Tim Cook confirms one line of Macs will be exclusively US-manufactured in 2013
engadget.com
engadget.com
I'd be curious to hear how many units those lines will produce & how many employees will be needed to man them.
While moving these jobs home will never make the US a manufacturing giant again due to advances in productivity, robotics and other areas it certainly will create valuable jobs at home.
Though, that article argues that the real value of the move home is in the ability to get manufacturers, designers and others as close as possible.
Not to pick on you, but this kind of statement is made so often that it's become received wisdom that "nothing's made in America anymore." But the US remains the largest manufacturer in the world. And while I don't have the numbers on manufacturing employment by country (anybody know where to look?), I'm sure the US is by any measure—including employment—a "manufacturing giant", even if it is more heavily roboticized and thus needs less labor for equivalent productivity.
Not that Americans should see China exporting more goods as a sign that the US economy has fallen apart. China has over four times the population, meaning it's exporting less than a quarter as much stuff per capita. China could grow to export four times as much stuff and that still wouldn't be a sign that the US's manufacturing sector is declining, only that it's holding its position.
And realistically, the US's manufacturing sector is incredibly strong - not just compared to other countries in the present, but also in comparison to itself in the past. I've got no idea why Americans get so worried that the country can manufacture so much stuff so profitably and with so little labor input that most their citizens get to work in the booming service and leisure economy made possible by that unprecedented level of efficiency, and feast on the luxury it produces, instead of grinding away on assembly lines. It seems nobody's quite capable of seeing the forest for this one particular infuriatingly backward-looking tree.
So yes, it replaces some jobs. But if we brought all manufacturing of domestic products back to the US, even if they were 100% produced with robotic manufacturing, there wouldn't even be enough workers to fill the necessary non-automated jobs.
It makes sense that as society and technology evolve, the low skill jobs will be replaced by automation. I think this is a good thing. In the long term, we shouldn't shun technology just because it keeps a real human from doing a mundane task 40 hours a week.
Many of the industrial assembly robots are made by Asian and European firms, but there are definite advantages to being local to your customers -- a significant increase in robotic manufacturing in the US could fuel a surge in robotics companies here as a result, which is an exciting possibility in my book.
Just as an example, a lights out factory is still going to need some people for maintenance but there is hardly any sort of "law of robotics" that suggests every manufacturing job lost is a maintenance job gained. Automation does replace people, in an ideal world the economy is strengthened by that automation and those people can therefore easily find new better jobs, but is there any evidence that is actually the case? I think the Rust Belt is evidence that it is not.
Doesn't the Mac Pro line make the most sense considering their low volumes and (I imagine) relatively high margins?
I think Apple said the Mac Pro is getting an upgrade in 2013, so it seems likely.
(caveat: its not for gaming or vm instances, it'd be my frontline local machine for benchmarking hpc codes, 'cause a mb air doesn't cut it for that :) )
It's a sausage factory for Disney's main street. And good PR.
I was told that according to a supply chain exec at a major US retailer, saving 1 day in supply chain lag time would save said company $100MM per year.
A friend was a process engineer at a Ford plant.
Every time the line stopped moving (even if for only a few seconds), they calculated it cost a minimum of $10mil.
I believe it was http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/n... where they interviewed people involved with it.
It was found that when a truck load of engines was late, the most cost effective thing to do was to crush the brand new engine-less cars, and crush the engines when they arrived rather than either stop the line, or try to shuffle the cars & engines in at a later time. It was mind-boggling, but the numbers were run many times in many different ways and it was true.
If a bolt is hard to thread, but you never stop the line, you're going to get a lot of crossthreaded bolts. But if you stop the line for every crossthreaded bolt, the company will very quickly realize they need to spec or design a better bolt.
So, the "anyone can stop the line" mindset only works in the context of a management philosophy that values continuous improvement.