Some new iMacs marked as being 'Assembled in USA' | Hacker News Reader

Some new iMacs marked as being 'Assembled in USA'

appleinsider.com

58 pointsQuekster33 comments

From the article:

"Besides built-to-order machines, the 21.5-inch iMacs are some of the first known examples of an Apple computer being assembled in the U.S., according to Fortune."

That's incorrect. For more than ten years, all Apple computers used to be assembled in the US of A [0].

http://www.strategosinc.com/articles/apple-foxconn-strategy-...

[0] Except perhaps for Apple Is sold outside of the US, as customers were expected to assemble that model themselves.

I wonder if assembling these in the US would win over many critical consumers and actually turn Apple a profit. Has this ever been done with another company? What sort of industry is this possible?

Methinks it happens in automobiles too. And higher end/larger electronic items.

It comes down to 1)logistical costs, i.e. the cost of shipping a final product v/s shipping parts of the product. 2) Safety/damage rates of the items thus transported 3) Speed of transportation in either formats

With the see-sawing of freight rates, Mr. Cook might be tweaking on the cost benefit analysis.

You forget 4) duty. that is probably the single biggest one -- sometimes components have a lower tariff rate than assembled final goods, and sometimes it makes sense to import low-value products and do a magic high-value "assembly" step in the country or compact (EU, NAFTA) of sale, if taxes are lower than duty, or if you can make the "assembly" step involve "purchasing and installing software or a license", and thus an expense, but not a tariff-subject item.

The ultimate examples being "pressing boxed software". Assemble the box, manuals, etc. in a certain country, add the value during that step in the form of components, with the license not being dutiable, but a boxed software item imported would be.

Regulatory arbitrage at its finest. This is pretty much why Apple makes some iPads in Brazil now.

The article did point out that the requirements for declaring something to be "Assembled in USA" are a lot more stringent.

The US also has low duties; it's mainly about some other countries, usually in the developing world, which have higher duties and more broken enforcement regimes.

Also the US has weird loopholes with some territories or other treaty countries, so you can do less work to make something "made in USA" in some places and some industries than in others (I think Saipan, American Samoa, Puerto Rico have special status)

I doubt that this is happening due to a direct profit motive. Way more likely that this is simply an effort to save face after all the foxconn drama.

Why would you want to "save face" if not for profit?

There certainly was drama, but nobody believes that other manufacturers are any better, so I wouldn't call it "save face": Apple can actually gain a marketable advantage over everybody else here.

Don't know what Apple is doing, but it is common for firms to manufacture goods overseas, then put a small finishing touch in the US to get a Made/Assembled in USA label for PR or tax purposes.

The article states that "screwdriver" or other non-transformative assembly of foreign components does not qualify. There must be a substantive transformation of the parts to qualify as "assembly"

Well ok what is the minimum then? Does epoxy gluing qualify? Plugin in ram module and glue case together?

At the same time I kind of doubt this is done much for PR purposes. Can't see really people dropping or picking Apple products in favor of alternatives because of the assembly origin.

There's absolutely no doubt that all the components were made overseas, the boards made and populated overseas, and probably the aluminum casing as well though that is conceivably Made in USA. The glass might be made in USA, a lot of Corning was at least recently.

It's final assembly, screwing the parts together. Gluing the screen. No screws in the screen, so perhaps Apple imagines that connecting cables and gluing the screen counts as assembly, and who is to say otherwise.

Sure, that's assembly. The fabrication is done at Foxconn still...

Victoria's Secret used to (still does?) make their products in Honduras and then send the essentially-finished garments to the US, where inmates in private prisons sew on "Made in USA" labels. Because the "Made in USA" labels are sewn on, that counts as the final step in the assembly process, even though literally nothing but the "Made in USA" tag is even made in the USA.

Having inmates stitch up designer undergarments seems like a bad idea. Male inmates or female inmates, either way it seems like it could bring up some emotions that prison guards won't be happy with.

California inmates sew their own garb. In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria's Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace "Made in Honduras" labels on garments with "Made in the USA."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-prisoner...

Almost certainly an urban legend.

Federal law requires that products labeled as "Made in the USA" be "all or virtually all" made in the United States. The Federal Trade Commission's guidelines [0] make clear that sewing a "Made in the USA" tag on a foreign-made article of clothing would violate that requirement.

0. http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus03-complying-made-usa-s...

They may have since changed the requirements, or there may be a loophole elsewhere, or people may simply be disregarding the law. As noted below, however, it's pretty simple to find many accounts of this with some simple Googling.

However, note that Northern Marianas produces products with the "Made in the USA" label, despite not being in, near, or part of the USA, and having a history of terrible labor practices and corruption.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Mariana_Islands#Econom...

The Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands is an unincorporated territory of the United States, and its citizens are US citizens. (And I used to live there, as it happens.) Its relationship with the US is similar to Puerto Rico's.

Accordingly, products made in the CNMI may be labeled as "Made in USA" (subject to the same rules I cited above). But after the labor scandals of the 1990s, many well known clothing brands that kept their factories there switched to labels like "Made in Northern Marianas, USA".

Since 2009, the CNMI no longer makes its own immigration policy. [0] The islands are now subject to federal immigration law, and all provisions of the Immigration and Naturalization Act will be in effect there from 2014. By that date, the CNMI's workforce will be governed by the same laws as elsewhere in the United States and there will no longer be any real basis for controversy over its "Made in USA" labeling.

0. http://www.dhs.gov/commonwealth-northern-mariana-islands-tra...

I visit Saipan last spring (home to 90% of the population) and it was rather sad. All the factories were closed, tourism was petering out and there were shopping centers being recaptured by the jungle.

The Northern end of Island is spectacularly beautiful and Japanese tourists still would visit there. In the whole of the Micronesia area, Asian tourists outnumber Americans by something like 20 to 1 and the US seems increasingly irrelevant even on the Islands it owns. Interesting.

If this was a pure PR move, then Apple might have announced and shown the factory, people, facility some time ago.

They certainly have the profit margins to fit it.

Now, if we're talking about further boosting their prices to maintain the same margins...

I dont think most people would look at where the product is assembled, however as a European, assembled in the US, might be worse than made in china. US made items dont have the best reputation here, the stadard US 30 day warranty, dose not scream "made to last".. (European law requieres all products to feature a 2 year warranty)

It's not like the US has a monopoly on bad quality. Renault, Fiat, and Peugeot have all been forced out of the US because their cars were terrible compared to an equally equipped Japanese car. Mercedes-Benz and BMW coasted on their cachet while everyone was in agreement they broke just as often as any other car, but with parts that cost 3x ($$) as much and could only be repaired at specific shops ($$$). Mercedes-Benz was particularly notorious for going a bit gadget crazy in the early 2000s. Random things, like the windows not working because the ECU was out of memory, would break and require an overnight shipment from Stutgart.

Also, there is no 30-day warranty in the US. It's a minimum of 1 year on parts and labor. 30 days is the legal amount of time you have to return a defective item to the store for a full refund (doesn't apply to EOL/clearance items which have been severely discounted to account for the loss of warranty).

Also, as I learned the hard way recently, this 2-year EU warranty isn't in effect everywhere and the process to get compensation usually gets you lots of runaround.

Im sorry if I came off as if everything made in the US is terrible and everything made in Europe, is the best ever, that certainly wasn't my intention.

It was merely a comment on the probability of increased profits, from the assembled in the US markings, you have to remember that about 60% of Apple profits (and still climbing) come from outside the US, and outside the US, the markings would not mean as much.

Wasn't it Steve Jobs himself who said to President Obama at a dinner that "those jobs aren't coming back" when talking about high-tech manufacturing?

I've been reading about other technology companies besides Apple doing this as well. Element and Vizio, two value-tier (think Wal-Mart and Target) flat-screen TV manufacturers have major assembly plants here in the states. They cited a combo of labor, shipping and duty being cost-ineffective at their price levels to make and ship from China.

Those are actually not contradictory.

Apparently, it's cost effective to assemble products in the US that incorporate large LCD screens. Apple was already assembling BTO iMacs in the US, and now some standard iMacs as well.

iPhones, iPods, and iPads are a different story, as they're a lot smaller. An airplane can fit a lot more boxed 9.7" iPads than it can fit boxed 21.5" iMacs – 28 times, to be exact (I just did the math.)

As for Steve Jobs' remarks, it seems he wasn't talking about iMacs but about iPads, iPhones and iPods:

"As Steve Jobs of Apple spoke, Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: What would it take to make iPhones in the United States? Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas. Why can't that work come home? Obama asked. Jobs' reply was unambiguous. "Those jobs aren't coming back," he said, according to another dinner guest."

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20120123/ARTICLE/301239...

Even “those jobs aren’t coming back” is a somewhat polite and euphemistic answer. Those jobs were never even in the USA in the first place. The USA could never support making phones and tablets on the scale on which they are made in China.

> Wasn't it Steve Jobs himself who said to President Obama at a dinner that "those jobs aren't coming back" when talking about high-tech manufacturing?

Interestingly enough, The Atlantic just ran two long articles about the return of American manufacturing: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/mr-china... and http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-inso... . Both are worth reading in full.

Clearly we're not going to get back to the 1950s, when manufacturing provided much of the U.S.'s employment base. But we're still substantial gains in the sector, and the belief that outsourcing always makes financial sense is disappearing.

Not only are "those" jobs not coming back, in a decade or so they won't even exist. Already we have fused the LCD and digitizer glass and moved just about everything into an SOC. How long until the glass and SOC are also merged?

Manual assembly of the iPhones isn't coming to the US, nor is it staying in China.

Oh come on, this is pure lies.

There is zero enforcement or oversight for this, they cannot even sue Monsanto, how could government stop this.

What if it's assembled by machines in a US territory with a handful of people working at below minimum wage? They can still label it "assembled in the usa".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com