Apple has contingencies in place (eg using the current gen). Production doesn’t change.

If that happens to an electronic component it can seriously fuck up your schedule for setting the assembly line / shipping the phone on time.

It’s not about the complexity of the component but the impact it has on production schedule. The CPU would be the worst since it’s super complex AND literally the brain of every phone. Now maybe because it’s in house it’s less of a concern (ie schedule has enough practice that they’re not worried about tape out and on time delivery). Or maybe I’m really wrong on how the iPhone supply chain actually looks like since it’s outside my area of expertise and I’m making conclusions based on second hand information that’s years out of date. Hence my original question. But random hypothesizing won’t answer that question.

I’ll correct myself. I’d like to see evidence gorilla glass itself is made outside Asia. Apple’s supplier list has manufacturing locations in SK and Taiwan for gorilla glass. I think Kentucky only makes engineering samples and/or the equipment for SK/Taiwan that’s used in manufacturing. They don’t make the actual component going onto your iPhone.

According to Corning's own website, Wikipedia (where you got your info) is wrong:

https://www.corning.com/gorillaglass/worldwide/en/faqs.html#....

Wikipedia's citation for SK leads to a broken link on Corning's site, for a news article from 2014.

Some iPhones have been manufactured there since 2017 and Apple is looking to increase that as of a few days ago.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-china-factory-protests-fo...

I’m not saying manufacturing being in India is a first. I’m saying manufacturing a major electronics component and shipping it to the other side of the world for assembly would be the first.

I’m well aware Apple has expanded where they manufacture things.

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