Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
apple.com
apple.com
They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government, but if it goes as well as last time, they will stop as soon as they can.
In china they were often able to iterate on designs and have custom screws and other parts made and ramped up in very short times. Something about having the whole supply chain in one place and very motivated and it all fell apart when tried to move to US.
So things that took weeks became hard on anytime line.. per Apple in China book.
If I was interested in "performative local manufacturing" I'd also build my own servers, it has the least economic impact.
Extorting CEOs to announce investments (like the Zuckerberg hot mic incident) is not worth anything to me. Meanwhile the US has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for the last year.
The investment in capability that is necessary to build the next generation of manufacturing capabilities in the US is simply not within the public imagination.
If the US changes their environmental regulations to match China, lowered their tax-to-GDP ratio to match China, changed their worker regulations to match China, and then opened up free immigration from Mexico for cheap factory labor then the "free" market would likely take care of opening up quite a bit more manufacturing.
It will never happen because there's too many industries and jobs that only exist because of all that regulation and will fight tooth and nail to avoid a short term haircut.
> It needs a careful long term approach from real leaders. Not a run-and-gun, corrupt, chaotic president throwing tariffs (taxes) up on a whim.
The problem is all the real leaders got indoctrinated and drank the globalization kool-aid. Unfortunately, it seems only an insane and chaotic person was able to actually buck the iamverysmart consensus.
If we end up in a place where AI and automation take over then yeah I think we start looking at alternative income sources and economic system. Just like star trek predicted we would do after WW3.
This isn't "working harder".
This isn't "rebuilding infrastructure".
This isn't "training people in trades".
The numbers are so cartoonishly lopsided as to be a non-starter for categorically replacing Chinese manufacturing.
Ford is openly discussing the idea to have joint ventures with Chinese EV makers, the whole idea is to get Chinese EV techs in exchange for US market access.
TikTok takeover is another good example.
It's at the point now where it is self-sustaining, which is why you see China starting to enforce IP Rights, precisely because it is now generating its own IP that it wants to protect.
Any economist would say that if China did just "copy" US technology to make itself more productive, that's good economic practice, from China's perspective.
Moats only worked for a while to protect European castles, they don't exist now.
it could be less economical, so Apple has to innovate to be competitive on pricing - with automation, robots, etc.
Establishing regulatory harmony across all those countries is obviously not possible in the same way it is in a single authoritarian state, but if the US made it a priority to create a trade bloc capable of replicating China’s manufacturing capacity, it probably could.
If the US wants to take on China, and actually needs Canada's help to do it -- I can assure you they just set themselves back 10-20 years from achieving that. We no longer have any interest.
The labour forces of Mexico and Canada are not at the US's disposal for these kind of games anymore. For several decades we have been exploited by the US for low wages and cheap resources -- and now there's a regime that's making cheap political points by accusing us of the opposite while trying to emmiserate our populace. So, yeah, no thanks.
Now it's the CPTPP and doesn't include the US.
Canada is looking to the Pacific and EU for trade now (and China as well), so is Mexico.
It's likely that the EU/UK trade bloc will connect with the CPTPP via both the UK and Canada, which connects them to the APAC/ASEAN nations.
Everyone is aware of the power of the Chinese economy and the idea of the CPTPP is precisely to build up a trade economy that can compete and co-operate with China on an equal basis.
In the meantime, China is using its Belt & Road Initiative as a sort of "Marshall Plan" to extend its influence by building infrastructure like ports and rail.
These trade initiatives are at least focused on increasing trade, as opposed to the US "trade policy" which is to use tariffs as a crude form of protectionism and extortion to "bring manufacturing back".
I think you got your timelines crossed - it was Trump who pulled out of TPP (though Clinton also opposed it during the campaign).
If we’re serious about it, we are going to have to commit ourselves to economy-tanking tariffs (like thousands of percents) for many decades until the US worker is as poor as the Vietnamese worker.
> Apple here is the first step.
Pretty sure the much-touted Foxconn plant in Wisconsin was the first step, and just like this one it will be scaled down to a few hundred jobs as soon as possible.
It's like everybody forgot that their neighbour's job depend on them.
We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys.
Hmm, I don’t like the sound of that.
Our political/ruling class wanted more of the pie for themselves, dropped the trade barriers protecting American industry, and gorged themselves on the arbitrage as manufacturing flowed to our chief geopolitcal rival, who was quite happy to accept such a generous gift.
We also have many US manufacturers moving sourcing their subcomponents from overseas to save a few cents per unit, there's no way to prevent that, nobody is going to check the BOM from everything they ever buy.
I think collective behavior is a large component but it is not quite right to declare it as the primary driver.
For example, I get a 40inch TV instead of a 65 inch or I buy a set of American made screwdrivers but then I can't get a bottle of Vodka.
Most people have their basic needs met. They just want as much as possible for their money even if it harms other Americans. At the same time, if they happen to work at a factory making extension cords, they'll want people to buy their US made cords to protect their job.
Because most people are selfish when it comes to people who aren't family or friends.
Really the mom and pop store was set to die in the US because of car culture. You'll pay a bit more to walk to the closest store, but if you're already driving there is very little cost in driving to a store a little farther is almost nothing.
The college educated white collar professionals who are grossly over-represented in policy discourse?
Middle america, the formerly industrial northeast and the former bulk industry west have been complaining about this shit policy for over a generation.
Implicitly shuttering our manufacturing and heavy industry by subjecting it to policy that we knew would make it increasingly noncompetitive at the margin and would prevent continuing investment was a macro/federal level economic policy choice that was actively pursued for approx 50yr.
This is an American quality where a person who works in a factory that makes extension cords and needs their job to survive would buy the cheaper lamp even though it's made in China.
Most people aren't willing to make financial sacrifices to help people they don't know EVEN if they might be affected by another person having the same belief.
There used to be other times and more honorable businessmen. Then came the Dodge Brothers who managed to get a court judgement asserting shareholder supremacy over long term interests [1].
The only thing I never understood is how in god's name Amazon got away with reinvesting profits and never dishing out to shareholders for decades.
The 1930s through 1960s (i.e. industrialization had matured but you can't construe it as "modern" business) are chock full of corporate raiders, acquisitions with nearly monopolistic goals, cartels, etc.
Because in the US that's the case because people give a shit about cost - you could make financial sacrifices to help your community by buying local...but your costs of living are skyrocketing every year, the costs of your family are increasing, and the difference between buying from BigCorp (Walmart, Amazon) and from your local store (which is 1.3-1.7x the price vs BigCorp) adds up.
Sad but it's true.
Are you talking about the small mom-n-pop shops that are only open when most people are at work, while with online shopping you can do it any time 24/7? The same mom-n-pop shops that refused to take returns, and had poor selection and would take weeks to order something for you, at a ridiculous price?
There are a lot of really good reasons online shopping has put so many stores out of business.
A huge part of that is rents. Basically, a store that owns their property outright or even on mortgage has far less worries when business turns down during a crisis. Take Covid - a year or two, depending on where you were, in more or less lockdown conditions.
A store that was owner-owned? No big deal. Staff was paid for by government assistance, not much ongoing cost for the building. Owned but mortgaged? Cut a deal with the bank, no bank wants to go through a 2007ff event again and they also got assistance for loans. But a store that was rented? Yeetie yeetie. Commercial renters have zero protections anywhere, and landlords are nonforgiving - especially when they are backed by REITs and other investment vehicles.
Recent history is filled with examples of investment funds that behave like vultures - seek out a company that has sizable owned real estate, buy stocks, force the management to sell off the real estate in a heavily biased sale-and-lease-back maneuver, put the acquisition debt on the company's ledgers, sell off the real estate and let the husk of the company wither.
And this is becasue huge international investors still own sites like malls and retail centers and still remember the massive rents they used to command for those units.
The bubble will burst when enough sites are written off, and IMO rents will come back down to a reasonable level in a decade or 2.
Oh no. It's US pension funds that own a lot of real estate, and these will continue to get bailed out or protected by the government.
The decision of the US to back pensions on the stonk market has insane, crippling side effects not just on their economy but also on the rest of the world.
Free trade does result in the best prices but it has other, negative effects, and it is when we think as policy makers -- as citizens, not consumers or business owners -- that we are accountable for those effects.
Yes.
That’s what rebuilding capability looks like.
China built dense supply chains over decades. Of course iteration was faster.
Hard isn’t a reason not to do it.
It’s what happens when you’ve optimized for margin and optics and performance instead of resilience.
The US does a lot of manufacturing, second only to China, but not low margin stuff that isn't economic.
Trying to "bring back" that sort of thing is idiotic and is entirely performative and induced by the current incompetent administration.
China is a genuine threat but the right solution is to move it to other friendlier countries instead of losing money trying to do it in the US.
Stupid is a reason not to do it.
What they stopped manufacturing was menial and low-end product; because it's not price-effective to have 100 Americans sit on an assembly line and solder SMT components for $7-18/hr. Instead, those potential workers pivoted into service jobs and office work.
1 - https://www.safeguardglobal.com/resources/blog/top-10-manufa...
China at this point is hard in automation, beyond anything the US has. China is well past the peak of sweatshops.
As someone in the manufacturing space in the US, the biggest issue we have in the US is that manufacturing continues to die. Any manufacturing we have left is the old guard dying off. It comes from a range of issues from companies refusing to invest in younger employees, to the cost of real estate (both buy or rent) for commercial properties being absurd..
The fact that China is diversified beyond low end manufacturing just shows that they have incentive + economic impetus to expand that field; and hardly disproves what I stated or shows any trend of US manufacturing "dying off".
The reason we can’t do manufacturing is because Wall Street demands capital light business models.
That, in turn, is an outcome of being the global reserve currency.
Not at the (AI) moment.
They are doing fine.
And it's not all high value goods. US produces magnitude(s) less than PRC in nearly all industrial sectors, i.e somewhere between single digit times less to 100s less. Some of it might not matter, like trinkets, some of it does, like 500x more shipbuilding by tonnage. Of the magnitude less that US produces, some legit high value like aviation, some are spreadsheet value, i.e. US car worth 3x than a comparable Chinese car. For shipbuilding, PRC produces like 50m DWT per year, aka MORE than US total WW2 shipbuilding, all 4 years, and generate about 150b revenue. US produces 0.3m tons (round up), and generate about 40b.
A ton of US ship, even navy isn't worth except 50x premium over a PRC ton except in spread sheets. That 50x premium is rent/capture, it's what prevents US from actually industrializing vs spreadsheet industrializing. TLDR except in a some high value sectors, US is getting absolutely mogged even per capita in gross output.
This statement is as inaccurate as the comment you’re trying to debunk. The fact is that China leveraged it’s low-end manufacturing work to work its way up the chain and now is the leader in many areas: https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outper.... E.g. China has been investing heavily in radar technology and as a result has air to air missiles with comparable range to the U.S. https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/why_the_us_is_alar...
There are synergies to having the high end stuff and the low end stuff in the same place. The story of IBM developing System 360 mentions the benefit from the ladies who wound the wire core memory and the guys who designed the computer on the same campus in New York. We gave that up when we outsourced the “menial” stuff abroad.
I never claimed that they did not do high-end manufacturing.
The U.S. still manufactures high end products in some fields. But in many areas we have lost the high end as well as the low end. E.g. we can’t compete with the Chinese in electric cars.
I think some more "low margin" computer and chip manufacturing would be healthy.
And quite frankly, who gives a fuck if top owners and investors get maximum returns, boo hoo they got 4% return instead of 8%, that is still far better than the average working class's deal. Our entire problem is a suffering middle and lower classes that need decent work, they will still be happy even if the product they make is a bit lower margin because they are paid hourly, not paid by dividends and stock options which is where all the higher margins profits go. Average citizens pay has not correlated with increased company profits, and increased company profits isn't what makes society stable, so the investor class is going to have to suck it up and take the hit unless they want their entire house of cards to collapse.
The reason we don’t invest in manufacturing is because of requirements for return on capital.
Ask yourself why GM is doing massive stock buybacks in the era of global transition to electric cars. Why aren’t they using these huge sums of cash to invest in the next generation of products and instead literally just sending the money out the door?
====
I bought a mac mini a year ago for $599. Personally, I'm pretty sure I would pay another $50 if it said "Made in the USA" on it. Maybe $80. Not sure I would pay $100.
But I worry this will prove to be like when Daimler bought Chrysler and shipped the Crossfire fully assembled except the rims, which were bolted on in the US so they could say it was "made in the USA". They only sold 76,014 and now Daimler extracted itself from Chrysler, so maintaining them has become a bespoke hobby.
I admit I'm probably an outlier, but in terms of durable goods, I'd pay 30-50% more for lots of things if they were "made in the USA" or "made in Canada" (any western country) and it meant something - like, better parts availability, repairability, documentation, support, etc. Not all of them, but something - AND, it was paying domestic imports / reducing imports.
I'm not living paycheck to paycheck, but I'm not wealthy.
> Never ever support authoritarian regimes!
(Speaking as an American)... you sure about that?
> and it meant something - like, better parts availability, repairability, documentation, support, etc.
But remember, this bit isn't related to the country that assembled the product, it has much more to do with the company and brand doing the post-sales support, marketing, and the rest of the customer-facing stuff. The Mac mini isn't getting a better post-sale experience just because it's going to be assembled in Houston. The product and company are identical.
Finally, I think it may be worth recognizing that there's a growing perception that Chinese products are the best ones, just like how people felt about many American products built in the post-WW2 era. I would subscribe to this perception that Chinese products are more likely to be good than products made in many other countries. They just have the ecosystem and the most expansive, skilled high volume manufacturing on the planet.
You can't compare different products across different brands, the whole point is to compare the exact same product made in two different locations.
If I was in the apple ecosystem (I prefer PCs with Linux, Android), I would pay $100-200 more for a mac mini made in the USA if there were actual benefits, like most of the additional cost went to paying domestic labor, better parts availability, better repairability, etc.
Apple (and all the other multinationals) are tied to manufacturing in nations with cheap labor.
China is far from the only nation with cheap labor.
> India now accounts for approximately 25 percent of global iPhone production, up from single digits just a few years ago.
https://manufacturing-today.com/news/apple-moves-quarter-of-...
Thomas Friedman talks about this after his most recent visit to China. Where China excels is through rapid supply chain development by fierce regional competition among several (state-supported/sponsored/seeded?) competitors.
Do we not recognize that western governments do this too? Do we not recognize that western banks and VC firms are quasi-state institutions? Do we not see western countries continually subsidize businesses by lowering corporate tax rates and giving out cheap loans?
The US government was giving out $7500 per car to buy EVs and the US carmakers still got demolished by better Chinese products.
It’s like the western zeitgeist can’t accept that China is simply out-competing them on pure merit.
It’s not possible for China to have every business be state-subsidized and running a loss. At some point the truth is that China is getting wealthy by selling the most competitive goods. It doesn’t matter that the state “subsidizes” it because the money for the subsidy comes from selling the best and most competitive products.
The US government absolutely does not do what China does in this case. But the reason for my paranthesis and question mark was that I was not sure what call it.
Even if you paid 5% more for materials for an iphone but could pay 50% less for labor than China, you could probably beat China.
How does the state sponsoring come in? The state represses the people and the wages and prevents them from leaving for greener pastures in many cases, which benefits the corporations.
I don't buy this argument.
Sure, labor protections in China are weak, but let's use our mirrors: the US has no guaranteed paid time off of any kind, it has unions on paper only, 1 in 10 Americans have no health insurance, and it's nearly the only country where medical bankruptcy exists as a concept. The largest employer in the US runs a scheme where their workers are intentionally kept part-time with low enough wages to need SNAP assistance and other social safety net programs, as well as avoiding any obligation to provide health insurance, effectively subsidizing their corporate profits with tax dollars. America's middle class has been shrinking via housing, healthcare, and education cost inflation while China's middle class has been growing as its industries have continually moved further up the value chain.
"China is just cheap labor" is a last-Millennium viewpoint. China is a manufacturing ecosystem where you can walk into a physical marketplace and find rows of vendors with skilled technicians who all know how to work on electronic or machinery or other manufacturing skills, where they offer services like chip-level NAND upgrades where they solder on storage upgrades to your iPhone while you wait.
China is now a country where you would pay a price premium to buy their products over competitors.
Literally last night the US president stated that his policy is to keep real estate expensive, and his main attempt to lower housing costs is by lowering mortgage rates, a policy which is incredibly short-sighted and squeezes American workers more. It also won’t work as housing is sold at market value: lowering rates will increase sale prices as buyers compete on available supply and the amount they can pay on a monthly basis.
I am not specifically trying to get political about it, but the Republican Party is generally opposed to public transit and is essentially anti-urbanism. They view cities as dangerous bad places with evil Democrats in them. They have done things like holding federal transit project funding hostage to MAGA demands.
Meanwhile, you don’t need to own a car to live in China and get around. They built out the world’s premier high speed rail network, and they’ve built massive metro systems in their cities rapidly.
Those “ghost cities” in China? That’s also known as “available housing.” They usually eventually get filled. Americans paying above-inflation rates for homes would envy that sort of thing.
Most other countries including China would consider the high cost of healthcare to be a pressing national emergency, but the US government has allowed the insane status quo fester.
With a 400m head start in a 1600m race. It's a whole lot easier to out-compete somebody when you know the government will backstop you even if you misstep.
Solar and battery technology were two of those areas. China absolutely dumped cheap, mostly inferior solar cells on everybody else to wipe out competing manufacturers until they caught up. And China absolutely subsidized local battery consumption until their manufacturers had critical mass and market share. Even now, the RISC-V ecosystem mostly relies on China funding students to do the grunt work of porting everything over.
This is a smart thing. We used to do stuff like this in the US. (See: VHSIC, VLSI project, Sematech, etc.)
And now, BYD appears to be, at this point, simply a superior manufacturer and it doesn't appear to be close. It absolutely grinds my gears that I have to root for BYD to come into the US and bankrupt the automotive companies to finally move their asses, but we have been here before--back in the 1970s with Japan producing better cars.
You mean like how the US government constantly bails out and props up the American car companies?
Um, yes? Did I stutter? Do you have bad reading comprehension? Are you using an AI?
Precisely what part of "we have been here before--back in the 1970s with Japan producing better cars" did you miss?
Also he talks about this on The Ezra Klein Show.
On production lines.
Obviously this is not plan A, but their ops team is insane.
I spent a little while unsuccessfuly trying to recall the jargon or the anecdotal company-name here, but IIRC there was an early pioneer in this where a company making radios (?) tried to develop a software system that would categorize non-conforming parts so that the flaws in different pieces would cancel out.
I don't think it worked for them, at the time it was far more efficient to just spend money on improving the quality and tolerances of the parts.
This becomes less of a problem as the product matures.
The Mac Mini is a good example of a design they likely stabilized a while ago.
it's cool and all that boston dynamics can do what they do, but i wonder if one reason why the chinese robotics industry is so advanced is because they've been able to test in production on real production lines, experiment with dark factories and learn a ton in the process.
it's kind of funny when you think about it. both the west and east are facing down the same set of potential problems that come with real automation of industries that have served as true economic dynamos for decades.
Yes, it's a good thing to have domestic advanced manufacturing, but this probably doesn't qualify.
According to the article, it's a site where they already assemble servers for Apple's own use, and will now start assembling Mac Minis as well. Electronics assembly is, for the most part, a pretty low-value part of the supply chain.
It's not nothing, but it pales in comparison to the scientific and technological sophistication and financial value of wafer fabs and IC test and packaging facilities. (I worked at Intel's flagship fabs in Oregon, and have worked as a consultant with other semi fabs around the world.)
They'll also hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony with maximum fanfare, at which they'll be sure to fawn over Donald Trump, let him ramble at length, and maybe give him some sort of shiny award.
Let's call it The Steve Jobs American Technology Greatness Prize. It'll be a blindingly flashy PVD-gold-plated 12" silicon wafer with a Mount Rushmore-style portrait of Jobs and Trump etched into it.
https://preview.redd.it/always-loved-the-design-of-the-mac-m...
so maybe that's the reason they chose it. They just designed a new iteration in 2024, so maybe they don't expect much change for a while.
I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines. The companies that process the raw materials are located mostly inland, then the companies that form those raw materials into metal and plastic stock are next door, and then the companies that take that stock and make components are next door to them, and the companies that input those components and output subassemblies are next door to them, and so on all the way down to the harbor where the companies that produce finished products output directly onto the loading docks where the ships await.
The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation. How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean?
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-a...
It's not really so much one's belief system as it is what happens when one gets power -- and that's hard to predict regardless of the ideology.
This principle of relative consistency is baked into how I test employees for management and friends for trust, and in the past, roommates as well. Though I do acknowledge potential for growth as well, but in my older age I generally also need to see evidence of motivation to give strong benefit of the doubt wrt possible trajectory.
Too often libertarian means liberty for me and not for you. That's authoritarian.
If you were to control for other variables I doubt there’d be much correlation. After filtering out engineers who belong to other categories with stronger associations to authoritarianism, you’re more likely to be left with the hyper-individual-freedom types than the hyper-authoritarian types.
And this flows in other areas. If I need a functional vehicle with cheap upkeep I optimize for it. I invest in low risk products since the income is limited. I know that people with plan and confidence are scary, you don’t meet them every day.
> According to two European social scientists working in Britain, Italian Diego Gambetta and German Steffen Hertog, who present their case in Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education, the presence of engineers among known Islamist extremists is 14 times greater than can be explained by random distribution. It was a finding the authors reached with caution and even a certain resistance. “We are social scientists,” Hertog explains in an interview, “so we are always seeking socio-economic explanations. We accepted this idea that there might be personality traits, expressed first in choice of profession and then in political ideology, very reluctantly.”
* https://macleans.ca/news/world/why-do-so-many-jihadis-have-e...
> This article demonstrates that individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent among violent Islamists worldwide than other degree holders. We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors – engineers’ relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset – is the most plausible explanation.
* https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/29836/1/Why_are_t...
It's easier when your government is proposing "hey, let's build all the factories the best way we can" and not "hey, let's impose illogical and continually-changing tariffs on everything and let Howard Lutnick's kids steal all the proceeds". You're right as an American to be skeptical of the government - it's not operating in your best interests unless you're one of the elite insiders. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.
Only need to look to the recent changes in Hong-Kong and the obviously hostile takeover of a democratic government to see how "pure" these changes really are.
this remind me one of the ep of the TV show <newsroom> when they found so many evidence of a massacre using chemical weapons and broadcast it.. and then found out its all fake.
https://credit.fgw.sh.gov.cn/xyyj/20220902/8693d5ba378d4f578...
They can even revoke your passport (which is functionally the same thing as some forms of travel only accept a passport).
So, you're both doing the pointing spiderman meme here.
there is no score at all. even this article didn't talk about anything about 'score'. its no different compare to many other countries. soical credit system is a general concept.
I do wish everybody outside of china have your mindset. then we have nothing to worry about.
There is no so-called social credit system you western guys have in mind. There is a credit reporting system. It's not that different from the US credit reporting system. But it has far less of an impact on our daily lives than the US system on Americans. For example, no one asks for your credit report when you want to rent a house.
The fact that everyone in the West is used to it doesn't alter the fact that it's social engineering at scale and not a law of nature.
This makes no sense. It is possible for a totalitarian government which is threatened by dissent and concepts like "democracy" to also work in the interest of improving overall quality of life.
It's the same category as: Why would a company with happy well paid workers be worried about unions and try to stop them forming.
Have you met people?
In other words, if things are good enough, there will be more people disagreeing with the totalitarian part than with the overall conditions.
Get some new talking points, you're like 40 years out of date.
As might visitors who are being asked to show five years of social media history to make sure their views are politically acceptable.
Free speech is over. If dissent isn't being actively punished - the current push for deanonymisation is coincidental, no doubt - at the very least it's heavily throttled algorithmically.
This topic has been discussed on Chinese forums and social media for like 1 million times. The short answer is it did. To give you a prefect example - the J-10 fighter jet was first tested in 1998, it shot down multiple best EU made fighter jets last year.
TLDR timeline
50s-70s was soviet engineers / knowledge transfer from post war wreckage. Built basic industry, 80s-10s was relentlessly building out every industrial chain for every sector except leading edge because lack talent. Talent pipeline was 90s-00s building out academic system, 2010s-20s was brrrting tertiary talent. Couldn't brrrt tertiary talent without teaching peasants literacy in 60s, and then having literate parents in 80s family planning (i.e. one child policy) which filtered generations of 1-2 kid households where surplus went towards education/tertiary. All the recent highend progress recently was result from that, step by step building on generational phase/timescale. PRC only passed US in total STEM a few years ago, now they on trend to talent inflection point 2x-3x STEM vs US in next 20 years. People mock one child policy, but it was exactly choreographed for this outcome, one of few cases of generational peasant to phd planning, though 50 year foresight to build up greatest high skill demographic dividend in human history, not 100 year foresight because cost is shit TFR in the next 50 years.
China just hasn't calcified yet after workers press for better standards of safety and quality of life and maybe they won't because that's where being authoritarian comes into play. They will crush that in a way we have moved away from.
We used to build great things in the US and then we decided the blood price of 30 lives for the Brooklyn bridge or 100 for the hoover dam wasn't worth it. It's really not hard to build anything when you ignore any second order questions of impact. Why do you think certain people here want deregulation and for the EPA to go away.
A quick google shows China prioritizes speed over safety something we've decided here in the US is not acceptable.
in regards to calcification of china your position is unclear. you say that china advances due to pressure from workers but at the same time claim that pressure from workers is irrelevant because government can crush them at will. you cant have the cake and eat it too...
AI halucination is well known, and output is non-repeatable.
There is also no indication of what timeframe, what industry, how it is calculated and more.
AI responses are starting points, and should never be considered factual without verification.
If you want to have any trust in youe numbers, find real stats, from a reliable source.
Because wouldn't it be just totally awesome for our rivers to burn again?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...
> In 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948 and 1952 the river caught fire, writes Laura La Bella in Not Enough to Drink: Pollution, Drought, and Tainted Water Supplies. Those are some of the incidents we’re aware of; it’s hard to say how many other times oil slicks may have ignited, as press coverage and fire department records were both inconsistent. But not all the fires were as innocuous as that of 1969. Some caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage and killed people. But even with the obvious toll on the landscape, regulation of industry was limited at best. It seemed more important to keep the economy booming, the city growing and people working. This attitude was reflected in cities around the country. The Cuyahoga was far from the only river to catch fire during the period. Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Buffalo and Galveston all used different methods to disperse oil on their waters in order to prevent fires.
aye. the old elite of China were overthrown by the communists, whose (that is, Mao's) decisions starved most of the country, followed by the insanity of the cultural revolution.
the new technocratic leadership is just that -- new. really only started happening in the 1980s and 90s.
the US is falling apart due to the entrenched hyperwealthy seeing more and more rents. China's hyperwealthy are all new money and are not entrenched yet, not the way groups like Ford or Boeing or Goldman Sachs are. But soon they will be, and soon the CCP will start prioritizing their needs
Actually, this is very hard because different individuals want different things. Normally you need a mechanism like the market or democracy to aggregate individual preferences. Expecting a dictatorship to do this well seems optimistic, and the full history of communist China doesn’t support the idea.
They just no longer do any central planning on nonsense matters like how much ice cream need to be produced for the summer and how much coffee shops are required for Shanghai.
I would say that for long-term engineering projects (building bridges etc) authoritarian central planning is a required trait.
I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.
Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism. As a part of a government delegation he studied agriculture, even bringing him to stay abroad in Iowa of all places. The world is too complicated for this type of analysis, sorry. I don't even think it is remotely the right data point to focus on or compare.
Dan Wang does the same spiel on every podcast and it is always terrible and seems predicated on credulous hosts who know little about the history of either country and certainly not enough about both who just use his lame analysis to engage in this current fad of Western self-pity. Instead of reform and asking hard questions let's just throw soft balls at Dan Wang's cheap analysis that anyone with a Wikipedia level education would know is absurd so we can keep propping up the same impoverished China v America tropes.
Why don't we demand better honestly we should be ashamed that one guy can just come up with such a dubious thesis suddenly appear everywhere and no credible debate or pushback once. The only thing Dan Wang convinces me of is the poverty of the modern intellectual environment.
If we broke up Google or Amazon, suddenly we're just as bad as China!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover#Mining_engineer
https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/impromptu/forget-the...
I can't speak for china either, so I looked it up and indeed, Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering and his predecessor Hu Jintao worked as a hydraulic engineer before becoming a politician.
Well in germany we had Merkel as a doctorate in quantum chemistry (but she never worked as an engineer, but neither did Xi Jinping).
I certainly would prefer politicians with some engineering background, unless they use their skills to manufacture a total state surveillance and control machine.
A lot of current/recent crisis and utter dependence on russian gas and oil was her doing. She desperately tried to appease putin at all costs despite him mocking her from time to time, she pushed long term underfunding of German army despite war on Ukraine happening since 2014, closed down nuclear plants too fast so coal energy was needed immediately and so on.
Shame on her to be polite, not a good example if you want to show that engineering background (just studies in her case) can lead to better outcomes than lawyers.
She was a software engineer. LOL.
(I speak as someone with a degree in Computer Science and Software “Engineering”, and an inglorious past as a Chemical Engineering student)
Well, um, that's China in a nutshell. They did exactly that.
Turns out people with power like to amass and maintain power, regardless of the structure they gain it in.
Dan came off as very China biased and Tyler literally schooled him on a few occasions.
But despite that, there are grains of truth in what he said, we have lawyers turned politicians at the helm in the US, so we have a great democratic system but on the flip side hardly any engineers leading us to the predicament we are in now, where nothing ever gets built.
It's a popular trope that confirms the audiences bias's and when you do that the monkey brain gets rewarded by seeing the number in the top right go up.
Indeed. “Used to” is the key observation. In the wake of WW2, the U.S. had both dynamism and the ability and will to act collectively. This combination led to rising standards of living, the space program, Silicon Valley, the internet, etc.
The U.S. economy is still relatively dynamic, but the will to collective action has completely failed.
Europe can act collectively but lacks dynamism.
Which country, today, demonstrates both traits?
The question is about whether any of that can be meaningfully attributed to some lawyer vs engineer divide. Your question doesn't answer that in the slightest and thus I have no idea why you are asking it.
The US, on the hand, is obsessed with individual rights, and any sort of collective action that threatens those rights is extensively litigated.
This is really what Wang's thesis boils down to, and which of course it's an oversimplification, there is a kernel of truth in there.
and the hidden implication is that there's a correct trade off to be made (because engineering is about trade offs).
So what happens to those people whose gotten the bad end of the deal? If china builds a damn, the villages downstream gets moved (with small compensation that is not commensurate with the value of the dam being made).
It's also why the high speed rail in california is costing so much in the US vs something similar in china.
The result is that far more people get far worse deals far more of the time. Healthcare, the jobs market, education, climate damage, grift in high places - it's all the same issue, and a lot of the problems are rooted in denial of reality on spurious "economic" grounds.
Isn't that a trait of the left in general?
What america has been doing is subsiding engineering capacity in china. This was done because it created more profit for larger companies as they merged and eliminated costs. This higher profit drove a "roaring" economic expansion. But now china is capturing more of the value.
A solution is to use tax as a way to re-patriciate engineering capacity. This is kinda what trump is supposed to be doing, but carving out exceptions for friends, and using blunt instruments doesn't work all that well.
I worked at a dev company, and we got bought by an IT company. Much pain and friction, all around. Is that a reductive representative of the company differences? Yeah, but it's still a useful mental model that helps one understand the differences. And I think the lawyer vs engineer trope is useful. Yeah we have both. Both my companies had both IT and developera, but the stakes & priorities were different enough that that lense became extremely helpful.
Think of it as engineers vs non-engineers (lawyers/mba types/etc). We complain about that on here all the time (ex. boeing). It's where the priorities are: is it on making things better or making more money? In an ideal world, it would be both. Unfortunately here, it is not otherwise enshittification would not be a thing.
And if you look at the absolute contribution in dollars, manufacturing has gone up 1.76 times between 2005 and today: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USMANNQGSP
This is roughly 2.9% a year over 20 years, so slightly ahead of inflation over the period.
To me this points to a story where manufacturing grew slightly but the other parts of the economy grew a lot more. Not exactly a bear case on manufacturing, but not a tremendously exciting one either.
The main reason it’s so political is the drop in number of jobs has been huge, and too fast for many to adjust. Automation has come fast.
“ Manufacturing employment declined from 17.3 million in January 2000 to a low of 11.5 million in December 2009, a drop of 33% over the decade. Compared to the peak of 19.5 million in 1979, manufacturing employment had declined approximately 41% by 2009.”
https://blog.uwsp.edu/cps/2025/01/29/u-s-manufacturing-emplo...
Interesting to think about. Share of GDP staying stable but number of jobs fell by around half.
Of course there are areas where that labour would be useful: healthcase, teaching, childcare, elderly care all come to mind (and there are many other examples). But our economy is not set up to enable this. The problem isn't supply side (difficulty retraining people to do the jobs), it's demand side: the people who need these services often don't have the money to pay for them. So the jobs are badly paid.
And it's a downward spiral: as wealth becomes more concentrated, demand for labour drops because those controlling the wealth already have their needs met and often don't care about the needs of others.
If history is anyhing to go by, then this will eventually lead to war and/or revolution.
On the last sentence, one significant difference between then and now will be the possibility of automated soldiers, which is terrifying to think about.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/u.s.-navy-shipbuilding-consistently...
If anyone’s analysis is subpar it’s yours.
The other issue is minimum wage and workers rights. It should be possible to have Chinese workers making widgets on US soil instead of Chinese soil, for $0.5/hr more than they can make in China. But that's illegal many times over.
Then people wonder why manufacturing is dying across the West. If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete, it's extremely basic. That might be acceptable but at least be honest about the trade-off you've made, and don't pretend you can patch it up with hacks.
Died a long time ago and went to hell in handbasket :(
>If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete
Houston had always been less expensive than Detroit, LA, Chicago, New England and just about anywhere else in the US for this kind of thing, but it was really the cheapness of the foreign labor that made it irresistible to Wall Street. It had always been that way but didn't really matter until after the value of the dollar had been dropped so low that they had to pay workers what amounted to exorbitant sums while the labor still ended up with less discretionary cash, and that was at the lower-value dollar.
You should have seen Houston in 1979 when the Nixon Recession was raging worse than ever, long after he had sailed into the sunset. It was no Pittsburgh[0] but there were still two steel mills and of course one of them was US Steel where they had expanded to the industrial suburb of Baytown Texas specifically because the labor was cheaper than up north.
Wall Street took that differential to the bank and lit their cigars with $100 bills :\
Eventually led to champagne and caviar with each round of layoffs.
Nixon "opened up" China, but Reagan was not yet here to put the nail in the coffin.
I agree it would take a whole lot more unfair advantages just to get closer to a level playing field.
The way to real manufacturing growth is to build much higher-value-added products per worker.
The difficult problem to overcome is that most of the low-cost raw materials have been coming from China for so long, and the ideal thing would have been coming from more than one place the whole time.
But no, the absolute cheapest must be sought.
Mexico could have been ready by now but they would have had to do it on their own in an organized way like China and India so it pales by comparison, especially high tech in spite of all the brilliant Mexican engineers and innovators.
Lower-cost labor in India might be abundant enough but it'll take a while before the supply chain can compare to what China has built with all the dollars they have had in their hands for so long.
[0] Made up for it with oil, as heavy industry goes.
So, to your query, maybe somewhat? But not strictly.
Organizing the entire chain geographically at the scale you described (inter-city) doesn't bring huge cost advantages by itself. In China labor has historically been cheap, so the transport cost between regions was never the dominant factor anyway.
Most industrial clusters in China formed organically over time just like the rest of the world. Aside from some exceptions like mining, there isn't some master plan laying out entire cities as linear supply chains to the ocean It's not SimCity.
One thing you're right about is that there is less bureaucratic friction or 'lawyers' in the way when it comes to economic development. For the former, it's because economic growth is THE metric for the government, especially at the local level, so they do whatever it takes to make it happen. For the latter, it's because… well, in China no one sues the government, period. I'm not sure it's a good thing.
Disclaimer: I'm Chinese living in China.
Can a person working in a Chinese tech factory for a major US company afford a reasonable place to live a reasonable distance, food, some entertainment, and have savings?
The point is that transportation within China isn't a dominant factor in industrial cost or efficiency. So the idea that major manufacturing cities are laid out like giant assembly lines isn't nearly as important as OP suggests.
China still has many advantages over the US in manufacturing. I just don't think this is a major one, even if there's a grain of truth to it.
I went to the window factory, which was directly beside more window factories, and directly beside that was the place that extruded aluminum for use. The aluminum they used was produced a up the road in what they called the metal district.
You are even saying that "industrial clusters in China" so there is clearly some amount of planning involved. There is obviously benefits to having all of the aluminum factories beside a aluminum producer, and having the shipping/packaging warehouses by the docks, etc.
There is some amount of government work at play here, either on a small scale or a larger scale to provide a reason for places to all setup.
I've also seen things that just are not possible in North America. Asked for samples of aluminum extrusions and had the die made and extrusion done in a day. Locally it would take months before a sample is at my door.
I've sent designs for quotes and get quotes in hours, half the time factory in NA doesn't even reply. And even when it does it's more of a "go away" then anything else.
I've seen live video of robotic factories building entire cabinets for housing.
There is some amount of rose coloured glasses in this thread. But we cannot deny that China wants business and can get stuff done fast and efficiently. That cannot be said for modern day factories in US or Canada. The work ethic and desire for business are just completely different.
You have areas with lots of Oil Refineries, Houston and Baton Rouge for example. You have areas with lots of steel mills, like in North West Indiana. These are examples I personally know of. Obviously a lot of big tech factories exist close to each other in Silicon Valley and in Austin Texas too.
There are "industrial clusters" in America too, simply put. It is natural for large chemical plants or industrial sites to build up near where their source is. Hence all the oil refineries around the gulf. This is not a uniquely China thing at all. Lots of major US cities are known for specific types of industries.
... like Factorio, just in real life.
> The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation.
A lot of that is to prevent our cities from looking like China did before they haphazardly cleaned up shop before the Olympic Games. Remember all the smog alerts? Athletes being afraid the smog and pollution would impact their performance?
> How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean?
There's a tool for that, it's called tariffs - basically, make it uncompetitive for manufacturing moving off to a country that systematically undercuts pricing even at the cost of its environment.
Unfortunately, the current administration doesn't even have the concepts of a plan on what they want to achieve with tariffs. It's mind boggling to watch.
Famously, Houston has no zoning.
Or, as they say everything is bigger in Texas, why not think big... an oil refinery!
https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-doesnt-have-zoning...
There was a great article from like 20 years ago - it quoted Jobs too on that. I remember Forbes or something like that, maybe this "“How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” — The New York Times (Jan 21, 2012)" (cant open it now)
The link to avoid everybody to do the same query: https://g.co/gemini/share/15fc8eb095a2
Nowadays all that infrastructure is now shops and industrial style apartments.
In contrast you have provided no arguments for why Apple’s leadership bears responsibility rather than Congress.
There’s a giant cultural shift that needs to happen in the U.S. to get that back—not sacrificing labor laws, like China does, but the same idea that X or Y CAN be done, and actually jumping at the chance to build stuff instead of feeling entitled to it.
We do have agency, but the agency actually starts in the U.S., in education and culture, and not with a company like Apple.
And what's "radioactively toxic and shitty"? Not wanting to slave away for low wages in bad working conditions?
Business apologists like to slander American workers, and it's tiring. Most of the "radioactively toxic and shitty" culture is management culture.
Probably because the Chinese are working 996. I know people who work 996, in China, and they dislike it as much as I would.
That's "jumping at the chance."
Meanwhile, you start talking to the Chinese machine shop guy, and he's all yeah my brother's does powder coating, his uncle does cardboard boxes and styrofoam inserts are another relative. The American attitude could go that and not work 996, but that's why it's not just about the money.
So basically, you're being unfair.
And, from personal experience, while it's not exactly the same, when I've worked with American tradesmen, they've always had someone they could refer me to for related work.
It's disgusting on so many levels.
But that's beside the point.
Do you honestly expect a machine shop, a place that specializes in creating or fixing or modifying pieces of metal, to find you packaging and fluff for inside the package and then ship it to your customers? Why?
I'm absolutely confused on why you would expect a company that has literally nothing to do with an area of business to just do that thing for you for your convenience.
Do you expect your plumber to also put your floors down? Do you expect your doctor to also clean your teeth or do your taxes?
This isn't an 'attitude problem', this is a 'you have irrational expectations' problem.
So when you talk about how Asian companies were quicker to jump on new things, that's exactly what I think of. I haven't worked in Asia, but I imagine their government is not holding them back with red tape even a tenth as much.
Isn't that massive? You make it seem like it's not important but look at Trump's tariffs that are connected to geopolitics. The US's relation with China could worsen to a point where certain imports are banned.
Really love your 1990s style western centric view.
Care to explain how fancy western IP is not leading in more and more techs fields, e.g. drones, EVs, renewable energy, robotics, fighter jets etc.? because western companies invested in China and gifted fancy western IPs they don't even have to China?
https://toolguyd.com/malco-eagle-grip-locking-pliers-final-u...
This isn't going to happen. The US government these days does not care about investment in things like infrastructure or education.
I think the USA has been very clear based on our actions over the past 4 or so decades: we don't want this kind of labor in this country. I don't see any material changes despite the recent puff pieces and political grandstanding.
Sure, if it took decades of slow patient effort to create the current situation, it might take decades to unwind it. And, sure, the US political system is exceptionally bad at industrial policy.
But, at the end of the day, the political and military logic is, and will be for the forseeable future, get your supply chains out of China. Just because it is slow and difficult doesn't there is any reason to believe the pressure will relax. (Putting aside the possibility of an AGI/robotics revolution)
The pressure to reverse this disaster will always be there but material change isn't realistic. We have neither the capacity nor a strong enough inclination to built out an industrial base anywhere near what China can do. I understand China is supplying the whole world and we'd only need to supply ourselves to achieve security, but that also makes the cost problem even worse.
Chips will come from Taiwan and everything else will come from China for the foreseeable future unless like you said there's a major disruption from somewhere. Without that, I only see one pathway everyone can stomach: continue growing the economy, which includes leveraging China's industrial and labor base, and hope any political differences with China can be mitigated diplomatically.
This is the legacy of Tim Cook before Jobs passed. He was the guy who put immense pressure on Chinese factories to deliver on the insane quotas and timeframes he forced on them. He essentially blackmailed companies in order for them to his bidding - threatening to go to competitors if they didn't deliver exactly what he wanted.
The stuff Apple got away with in China could never be repeated here. I mean, you think you can regularly push so many workers to commit suicide, you have to put nets around the buildings in order to dissuade them from jumping off buildings? Yeah, not happening here. Which is why Apple does business there. Its why Tim Cook was able to abuse Chinese labor laws to get them to deliver the impossible, time and again, regardless of the human cost.
I chuckled out loud at the huge-ass-safety-hazard-in-any-manufacturing-environment US flag thumb tacked to the factory wall. It's all wafer thin gold leaf to appease the toddler in command.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2026/02/apple-accelera...
'Q:What does China's competitive edge look like in practice?'
'A: One example from The Times article: When Jobs decided just a month
before the iPhone hit markets to replace a scratch-prone plastic screen
with a glass one, a Foxconn factory in China woke up about 8,000 workers
when the glass screens arrived at midnight, and the workers were
assembling 10,000 iPhones a day within 96 hours.
'Another example: Apple had originally estimated that it would take nine
months to hire the 8,700 qualified industrial engineers needed to oversee
production of the iPhone; in China, it took 15 days. Anecdotes like that
leave you "feeling almost impressed by the no-holds-barred capabilities
of these manufacturing plants," says Edward Moyer at CNET News,
"impressed and queasy at the same time."'
Here I can't even get a tradesperson to give me a quote, much less show up on a dime. I guess I need another eight billion dollars, give or take a penny
But maybe China and similar places will elevate their overall prosperity enough that people will refuse to be treated like this en masse, so there is some hope.
China also needs to change something drastic to avoid brain drain. The migration of competent people is still one-way. There no path to become a Chinese citizen. China has come a long way, but Europe is still ahead on building liveable communities and wok/life balance, while the US is still attractive to those seeking freedom and prosperity. China has avoided issues due to a huge population and that demographic dividend. But eventually it’ll become an issue
Why does this matter? I hear this a lot but at the same time I look at what's coming out of China, especially in the AI space, and it's clear that brain drain isn't really hampering them.
No, 2000s-2020s was peak blue collar dividend, think world combined, but low value dividend. When PRC had lots of hands but few brains, i.e. fraction of STEM vs US / west.
2040s-2080s is PRC peak tertiary skilled dividend. They'll have about 2-4x US in just STEM who'll be in workforce for most of our and our children's life times, even while tfr math starts eating away at future cohorts. The TLDR is they've just started cooking, their highend human capita pool will be exploiting greatest high skill demographic dividend in recorded history for high value. Their final form is OCED combined in talent and world combined in bluecollar backstopped by robots/automation (currently on trend to be more than world combined).
Brain drain barely a problem now, this isn't 2000s where there's shit domestic opportunities and PRC lose large % of the few best they produce. They now they mint so much talent, brain drain a rounding error, top talent increasingly stay in PRC. And many of the best that went abroad are returning. Or future trend is many of best that are leaving will recirculate back to PRC eventually. TBH most of those go abroad now are frankly PRC B/C tier talent, i.e. most international students are those too mid to do well on gaokao and even then they turn into A students in west. Like there's still some sectors where west can draw because they can afford to pay magnitudes more (which is matter of FX/geopolitics), but PRC now also in position to attract foreign talent via $$$, so much so that places have to ban nationals from working in PRC strategic sectors. China's expat draw is it's PRC, if you're high end talent and you want lab built in a few months, bottomless access to resources including human capital, dynamism of Asian tier1 cities, that EU+US can't offer. But immigration point really secondary to fact that when PRC produces plurality of high performing global talent, and retains most of them, they don't need to worry about immigration of competent people, just need to hold on people they have, which by and large is happening, i.e. Tsinghua brain drain rate went from 30% to single digits in last few years and returnee rate higher than ever. As in west depend on PRC talent surplus (because western talent pipeline shit vs PRC), trains them, and now that PRC rich with opportunities, many recirculate/reverse braindrain back to PRC anyway when they're high level.
At end of the day _most_ people are economic migrants, they move for $$$ not muh freedom/community. Ultimately US/EU strength is they have money/FX money multiplier, US way more than EU. When that goes away/decline people start making different choices. And again, PRC demographics will be lingering in background... but just means cheaper housing/less crowded cities, i.e. less drag on PRC living. It terms of active demographic dividend, most of us will be dead before PRC declines, imo not really worthwhile extrapolating on that timescale.
maybe time to check your priors
Yea must be really amazing living a crowded factory dorm room with suicide safety nets under the windows only to be abruptly woken up because some schmuck in California demands his precious phones be assembled. Must be a wonderful gig.
The US is still an economy with the ability to tackle very complex tasks with its industrial base. Up until fairly recently, it was a major destination for people seeking higher education and work in specialized fields in STEM, which is necessary for the execution of the projects that companies like Apple want to do.
The problem is that we now have an anti-immigration administration, and are home to a number of multinational companies - Apple's a great example - that feel that their one and only obligation is to create value for shareholders. They don't want to throw the money needed at American engineer salaries, because money paid to the American engineer is money not paid to a shareholder.
We can possibly deal with the administration. The US isn't the only country in the world with a nativist movement; China does it with non-Han peoples within its borders. The real hangup is making a bunch of Americans with capital feel some sort of loyalty towards their own country and its workers.
"The real hangup is making a bunch of Americans with capital feel some sort of loyalty towards their own country and its workers."
People didn't culturally decide they don't want these sorts of jobs, business did, because short term monetary benefit. The other stuff may have come along after but could easily be reversed. But currently there is no need to reverse because US business only cares about short term monetary gain.
All this talk like this is some huge systemic thing is BS. If there were jobs, it would all happen. Just like it did in China.
Second, it takes a huge amount of engineering talent to do what China is doing as well. In the US, a lot of engineering talent has been attracted to software (or other service industry jobs), where there's a lot of money to be made, and you can sit on your ass and argue on an orange-colored website all day. I prefer that to wearing a hardhat and waking up at 6 AM to go to a factory.
Third, China concentrates a lot of this talent into dense cities, and people make a lot of sacrifices to live there. You're definitely not gonna convince an HVAC guy to leave his suburban home and sell his pickup truck to go live in a dormitory in a dense city and ride a scooter. In China, there's plenty of people that are itching to leave the countryside for the city, leave their families, and search for a better life. In the US, people that live outside of cities, generally want to live there, and aren't interested in relocating. Most developed nations feed this need for skilled labor by importing labor from countries where people have a strong desire to better themselves but don't have a cultural expectation of a backyard and a white picket fence. But the US has had a fucked up immigration system for a long time now.
Fourth, China pulls out all of the roadblocks in order to facilitate the growth of their industrial base. They don't need to go through 10 years of planning to build something, they don't need to argue with a local zoning board, and if they want to build something they don't wait for the free market to decide to do it. If they want to support an industry, they just do it. Single-party unitary governments are efficient as fuck. Of course, this comes with many drawbacks, which politically are just not viable in the US.
1. The HVAC guys would definitely fill the the quick turnaround, small shops that surround the manufacturing industry in China if that was an option.
Culturally doesn't matter. The majority of young men I know are underemployed and hate the service industry, but would be a fit for having their own adjacent business like that ones in China that get so hyped as enabling their dynamics. I think you are very focused on the crowd you know. The young people I know are so itching to create they have 3d printers, or make fishing flies, or make their own clothes.
2. Sounds great, if you live in the bay area or other tech scenes. I no longer do. I left tech to work (albeit tech) in a factory. For the majority of people I know, what you lay out it isn't an option or on the table. They are under-employed in brain dead service jobs they hate, and that do not provide them a future. They would jump on building up the adjacent small businesses that China's manufacturing depends on and that people here hype as 'wow, you can find a shop that does XYZ'. The stuff people say 'we just don't have in the USA'.
3. Small town America was factories since forever. I don't think China's way is the only way. We have a very good transportation system whereas when China established it's manufacturing it didn't. I think your view is myopic here and clouded with 'the China way'.
4. Again, the 80% of America you seem to ignore, pulls out all the stops for shitty ass 50 employee employers to build. You seem to be focused on a very small part of the US.
Nothing you say is a limiter IF the jobs are there. American companies pulling the jobs killed American dynancism, not any of the things you list. If it's TRULY no longer about cost, we could EASILY do it again. The people I met in China weren't better than the average American. They were great, and I think very highly of China. But the advantage I saw were wages, and people from the countryside willing to put up with a lot, but I don't think they will put up with as much long term (and I hope they don't have to, again the people I met are all great people and I hope the best for all of us). And a side of environmental pollution (I know 2 guys that moved their factories to China purely because of savings by not having to be environmentally friendly. So many that falls under your regulation, but that isn't a long term solution/state for China and that was a decade ago, maybe things are changed for the better already).
> 80% of America you seem to ignore, pulls out all the stops for shitty ass 50 employee employers to build. You seem to be focused on a very small part of the US.
It's easy to get politicians to give out some tax breaks for a reelection campaign. It seems to be damn near impossible to actually get anything done that actually matters. We frequently spend billions of dollars to support manufacturing investment and have nothing to show for it.
Just look at Foxconn in Wisconsin, as an example. Over $1 billion and half a decade and still nothing. China could've had a whole city built. We were just trying to get 13,000 factory jobs, but we couldn't even manage that.
But we'll probably just talk past each other past this point. It will be interesting to see what happens. Like I said, I remember the Japan scare. Then all manufacturing going to Mexico (and my dad making sure he didn't buy the heche en mexico lable) before it finally landed in China.
There are other places, as the comment above mentioned, that can produce for cheaper.
The US could do the exact same. Many high-quality, sophisticated goods are made in the US.
It's just cheaper to do in China because the salaries are lower and the costs of establishing more efficient business infrastructure are lower.
And since these companies care more about cost than anything, they choose China.
People invest in things that maximize returns. 30 years ago they had a choice: invest in building out more manufacturing infrastructure in the US, or doing it in China. China was, and is, less expensive to run. So China got the investment dollars.
You could absolutely build any product in the US. You'd just also have to build the infrastructure to build the industrial base, and that means spending more money than you would in China.
It always comes down to cost. Always.
Transcript:
There's a confusion about China — let me at least give you my opinion. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago. That is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view.
The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill, in one location, and the type of skill it is. The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with the materials that we do, are state-of-the-art, and the tooling skill is very deep here.
You know, in the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure we could fill this room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields. It's that vocational expertise that is very deep, very very deep here. And I give the education system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that, even when others were deemphasizing vocational. Now, I think many countries in the world have woken up and said, you know, this is a key thing and we've got to correct that. But China called that right from the beginning.This is a token operation meant to project the idea that manufacturing is coming back to the United States. This is appeasement by Tim Apple.
"But it's cheaper in our main geopolitical rival" doesn't quite wear like it used to.
The address I found for the facility is 9101 Windmill Park Lane Hudson, TX 77064
This seems ill advised given recent events like Hurricane Harvey
[1] https://pangea-network.com/busiest-and-biggest-ports-in-the-...
I grew up in DFW.
My house in WI is assessed at a significantly higher value than my siblings house in Ft Worth.
My 2025 property tax bill ~$5k, my 2025 state income tax - not gonna publish it here but not all that significant.
Sibling in Texas property tax bill: ~$14k. Significantly higher than my state income tax + property tax.
Also, I don't have to live in Texas.
https://www.propertytax101.org/propertytaxbystate
As someone living in Fort Worth and making good money as a Staff SWE, I got a tax refund this year. It was due to paying interest on my house, but still.
I'd recommend asking your sibling see if they qualify for the homestead exemption, it's significant. You or they can check if they're using it and see their exact property taxes here:
The difference here is really more of an indicator of property values in the respective areas. In major metros in Texas, you're looking at ~2%+ tax rates, which is infact higher than Wisconsin, even in the metros there.
> As someone living in Fort Worth and making good money as a Staff SWE, I got a tax refund this year. It was due to paying interest on my house, but still.
If you paid more in property taxes, that would indicate you can take a larger federal tax deduction... so, if anything, a tax refund implies you paid a lot in local property tax. Either that, or a boatload in interest (or, both). Neither is indicative of local property tax being low.
Also, everyone gets a mortgage interest deduction in the US on their primary residence, so it shouldn't be that surprising.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/economy/article/ap...
Steve Jobs would have fired someone over that obvious broken window situation, and he'd have been (mostly) right to do so.
Flooding is also something which can be mitigated: build foundations to be taller, work with the topography to avoid the path of water, and build drainage solutions. You should see the drainage field that Apple built for their campus in Austin, it's absolutely massive and can divert an incredible amount of water.
It’s not limited to mega corps. Commercial construction is built to a higher standard. Some times you can buy commercial grade hardware and materials for your house if you want.
Larger buildings are also more robust at the foundation because it needs to be so much stronger. That thick concrete is necessary, not a luxury.
All this tracks. Anyone else getting bombarded with WSJ youtube videos about Apple manufacturing?
Some of the calculus is not about if it will flood it's about if you'll lose your investment if it floods. If an underwriter is willing to cover it, you might go for it anyway.
https://www.swg.usace.army.mil/Missions/Dam-Safety-Program/A...
In the video there are Chinese characters on the clothing above the front pocket area. In a picture of her later on in the news article the Chinese writing is gone.
Has it been photoshopped out for the press release images?
Can you chare to an image host that isnt quite so rebellious?
https://rimgo.bloat.cat/TEmek6j.png
You might be interested in https://libredirect.github.io/
512 with M4 Max is only a little above a dual Epyc with 192 cores each though.
https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/apples-houston...
I'm excited for these to fall into collectors hands in a decade or two.
obviously not framed in terms of "here is how we create more e-waste" but you can see the additional barriers to attempting to reuse decommissioned hardware
I have a few prototype apple devices in my collection. Especially with the sheer number of these AI servers it's just a matter of time before they wind up in public.
Is that assembly really in the US? Asking because the woman in the first shot appeared to have Chinese letters on the left side of her uniform.
Increasing for sure with different uses and possibilities.
Because the video is of the workers in that specific factory, and they’ll only start producing the Mac mini there later in the year. It’s in the title. You can’t show real video of something which hasn’t happened yet.
We're going to have to teach our children this concept about discerning the AI slop their grandparents flood Facebook with :')
I have seen exactly that, thanks to AI...
Foxconn bought it last year: https://communityimpact.com/houston/cy-fair-jersey-village/d...
EDIT: a screenshot from the video: https://imgur.com/a/X3t4crC
"Think Different" -> "Think Indifferent"
A VPS that can perform like a Mac mini will likely cost the same as a Mac mini in 12 months time.
Apple is amazing at marketing to make 1990s technology sound cutting edge. I'm sure they change something for plausible deniability, as a nominalist, not even 2 of the same computers are the same.
It is the cheapest Mac you can get for that.
Gosh I wish I could hire their marketing company.
Like the rest of HN (maybe it's HN's fault!) I managed to convince myself that I not only needed a Mac Mini desktop but also a 4090 rig for AI.
The 4090 hasn't been booted up in 9 months and the Mac Mini is now the world's most amazing 10GBE NAS server. My older M1 Max Macbook Pro and underpowered newer Macbook Air are the only things I use.
It's funny how we convince ourselves we need things. I bought myself a 3080 Ti a few years ago because I wanted a gaming computer, but then I ended up buying a Playstation 5 and not using my computer for anything more intensive than Factorio. More recently though I have been using my 3080 for Comfy UI image generation and messing around with local models, so I guess it's getting use now.
If you want to humiliate me conclusively, throw me some numbers. LLMs have moved trillions worth of hardware value, but only a fraction of it is Apple branded.
Both my fortune 20 company and my buddy got these for LLMs... and the champion/my buddy had the look of shame when it wasnt usable.
Together with robotics push , it has a chance , and even they do small things . Today they make body , tomorrow cpu , etc it’s a good thing going on regardless of politics
The US built a high margins service economy.
This is two steps backwards, no step forwards sort of a deal.
The GDP sector composition of most of the largest economies is heavily service biased. So, no.
What are you even talking about.
Iraq economy is almost 60% industrial, are they doing better than Ireland? Of course not.
Also, the US is the second largest country by motor vehicle production in the world. And the US GDP is 80% service derived.
The US has no national interest in the Mac Mini, or the Mac Pro for that matter. Homeland security isn't reliant on Apple datacenters. The Mac comprises less than 10% of Apple's yearly revenue, almost lower-profit than the iPad. Manufacturing Macs in the US doesn't even secure your pension.
The iPhone comprises a minor national interest corollary to Apple's stock price, but that's never being onshored. Apple would go bankrupt paying Americans to assemble the iPhone, and if you don't believe me then Google the leaked BOMs.
When the war will start what wit China are you going to use ? What’s even more critical who will be the one who will start manufacturing?
Yeah maybe it’s a tiny drop in the ocean , but that’s the start at least of something. Not just installing solar toilets billed as solar panels for $40k as it was under previous administration
These things just take a lot of time, there are tremendous headwinds to fight, and the US government + US media increasingly seems unable to see through projects past the next election cycle.
Lots of billionaires in the US, got that way, by exporting all their production to China. Because they did it, lots of lower-tier people had to do the same, or go out of business.
Since we worship billionaires, that little bit never seems to get mentioned, as it makes them look bad.
The only cure is to cost some of those billionaires money.
Ain't gonna happen.
But that was the entire point of the Trump tariffs? Or am I missing something here?
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/09/apples-new-mac-pro-to...
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/28/tech/apple-mac-pro-produc...
The two articles you share are one from CNN saying apple was moving production back to China after 6 years in the US and second from apple a few months later saying they were keeping it in the US.
You put the article from September before the article from June to create a narrative that only a few months passed between Apple's announcement of US production and CNN debunking it. The only issue is that the CNN article was 3 months _before_ Apple's rebuttal.
However, this issue is complicated by the fact that Trump toured the factory in 2019 and claimed it was new, something the press picked up an and therefore the media stories of the time are pretty warped.
In reality, Apple had many issues ramping up production in the US for various reason, one example being supply chain.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/now-know-why-apple-had-142145...
If they started in 2012 and it all went rosy, why did they have another press release in 2019 announcing it again, and why are they making a big song and dance about it again 14 years later? If everything with manufacturing in the US was going fine, I would have expected them to start making a lot more products in the US over those 14 years. Instaead we have a couple of troubled product lines, and some big shiny press releases trying to show off its importance.
So, servers and minis share a production line then.
I kinda knew it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45599894
Private Cloud Compute runs on Apple silicon servers derived from the same silicon used in devices, with custom secure OS infrastructure built around them. See Apple’s security documentation and reporting on PCC servers by finding the link somewhere in the comments of this thread.
As for their econ model, just see Cook’s methodical style with fast turnover to avoid stockpiling [1], i.e., the opposite of what is going on with AI servers where margins are cut at every step of the way. So sharing an assembly facility doesn’t imply chips are interchangeable, it may well just be assembly efficiency, which I guess is common.
[1] https://mondays.supernegotiate.com/post/inside-tim-cook-s-ma...
The only thing it says is "custom Apple silicon", which honestly could mean a high-binned chip from the same production line.
You gotta admit that the M4 price is kind of a magic trick. Also, with zero carbon emissions.
Look at their environmental report:
https://images.apple.com/co/environment/pdf/products/desktop...
> To address emissions generated by using primary materials, we’re increasing the recycled content in our products, maximizing material and manufacturing efficiencies, and improving yields.
This wording is very specific. It's not "recycled materials", it's "recycled content" to address the emissions of using primary materials. I find it to be very sneaky.
I'm not saying they're refurbishing used servers, but there's definitely something going on here.
Look at their overall environment report from 2024 (not product specific):
https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Pr...
There is a section about "Material recovery". Here is a quote:
> Even after a product reaches the end of its life, the materials within it can serve the next generation of products.
> Each time that we effectively recover materials from end-of-life products, we enable circular supply chains.
> Disassembly and recovery advancement: Continuing to develop better, more efficient means of disassembling products that maximize material recovery while minimizing waste.
It seems to me that what they're describing here, publicly, is almost exactly what I said. I just made an extra leap implying that the disassembled EOL'd products were servers that never got used and were turned into M4 Minis (which is speculation, but highly informed by these reports).
Why do this? Well, it means they can invest on servers and if they lose some race, they can pivot. It's a unique advantage. I would take advantage of that if I were Tim.
They also use Anthropic internally (code/marketing/sales) which runs their models on Cerebras so they also seem to be agnostic so runs on the same Apple hardware.
What's likely to happen is Mac minis for North America will be made in Houston. Otherwise, the ones for the rest of the world will be made at the same facilities they are now.
Just like iPhones for the US are made in India; iPhones for the rest of the world are made in China.
I'd guess it's a small percentage of the Mac minis for North America. Just enough that they get exempted from tariffs on the ones coming in from overseas...
Also investing $500 billion in domestic manufacturing doesn’t hurt.
Either of these devices (per watt of computing power) could become a home appliance pretty easily.
If "can't have been made in any capacity in Texas" is your criteria that might be pretty difficult.
Example, rarely do I navigate to YouTube, I download the videos before watching them. Or if not, and I am presented with advertisement .. I say F' It, not watch, and move on with my life.
Computer components are a requirement and I limit my purchases as much as possible.
USA lacks proper regulation for operator safety in automation environments. USA company can manufacturer machinery that is easily capable to remove limbs and decapitate people.
EU regulations require safety be built into the machinery if it can be. This means anything that is manufacture in the USA and authorized for use in the EU is of better quality.
Most US companies don't care if one of their client employees is physically harmed because they put up a warning sign.
I will continue to not waste my money on states that reject simple humanity ... such as rejecting the requirement for heat and water breaks for outdoor workers ... and erosion of church and state.
[0] https://www.fox13news.com/news/desantis-signs-bill-banning-f...
[1] https://apnews.com/article/paxton-indictment-texas-d5e57fc6c...
[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/11/26/texas-laws-effective...
[3] https://www.fox4news.com/news/texas-laws-now-effect-septembe...
P.S. I have family that lives there and they tell everyone not to move there. If they had the means to get out they would. Unfortunately it is not just about economics it can also be about divorced parents with shared custody that prevents this.
> Apple's work on a new Mac mini factory in Houston wasn't a quickly-conceived plan to appease President Donald Trump. The reality is that Apple had a plan ready to do this long before the demands started.
The hard part is manufacturing Apple's high-volume hardware, namely the iPhone. That is not anywhere close to being onshored, and Apple seemingly has no interest in even attempting it if Indian labor is still an option.
As Tim Cook put it: "In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields..."
The article mentions they are opening a manufacturing academy to train a future generation of Americans to build manufacturing capability.
It doesn't matter how many manufacturing experts America trains anymore. We lost this race; China has globally-competitive manufacturing, and the US doesn't. Apple doesn't want to willingly pay for American labor today, and a decade of manufacturing graduates will probably only ease the blow when big corps are forced to onshore again.
Mark Zuckerberg made up pledged "investment" numbers on the spot at one of their dinners and was caught on hot mic admitting it. This is hilariously corrupt and will not result in a US manufacturing boom.
Luckily it's not just "for any reason" then! There are plenty of examples, where do you want to start? I'll start with a few: Steven Miller saying they have plenary authority, Bovino claiming a city was "theirs" after rolling up with CBP/ICE goons, JD Vance saying federal officers have "absolute immunity", CBP officers showing up in force at Gavin Newsom's rally, and the pardon of Jan 6th insurrectionists.
Also you didn't answer how the economics of onshoring have changed, I guess the fascist thing really struck a nerve... I wonder why.
Oops - you've done it again.
Then Trump did a good thing. You’re inadvertently praising Trump in your attempt to slander Tim Cook.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/09/apples-new-mac-pro-to...
Apple Manufacturing Academy opens in Detroit on August 19 — https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/07/apple-manufacturing-a...
Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud — https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
Remember that, after World War I, the U.S. had most demobilized its military. The Japanese had more aircraft carriers than the U.S. in 1941. That’s why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor—it thought it could win!
But while the U.S. was weak militarily, it had been the largest industrial producer since the late 19th century. Within a couple of years of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had built a bigger air force and navy than the rest of the world combined.
That’s why it’s better to be able to make Mac Minis in Houston. Because you can repurpose those facilities to produce electronics for warships instead of having to buy parts from countries you might be at war with.
What is the final judgement about this?
For example, on a military level, the US is concerned about how rapidly China is catching up in naval capacity, China is building new warships far faster than the US can. And it's hard not to notice that China's overall shipbuilding capacity is more than 200x higher than America's.
The US has a lot of pride over having been "the arsenal of democracy" in WW2, and it's well known that a huge part of why the US was effective in that war was sheer mass: the US simply made much more war 'stuff' than any other combatant. But if the US was to get in a shooting war with China today, it would likely be China that would enjoy an advantage in production scale, with the US trying to make do with fewer vehicles and munitions.
Also: "In Houston, workers assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S."
Advanced AI servers!
Mac Mini is their simplest product. It's the natural place to start training at a new facility.
> Advanced AI servers!
Yes, they have their own AI servers.
How can it be simpler than the Apple TV?
Apple invented Advanced AI Servers! So much more advanced!
Just like in the 2000s when the G4 Mac was a "supercomputer".
Seems to me this part of the PR release is a reference to claudbot/openclaw. What else could it be referring to?
If you genuinely can't find out what they are referring to, you've been on HN too long.
This is not in response to OpenClaw. It takes a long time to plan a new manufacturing facility.
The Mac Mini is a natural place to start training at a new facility because it's their simplest product.
Mac Minis are also around 1% of Apple's device sales. Even with an OpenClaw-inspired burst of sales, it's still a small part of their volume.
Update: For the record I do hate the POTUS. He’s ruined our reputation around the world. Allowed things like USAID to die removing aid from millions leading to many deaths. He’s incompetent and very stupid which will likely get us killed either in some war or in the next pandemic. Tarrifs are a tax. Congress raises taxes. If you support his right to tax without congress then go live under a king. I’m an American. We don’t want kings. Need I go on?
And hating POTUS for what he’s doing to the country is my right as an American. We weren’t perfect. But we were at least respected. Now the world laughs at us.
He works for me. And you. And he’s doing a garbage job at his job. Why continue to give him a free pass. Would you give someone like this in your team a pass?
Here’s hoping his managers (congress) fires him (impeaches) him.
Margin is the wrong way to look at it. Law and finance are high margin work. But lawyers won’t help you win a war.
We’ve got to get you some better sources, mate. This is a straight-up Russian propagandist pretending to operate out of the UK while having a mailing address in South Korea.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/military-watch-magazine-bias/
Notice that this doesn’t contradict your link being shoddy. Blindly reiterating Russian propaganda is very patriotic of you.
> But this particular point about air to air missiles is well attested.
Please don’t pretend that I was disputing the expected range of the PL-17; that’s clearly not the point I raised.
I’m on the right side of history. Are you?
As stated, it is offensive
You need to do appeasement as needed. Business is business.
Apple doesn't break out the Mac sales by product, but the latest estimates is it's 5% [1] of total Mac sales.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/23/mac-mini-us-manufacturi...
Right, but it's closer to 1% of total device sales like I said in my comment.
Macs are only part of their device lineup, of course.
That’s correct.
Arm64 is still limited for sure, but with Snapdragon and Windows finally committing to ARM I think the future is bright for that. Just not here yet.
Are you thinking of plugging in actual consumer expansion cards, or are you wanting the lanes broken out on some kind of riser where they can go to hardwired stuff on a carrier board?
Directly exposing literal PCIe signals cuts out the pair of expensive Thunderbolt controllers.
Plex started as a Mac-only XBMC fork during this era. There were also apps like Remote Buddy which let you control pretty much everything with the simple remote that came with the Mac. Apparently Remote Buddy still exists and works with the current gen Siri Remote.
Great performance, quiet, efficient.
It would be tough to get a windows machine at that price that gets anywhere close on performance, especially if you consider the cost of electricity.
Great parent/grandparent machines, home servers.
Not that tough. I paid $299 for a Ryzen 5800h mini PC last year, which roughly lands in the same performance bracket.
Would have considered the Mac Mini, but the AMD box has much better Linux support.
Not really. And this is before the M5 Mac mini which ships later this year.
Putting it together in desktop‑mini form factors:
- Raw CPU: M4 is much faster single‑core, generally faster multi‑core at lower power.
- GPU: M4’s iGPU is roughly 2×+ Vega 8 and more modern.
- Memory subsystem: M4 has far higher bandwidth and unified memory, ideal for integrated GPU and many modern workloads.
- Efficiency/noise: M4 wins by a large margin; much higher perf per watt.
- Compatibility: 5800H wins if you need bare‑metal x86 OSes like FreeBSD or specific x86‑only software stacks.
- 5800H: 35–54 W configurable TDP in laptops; mini‑PC implementations often run it fairly hot to maintain clocks.
- M4 in Mac mini: ~24 W base TDP, ~40 W boost, but getting clearly higher performance per watt.
The mini would save $87/year. That's a 3.5y breakeven assuming no reinvestment.
To reiterate, this is absolutely a comparable machine to the Mac Mini in terms of performance. Maybe not your ideal configuration, but I had $300 and a limited patience for Asahi development.
Reiterating is not the appropriate response after someone has already detailed many ways in which the performance a 5800h is not in the same league, none of which you have even attempted to refute.
The more truthful claim you could have made is that you don't need the extra performance (far more plausible, given that you bought a new machine with a four year old chip), or that you needed storage capacity more than you needed performance.
I don't think Apple wouldn't find a cheaper place to manufacture Macs than the US. The US is literally the most expensive place to build.
That, or the Mac Minis are 100% asembled by robots, which is also a possibility.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
When a large company wants to create a new plant somewhere, they go shopping for what state/city will give them the most favorable tax. Politicians throw in special exemptions, special tax credits, exclusivity contracts, all sorts of things.
In the US, everything is flexible.
Rulings from different countries are typically used to ensure no taxes are paid. E.g. get a ruling from the US that some activity is taxable in Luxembourg, and then get a ruling from Luxembourg that it's taxable in the US. Like McDonald's did. Either country will then say "well, it's up to the other country to tax that, I'm not policing that". Mostly after a while, multiple companies get clued in and it all gets exposed and the "loophole" is closed. E.g. a uble Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
This can be an honest error by one or both tax services, a strategic move (to be a "tax paradise" and prevent other taxable activities from leaving the country), or - one would speculate, allegedly - for political or personal gain.
> https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-invest-american-manufacturing...
> https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/08/06/apple-exempt-from...