The US is a long way from competing, globally, in this space. And before others take that personally, I’m simply saying we (the US) have done virtually nothing to create a foundation (education, training, financial support, regulatory, etc.) that would support a workforce capable of competing with the likes of India - let alone China. And I just don’t see that changing much in my lifetime. I could be wrong.
Taiwan/Singapore/S.Korea/Japan: Probably not major assembler/plant due to country and population size, but more focused on high tech chip fabrications, and they actually are.
Btw, Foxconn is Taiwanese company.It's not about education. It's about working attitude and mindset of the working population. And then there are the machines and techniques themselves that are often specific and invented there. Plus, the factory compounds like the ones in China are simply not replicable in other countries that easily, especially the US.
These are the facts and they are true for many Western countries when it comes to IT manufacturing. A lot of special knowledge is no longer available in the West because it has been outsourced to China etc.. This is not about "general education", this is not knowledge getting asked in a SAT. This is about highly specialised knowledge. Countries like China invited Western specialists and acquired all their knowledge, while us in the West became complacent. Eventually, we just collectively said "Alright, then let the guys in China do it" and now we are wondering why we can't manufacture back at home anymore.
Most likely you would have to buy it from India. The main reason Apple is setting up assembly in India (and Brazil a few years back) is due to India’s extremely high import tariffs On foreign made phones. This is the reason that most Android OEMs (including Chinese OEMs) have been assembling phones in India for years just for the Indian market.
If you look at the upward trajectory of education statistics in your chart, you would see that the less educated is most likely the older generation who got much less schooling in the years prior to China’s past 30 years of development, which says little about the education levels of the working age population.
It won’t be. It’s nothing to do with education - it’s primarily labo(u)r cost. If the process was sufficiently automated it would need fewer people - the reality is that your iPhone had a significant portion that’s hand assembled - and the labo(u)r cost element would be less of an issue.
Abstaining from condemning does not equal support. It simply means that it does not want to take a position. India (like China) still relies on Russia for a good amount of military hardware and other expertise, so it’s not beneficial for either to outright cut ties with Russia. If either governments actually agreed with Russia India would have voted against and China would have used its veto in the security council. From what I’ve seen so far both countries have urged restraint and encouraged a peaceful resolution. Doing any more would have impacted the national security of both.
I was going to say, India may be a democracy but it's hardly a shining example to the rest of the world. Its insular nature and current love of Russia makes it a place where few can or want to invest. India has a few major conglomerates, and if you want to move up in society you basically need to get into whichever university they've got an agreement to trawl graduates from. Huge swathes of the country are still incredibly and increasingly poor.
Who is “everyone else”? Most of the world, including almost all of Asia, Africa, and South America have not put forth any economic restrictions on Russia.
I’m not saying that natural resources have nothing to do with it, but I’m talking about military ties and hardware which is a lot harder to replace than natural resources overnight. I don’t want to do whataboutisms, but since you brought up Chamberlain… There has been a lot of conflicts larger than this one since WWII. I really don’t want to minimize the suffering felt in Ukraine here, but the civilian deaths and suffering in other wars like Iraq, Chechnya, or Kosovo have been orders of magnitudes worse.
A country in which more than 344 million people are without regular access to toilets (2017 stats from WHO and UNICEF) yet has a space program has rather skewed priorities. Since I was in university 40 years ago there have been (although not so much over the past number of years) articles in business publications predicting that India was the next boom economy and a must place to invest. I certainly did not follow that advice.
probably the same reason every other powerful countries impose issues on the rest of the world. this is a topic of diversifying supply chain, not geo politics.
I am glad that India is showing those hypocrite politicians in US and EU their place who are still buying cheap Russian oil but sanctioning everything else which doesn't affect them. The dirty face of US and EU stands exposed.
I understand that both the PRC and India have myopically pursued a path of self-interest, no matter what the cost to the people of Ukraine. And failure to condemn a massive unprovoked invasion is support. The only good thing about the Ukraine situation is that the masks have been taken off countries that don't care about people, peace, or democracy. Thus, buying products from these countries might be considered as a way of giving them blood money. Maybe Apple should look to other countries for manufacturing.
'Cowardly' and 'unprincipled' are the words I would use, not 'neutral'.
If that was the metric for supporting a company maybe Apple should consider moving their HQ to Ireland permanently, considering all the US has done in the Middle East in the past 2 decades.
Labor is only a small portion of the iPhone’s cost. Doubling the labor would add maybe 10-15% to the price. Make as Made in USA version for $200 more and see if it sells.
