Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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Indeed.

There's a somewhat better discussion of this phone here.[1] At least the making of the board. Board manufacture, SMT pick and place, and soldering are all automated, and the equipment is widely available. Everybody does boards roughly the same way.

The assembly problems in phones come from all the non-board parts. See this iPhone teardown.[2] Look at all those little subassemblies. Some are screwed down. Some use elastic adhesive. Some are held in place by other parts. They're connected by tiny flexible printed circuits. That's the labor-intensive part. Usually involves lots of people with tweezers and magnifiers. They don't show that.

So here's that part of assembly in a phone factory in India.[3] Huge workforce.

For comparison, here's a Samsung plant.[4] More robots, fewer people. Samsung made something like 229 million phones in 2024. If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down.

[1] https://puri.sm/posts/manufacturing-the-librem-5-usa-phone-i...

[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+13+Pro+Teardown/14492...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQZycjXZAKI

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ5t7zgoQRM

There's another way to do it. Here's a teardown of a classic Nokia "brick" phone.[1] That's designed for automated low-cost vertical assembly. The case provides the basic structure, and everything can be put into the case with a vertical push. There are no internal wires to connect. There are simple machines for that kind of assembly. Then everything gets squeezed together, and you have a hard block of an object that's hard to damage.

If you can design something which can be assembled in that simple way, high-volume manufacturing can be automated cheaply. Smartphones are not built from parts intended to be assembled in that way, but that's a decision based on cheap labor, not one that's inherent in smartphone design.

Design for assembly was more of a thing when manufacturing was in the US. The Macintosh IIci was designed for vertical assembly. Everything installed with a straight-down move. The power supply outputs were stakes that engaged clips on the motherboard. No internal wiring.

Then Apple gave up on US manufacturing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xglr0Zy8s8

The trade-off of the current smartphone assembly process (many parts and many steps) is driven by numerous factors, including cheap labor. It also considers: incremental design improvement, testing, defects, supply chain, model differenciation, ...

>Then Apple gave up on US manufacturing.

Then Tim Cook gave up on manufacturing. Which was how it saved Apple.

Steve Jobs always had a somewhat fantasise vision of dark factory. He wasn't able to accomplish that when Apple was still fighting for survival. But now Apple has more cash then it knows what to do with it.

a bit of the problem is that modern elements like display + touch screen require a lot more bandwidth than 3110 - for example the displays require ridiculous bandwidth in comparison to the nokia, like 10 gigabit/s for Samsung Galaxy S25 (basic model, not plus/ultra), plus connectors for the cameras.

At the very least you can't really make the screen soldered-on, and the simple connectors used in Nokia might not work out for such high bandwidth use case. Same with cameras.

Thin ribbon connectors are one of the hardest things to automate from what I remember regarding Sony's efforts to automate PS5 manufacture.

"but that's a decision based on cheap labor, not one that's inherent in smartphone design"

This is the heart of the matter. The US has abandoned skills because cheap labor in Asia. An example from the story about dealing with touch screen tests: they're employing disposable workers to toy with pinch and zoom testing; something easily automated with a simple machine and image comparisons. How sad. This is an actual regression in technology.

If the US wants to get manufacturing back, the only areas that matter are electronics and, to a lesser extent, machinery. See this chart.[1] That's an achievable goal.

Here's a useful smartphone that could become big:

- Solid state battery that will last at least 5 years.

- 5 year full warranty.

- No connectors. Inductive charging only.

- Screen as unbreakable as possible.

- Sealed unit. No holes in case. Filled with inert gas at factory.

- Totally unmaintainable.

- US $199.95.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports/united-states

> If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down.

The problem is, there are no Western manufacturers left that have the brand loyalty to bring such a large volume of purchases to the table.

The giants are so giant, it's almost impossible to compete with them in the consumer mass market. The only way you can outcompete the giants is by focusing on tiny small niches where consumers are willing and able to pay a premium - the government (auditable supply chains) and eco-progressives. That's where Tesla started, that's where Purism and Frame.work live.

> The giants are so giant, it's almost impossible to compete with them in the consumer mass market

Chicken, egg

Yeah, but it didn't have to be that way. We failed to uphold anti-trust acts and now are faced with this issue.

It didn't have to be this way, but anti-trust is not the sole reason.

>More robots, fewer people.

It would be amusing if after all this turmoil the work came back to the US but it barely increased manufacturing employment.

It won’t come back, as it never were in the US.

Your scenario is more like a best-case option, actually. I mean currently there are only 13M people employed in manufacturing in the US [0], while output is at an all time high [1]. The vast majority of this manufacturing is dependent on components imported from other countries - which just got much more expensive. So even if employment in manufacuturing would increase by 20% (unrealistic IMO), that would only translate to 2.6M people - while at the same time losing multiples of that in better-paid jobs in other industries, mostly services.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...

I think you might even lose a bunch of these jobs, at least in the short term, as businesses now need to free up money (they likely hadn't planned to initially) to pay for tariffs before their goods / parts are auctioned off at the port. That's even before consumer spending tightens up due to rising prices, and declining stocks.

Pretty much guaranteed. The goal of modern automation isn't more people it's less. People love to spout "but the industrial revolution just made people able to do more jobs". But the goal of modern automation is to _replace all jobs_ that it can.

Then you hire 4 guys to maintain all the automation between 5 factories they drive between as needed.

Yes, that's what civilization -> industrialization -> automation does: eliminate jobs, which opens up opportunities for new jobs.

you are no longer an animal spending most of your waking life searching for food, nor do you build your own shelter, make your own clothes, construct tools, etc

yes, automation seeks to eliminate factory jobs, most of them are pretty awful anyway. this opens up new options as every step along the way always has

and yes, the change isn't always easy for the folks that have to find something new

The goal isn’t actually specifically employment increases, that’s mostly a marketing strategy, the real goal is national security. US, Japan, and South Korea seem to have decided enough is enough with Chinese aspirations and threats to Taiwan, so US has convinced them to build additional capacity in the US and also to have those nations increase defense spending. Notice Japan has started joining NATO command and participating in NATO missions. I predict Japan will the be first “deal” announced by Trump administration, with South Korea soon afterwards. It makes sense for these allies, the logic is we should fortify our supply lines building redundant facilities in US homeland which is much harder for China to disrupt and attack, you guys start buying lots of F-47s, we start massive ship building, re-industrialize as rapidly as possible. Then should China try anything and somehow mess you guys up, the US will come back a get you out of it.

That would be sane, but it makes no sense then why Trump is threatening tarrifs on Canada or the EU - both places that also need to do the same. (move manufacturing out of China)

Sure it does. The strategy is based on chaos and reminding all the world, allies included that the US is in charge and they want some very specific changes from both Canada and EU, they need them to militarize quickly, the US military is furious that all their allies appear to be almost incapable, very little naval power specifically. I’d even argue the implied threat to leave NATO, the talk of annexation of Canada and Greenland, it’s all strategic psychological warfare on allies to shock them into action … and it’s working … take a look a Germany’s new military budget and plans. There is also an intentional devaluation of the dollar to assist in re-industrialization. This is all national security and world order driven, not economics, and it’s actually the optimal time during a strong domestic US economy to try to make these changes.

It's national security to destroy all of your alliances? In that case, what is the reason Russia is exempt from these tariffs? Reverse-psychological warfare?

First of all there is (EDIT: almost) zero trade between the US and Russia currently, same with North Korea. (EDIT: perhaps some token signal of wanting to negotiate over Ukraine? or perhaps even more “sinister” - getting US political opposition to falsely argue Trump is a Russian agent and make themselves look silly)

Second, yes part of the strategy is to force allies to self assess themselves and their dependence on US power. Trump and Nixon had a personal relationship and his fundamental strategy in business is based on creating uncertainty, it’s literally like point 1 of his “Art of the Deal” and however another part of that strategy is being willing to walk away.

We are living through a turning point in history where current US administration has reversed the open policy to China and for national security reasons are working to re-industrialize and militarize quickly as a strategy to deter Chinese ambitions.

It’s fine to disagree and argue the neoliberalism strategy of globalism isn’t dead but politically it is. Of course that world order is fighting to survive where it can, UK, France, Germany all putting up resistance to the rise of neo-mercantilism and nationalism but we will see if canceling elections, restrictions on speech and jailing politicians will work to block it.

> First of all there is zero trade between the US and Russia currently

Not true. The US imported 3.5 billion dollars of goods from Russia in 2024, and exported 500 million dollars of goods.

https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/russia...

>First of all there is zero trade between the US and Russia currently, same with North Korea.

No, there is trade, $3.5b worth of it. But even if there wasn't, why would they get an explicit exemption?

Maybe one change, but there is far too much going on and thus diverting attention. Pick something and fix it, not a million things and divide your attention and thus get nothing done. (not that other presidents were better, but part of that is good change is slow in many cases)

I don't buy that [3] is bad and [4] is good examples. That Samsung plant reel doesn't show the same parts of assembly as the first one - I bet those videos are just focusing on different parts of fundamentally identical factories.

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