I don't understand this post. This happened six years ago and is not responsible for any current delay.
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2013 Mac Pro Launch Was 'Postponed' Due Partly to Shortage of 'Made in USA' Screws
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I don't understand this post. This happened six years ago and is not responsible for any current delay.
Asinine. This is someone at Apple not being capable of basic procurement, not an inability for anyone in the United States to operate a Swiss Machine... or even a basic screw machine. There are, within an hour of where I sit now, easily more than twenty manufacturers of precision fasteners great and small, capable of mass production and frigging shipping them on time and within budget. Perhaps look outside of bloody texas.
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For the best really. My experience seeing a "Made in America" sticker has taught me that the stuff coming out of America is of even poorer quality than cheap Chinese stuff off ebay.
I mostly agree with you, except for two things:
During economic downturns, these are the jobs that everyone complains they can't get because of foreigners.
Second, I worry about this creating a caste system of sorts, with mostly people of color (various skin colors) working menial jobs with no upward mobility and lower pay. The more people of color working low-end jobs, the more it reinforces stereotypes and discrimination when they try to break out of it. I think the vast majority of discrimination is subconscious by people who don't even consider themselves racist.
I think a more moderate approach is best. We need a certain amount of manufacturing to diversify our economy, much like one diversifies an investment portfolio to lower risk. But we don't need to become a manufacturing economy. I also think we should open the border some more for job opportunities, but not completely. There should be a stronger emphasis on enabling students to follow the career path they want, be it vocational training or higher education, with more balanced pricing depending on career path. More difficult said than done for all of this.
Not only that... But Foxconn can turn on a dime adjusting its output as required by Apple changing its production requirements daily. Ditto for fulfillment.
Need to go from manufacturing, testing, and shipping 550,000 iPhones a day, to say, 800,000 units a day for a few months to support a new iPhone release? No problem. Done.
Glue, Apple, glue and not screws! Who care about iFixit folks. 
You don't need 100,000 workers to make a relative handful of screws for a specialist computer.
I believe they have 27,000 screws left over
Indeed.
When it comes to our everyday lives, most of us innately understand the value of trade and of letting others do things for us when they can do those things more efficiently, better, or at a lower cost. We appreciate the benefits of even those trade relationships which represent trade deficits. We, without having to explain it, get that we are generally better off - e.g., have more free time, can more easily provide for our basic needs, can have more stuff that we want, can do more things that we want - for letting other people do stuff for us, cheaper, when that option is available.
But, for whatever reason, when it comes to the same dynamics working on larger scales - e.g., as between parties in different nations - we don't understand the basic economic realities. We just don't get the degree to which we benefit from trade, even when we have large trade deficits with particular parties or nations.
When we let others do stuff for us, with comparable quality and at less cost, it frees us up to do other things. Employment isn't a zero sum game. There isn't a set amount of stuff to be done which just gets divided up between whoever's available and willing to do it. Humans - and in particular Americans - have always been good at finding ways to use available (i.e. excess) productive capacity to improve our lives - to better provide for basic needs, to make life more fulfilling or easier or more pleasurable or whatever.
As we get better at doing the basic things we need done - e.g., finding food or providing shelter - we have more time to do other things. As we get better at doing those things, we have more time to do still more other things. And so on and so on... That is what increasing prosperity is. We have more time to either create and produce more and better things, or more time to enjoy or explore or whatever. And all levels of society benefit. Some more than others (as compared amount people at a given point in time), of course. Prosperity is relative. But even those at the lower end of the prosperity spectrum can be better off than they might have been a hundred or a thousand years ago. And it's mostly because we get better at doing things and thus have available time and productive desire to do new things.
So much of modern prosperity is the result of trade between nations. And that's true for people in the middle and lower classes. We benefit greatly, e.g., from people in China being willing to do so much work for us on the cheap. We benefit greatly from them being willing to produce basic products for us such that they cost us less - in dollars but also in effect in time - than they would cost us if we produced them ourselves. And there are plenty of bright people who are willing to create and define new productivity roles for others such that those who are unable or unwilling to do so for themselves can have new productivity roles to fill in place of those which they are no longer needed to fill because other people in other parts of the world are filling them for us.
We don't have a problem, in the aggregate, finding work for people in this country. We experience economic disruptions, of course, which create short term aggregate availability of work problems. But such disruptions would happen regardless. And some kinds of work in some areas give way to other kinds of work in other areas, creating significant adjustment issues for some. But, again, it isn't about us having enough work to go around. We have plenty of work to go around because, as I indicated before, we have plenty of people capable of and willing to create new work which can be done. We are good at finding uses for available productive capacity.
Selling stuff to parties in other parts of the world is, of course, generally of benefit to us. But so is buying things from parties in other parts of the world. Trade surpluses or deficits aren't indicative of how much we benefit or are harmed by trade. Rather, it is trade volume which is indicative of such things. Generally speaking, the more trade the better - so long as it is trade entered into by individual parties based on what makes the most sense for them. Exporting is, in itself, good. But so is importing, in itself. A trillion dollars worth of outgoing trade plus two trillion dollars worth of incoming trade is likely better for us - when it comes the prosperity of most everyone in the country - than two hundred million outgoing and one hundred million incoming.
The overarching reality of U.S. trade is this: Other nations pay us a premium for the work we do for them while we pay other nations quite modestly for the work they do for us. That's, of course, not the case in every regard. But it's the broad strokes reality. And other nations being willing to do so much for us at lower costs (i.e., in effect, at a lower time cost), leaves us free to do more, better paying, stuff or leaves us more free time to enjoy. We benefit greatly from trade, whether it be coming in or going out. And even if other nations end up doing more work for us than we do for them.
So, yeah... if China or any other nation can and will make stuff for us cheaper... then, by all means... let them... and say thank you very much.
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Ask your nanny, maid, and landscaper once in awhile, I’m sure they would like a raise and not have their wages driven down by immigrants.
Who needs Liberal Arts-workers anymore?
Won’t AI replace accountants, statisticians, mathematicians, and scientists, etc?
Don't reap what you sow.
All this story indicates to me is that Apple picked the wrong supplier. The first one could only produce 1,000 screws a day but the second could supply much greater than that. Both are in the United States.
So why didn't Apple research the suppliers more to find out exactly what they could produce? Obviously that second supplier was there all the time and Apple never called them until the product was delayed.
The teachable moment here is Apple needs better supplier scouts, that's all.
So why didn't Apple research the suppliers more to find out exactly what they could produce? Obviously that second supplier was there all the time and Apple never called them until the product was delayed.
The teachable moment here is Apple needs better supplier scouts, that's all.
Yes, that is the Adam Smith "Wealth of Nations" view. There's also the Mercantilist view which most everyone held to for centuries before Smith's treatise. The problem is so-called experts believe this to be an either/or kind of discussion. I don't as I think there's validity to both.
I lean toward Smith's view of the world but that's not the end of the story. For example, it's hard for anyone to convince me it's a Good Thing™ for the USA to assemble all of its vehicles in Mexico. In theory I suppose it could work but not everyone in the USA will be or can be an expert software engineer (as one example). We need a diversified economy that the government promotes so we can effectively employ people with all sorts of abilities.
Whoever was the Apple production coordinator for the Mac Pro should have been fired. Either the scheduling specifications for these screws was deficient or the screw engineering specification was deficient. I'd blame Apple management first for not paying closer attention to production details.
Apple should get someone in charge that understands efficiency and supply lines and use standard screws.
watch the birth of an urban legend
Apple can't produce in the US, based on a decades old story. How lame is that? Yes, Apple may have had their screws ordered locally, yes due to SNAFU it didn't work out. But does anyone really think that Apple knowingly and willingly chooses to respond to that situation by considerably delaying the sale of a prime product, just in order to keep it an 100% American? Because of a screw??? A much more likely story: someone coordinating that was simply too jerked up and responded too late to the situation. Everything else was just the cover-up story of that employee. Serious business isn't local, all is global.
Apple can't produce in the US, based on a decades old story. How lame is that? Yes, Apple may have had their screws ordered locally, yes due to SNAFU it didn't work out. But does anyone really think that Apple knowingly and willingly chooses to respond to that situation by considerably delaying the sale of a prime product, just in order to keep it an 100% American? Because of a screw??? A much more likely story: someone coordinating that was simply too jerked up and responded too late to the situation. Everything else was just the cover-up story of that employee. Serious business isn't local, all is global.
Just an FYI, the US is still the single largest manufacturer in the world. What we don't do as well on is turnaround time on these particular types of custom mass production, mostly because the US has a labor force that has slightly better protections at being worked into the ground.
That said, Apple has the billions that they could invest in US plants to build out that kind of capacity if they want to, they certainly are doing it elsewhere.
Really? You didn't have enough screws to make it? Really?
I haven't heard an excuse this poor since "my dog ate my homework".
It takes Apple years to design a real professional, expandable desktop while everyone else can bang out workhorse computers several times a year.
Hell, the hackintosh crowd compiled a list of compatible parts to make killer desktops in less than a year, and continue to update that list constantly. At zero cost.
Now Apple says it can't make the desktop that many business/home users need because their aging computers are painfully in need of an update.
All because they can't find enough screws.
...
Gotta hand it to Timmy Kook. Using screws to screw the customer. That's some next level slime tactics right there.
I haven't heard an excuse this poor since "my dog ate my homework".
It takes Apple years to design a real professional, expandable desktop while everyone else can bang out workhorse computers several times a year.
Hell, the hackintosh crowd compiled a list of compatible parts to make killer desktops in less than a year, and continue to update that list constantly. At zero cost.
Now Apple says it can't make the desktop that many business/home users need because their aging computers are painfully in need of an update.
All because they can't find enough screws.
...
Gotta hand it to Timmy Kook. Using screws to screw the customer. That's some next level slime tactics right there.
"When Mr. Melo bought Caldwell in 2002, it was capable of the high-volume production Apple needed. But demand for that had dried up as manufacturing moved to China."
That sums it up. Start with capacity. Move production that supports capacity. Capacity withers. Complain about lack of capacity, or worse, claim it is impossible to (re)build capacity.
That sums it up. Start with capacity. Move production that supports capacity. Capacity withers. Complain about lack of capacity, or worse, claim it is impossible to (re)build capacity.
Is this yet another sad example of Apple misprioritizing form over function?
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First, build the damn computers using standard off-the-shelf items for things like screws. Second, I thought Mr Tim was so wonderful because he was a supply chain wizard. So, basically, we can't design and we can't manage our suppliers. But, damn, can we MARKET!
It's not so much that Americans are unwilling to do manufacturing work, but they're not going to do it in the manner that it's done in China, and therefore the products will be more expensive (which we aren't willing to pay for) and they will be produced at a slower rate (which we aren't willing to wait for). This is more on the consumer than anything else. If China can do it faster and for less, then companies are going to turn to China to manufacture things for them.