Hacker News Reader

Comment by hypeatei | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Those sound like good things. I'm not sure why your second paragraph sounds like the opposite.

They're cursory gestures at best, and stark condemnations of US manufacturing capacity at worst. The Mac Mini and Mac Pro are not complex or dense electronics in the slightest. They're carrier enclosures for TSMC technology, you could probably make them in Siberia if you wanted to.

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..."

So Tim said it's not yet practical so they aren't doing it? And instead of moving what they can?

The article mentions they are opening a manufacturing academy to train a future generation of Americans to build manufacturing capability.

You have to ask yourself, why does America beg Apple to onshore in the first place? Why is Apple offshoring things that can be done in the US?

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.

Currying favor with fascists is NOT good. What has meaningfully changed for onshoring to make sense economically? Nothing. All that's happened is an executive came into power who threatens tariffs and other retaliatory action via the DOJ / DHS / FCC if you don't do what Trump says. It's embarrassing and frankly insane that our business leaders continue to stay silent, have dinners at the Whitehouse, and put out puff pieces like this.

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.

Calling people fascists for any reason has completely removed the real meaning of the word. Putin did the same to incentivise the war in Ukraine, and in the US, if you're not the media companies benefitting from endlessly stirring people up to a frenzy with that word, you're the LLM trained on their very narrow input texts.

> Calling people fascists for any reason

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.

> I guess the fascist thing really struck a nerve... I wonder why.

Oops - you've done it again.

Let’s say you’re right and Apple is only doing this because of Trump.

Then Trump did a good thing. You’re inadvertently praising Trump in your attempt to slander Tim Cook.

Your point being?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com