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Comment by ipaddr | Hacker News Reader

Apple went bankrupt under Jobs and Wozniak and was saved by hyper optimizing foreign supply chain company Microsoft only to rise 10 years later by focusing on hyper optimizing foreign supply.

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There was a lot more than that going on and I think you've pretty generally mischaracterized the main problem with the mid-80's era Apple—which had nothing to do with domestic manufacturing and everything to do with not delivering new products that people wanted, at a reasonable price. You can claim overseas manufacturing solved the pricing component of that, but that's not at all clear: other companies were manufacturing in the US at the time and still out-competing Apple.

All of the big PC companies had factories in Texas in the 80's and early 90's, didn't they?

And Dell became a case study of outsourcing everything (and sending your stock and profits soaring the whole time), until you have nothing.

That timeline isn’t even close to accurate. Apple was doing quite well in the 80s when Jobs and Wozniak were there. In the early/mid 90s was when they started going downhill (well after Jobs was gone), and by that time they had already outsourced a lot of their manufacturing (computers in Cork, Ireland and Singapore, and motherboards/components in places like Taiwan).

I don't know about Microsoft, but I'm very clear that the "miracle" operated by Apple was exactly to perfect foreign supply chain at a time when Intel/Dell/HP and others were still heavily focused on the US. The quality of Apple products was already there since the beginning, but they had no way to compete with the PC market until they figured out Asian supply chains.

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