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Mac Pro and China where there are skills for ambitious products. Are Americans not capable of that?

Americans (majority..not all) are pretty stupid. We will always need these types of grunt jobs. It'd take a major refocus on education to reverse this trend. But we're too busy handing out participation trophies, overreacting at the slightest criticism, and trying not to hurt people's feelings.

How about instead of very big tax cuts and incentives for the richest company in the world - a temporary solution - we find out what laws are making America ungreat and we remove those. And take that money you were going to give to rich Apple and offer it to workers that have been displaced to do new things. All this crony business stuff is just unoriginal short term bandaids.

The problem isn't a lack of American workers willing to work in factories and do manual labor. It's also not a lack of knowledge of working in a factory. Those skills can be trained relatively easily. The problem is that since China made the labor so much cheaper, American manufacturing went to China. Because the Chinese economy is based on manufacturing now, their education has a lot to do with manufacturing practices.

Apple isn't such a great company simply because they can make technical products designed well - it's because they can make those well-designed products at scale. The manufacturing processes are designed as a collaboration between Apple and their Chinese manufacturers. It's this engineering and setup that requires skills unique to Chinese manufacturing engineers.

If you look at any kickstarter campaign with manufacturing issues, you'll generally get some updates about how they are discussing the manufacturing process with their Chinese manufacturers. These Chinese manufacturers know the typical manufacturing processes that work well and what can and can't be manufactured quickly. They can take that knowledge and design a factory line able to manufacture those complex products quickly.

Americans aren't stupid or lazy. Americans lack a motivator to learn something like tooling design since there isn't any complex manufacturing industry other than cars for Americans to work in. If manufacturing was suddenly required to be done in the USA by Americans, there would be an extreme short-term slowdown in new products being successfully manufactured as tooling workers are being trained.
 
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Genuine question: how many months would it take to train an individual with basic manufacturing skills to meet the "required skills" needed to make "ambitious" (or even normal) products? No offense, but we're not talking about a Ph.D. here...

That depends on the level of fabrication you are talking about and the engineering production involved. Assembly doesn't require much in the way of specific education, but design and production of circuits and wafers does.

It also requires a facility to work and train at. Of which the Asia/Pacific region has many. Not so much in the USA. That workforce would rather stick with with what they know in established industries that already exist locally (even if they are failing) than start training their kids to look into tech jobs for new industries elsewhere.

If the facility is not there nobody will train for it and if the workforce isn't there nobody will build a facility. So someone has to look to the future and decide to make a change rather than just relying on the past.
 
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Fair enough, but after 4 years of the older design, releasing a computer just as thick and just as heavy would be less enticing for people to upgrade. I know the so-called "pros" on MacRumors message boards would love that, but the other 80% would walk into an Apple Store and say "Why is this so much more expensive than the old model? It feels just as heavy and is just as thick. I'll just buy the old one...I don't need a Touch Bar thingie." Instead, if you go into the Apple Store and compare both machines side-by-side, it's clear which one is nicer right off the bat. That stuff matters.

Matters to mostly superficial low-tech consumers maybe.

That's why there used to be the Macbook and Macbook Pro until they became just brand names for the entire consumer line.

If Apple hadn't diluted the Pro line then it wouldn't matter. 1/16th of an inch thicker is irrelevant to a professional if it includes more capability and power. It's also irrelevant to the other type of superficial consumer who just wants to wave around the most powerful box for bragging rights. Which is where a lot of Macbook Pro sales came from.

Sell an expensive and stupidly thin machine with limited power and the customers will still buy it even if Apple are also selling a stupidly powerful machine that is equally as expensive but twice as thick.
 
[Side note: It is a major problem for a company if there are consistently people willing to fork over >$1,000 to you at any given time and you can't come out with a product to capture that revenue.]

Yeah. It's time to spin off the Mac into a separate company - one that is dedicated to macOS and the Mac. Having the Mac line-up rot like this is inexcusable and pathetic.
 
His TEXAS Plant only assembles the Mac Pro so what was the Dig to Americans for?

I know a lot of folks on here have been saying the same, but it's hard to look at it any other way. It just seems they're being purely business focussed - the iPhone / iPad has better margins and ships in higher volumes, so why waste time on the Mac? It sucks for those who have invested into the Mac desktop ecosystem and are now being left hanging :(

Really hope they release some killer new desktops in 2017.
 
if you want the Mac to survive stop buying iPhones and iPads and the apple watch

the more money Timmy see coming from mobile devices the sooner he will be killing the Mac
 
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My dream Mac Pro would just be a slick briefcase - open it up and there's my power cord, mouse, keyboard, cables, etc, - then have tons of ports on the outside....of course, monster CPU - tons of RAM, and super serviceable innards. (ram, cpu, etc) 'never understood the can concept myself.
 
Maybe they'll put back in a SuperDrive and floppy to appease you as well. I also hope they add VGA and DVI connectors because I have a few 4:3 Dell displays I'd like to still use.

USB-C is the best port ever created and Thunderbolt 3 is lightening fast. If I need to buy a few $19 dongles to get me through the next year until more USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 peripherals come out, than so be it. Bring on USB-C.

Apple is damned if they do and damned if they don't. People clamor for innovation and then get mad when anything changes. Can't have it both ways.
That is precisely the attitude that enables Apple to dictate to the consumer what they feel is best as opposed to what is best for the consumer.
Besides I still run Firewire 800. The is NOTHING WRONG with old technology.
 
I cringe at that price point for a keyboard considering it's jut a keyboard. But as long as they keep a non touch bar keyboard for cheaper, I don't think it'll be a big deal

You know, I was speaking with a friend who lives in New York and the associated costs, looking at a the price-changes recently in the Apple product lines, I got to thinking that Apple's command structure may have an extremely skewed view of acceptable product-price-points due to their location. As an example, a new 15" MBP starts at $2400 (ok, $2399), not including tax. That is, for my friend, basically 1 month's rent of his efficiency apartment. It is not utterly inconsequential, but in the grand scheme of his financials, it's just not that big a deal. Me? I own my house (well, still paying for it of course). It is a nice small single-family home in a good neighborhood (a "your neighbor is welcome to borrow your snow-blower at any time without even asking" kind of place). It is a 3-block walk from a public beach on the shore of Lake Michigan. I can walk down to the beach every night and stroll along it all the way into town, or just hang out and watch the sunset. $2400 is, for me, within a few $ of 6 entire months of mortgage payments... To me, $2400 is a very, very big deal.

If everyone making pricing decisions (and deciding at what price points their products should be designed for) at Apple is blinded by "big city price-points" that is a problem. They certainly need to realize that, as populous as our large-cities are, the product-line needs to reflect other realities as well.

Which is, in my long-winded way, me agreeing and saying "Yes, Apple needs to keep less-expensive product-lines active."
 
"And then I told them we had a great desktops in our roadmap!"



"You should have seen the look on their faces!"

Well, to be honest, great isn’t the same as: amazing, magical ... BOOM!

Guess great 5K-bargains in the near future ;-)
 
And what is your great plan to keep them here?

And he will fall for it like many other companies are about to pull on him.
Say some stuff about moving some division to other country and then watch him get all huffy and offer tax cut. They take tax cut for "saving" that division and send other parts overseas.
 
Maybe they'll put back in a SuperDrive and floppy to appease you as well. I also hope they add VGA and DVI connectors because I have a few 4:3 Dell displays I'd like to still use.

USB-C is the best port ever created and Thunderbolt 3 is lighteni. ng fast. If I need to buy a few $19 dongles to get me through the next year until more USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 peripherals come out, than so be it. Bring on USB-C.

Apple is damned if they do and damned if they don't. People clamor for innovation and then get mad when anything changes. Can't have it both ways.


Orangutans are skeptical of changes in their cages. A lot of the noise and clamor has to do with change. I find as I get older I have a resistance to change.
 
When china was in isolation and begging us for help or they would start a regional war those jobs where in the millions. They where used to support WW2! I would left left them in isolation and protected my nation and it's jobs/IP.

These jobs could be returned if the will was these and that's why you have Trump. Those jobs are needed to defend this nation, no industrial base no nation.
 
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Orangutans are skeptical of changes in their cages. A lot of the noise and clamor has to do with change. I find as I get older I have a resistance to change.
No its not about change its what best suits the consumer.
The consumer sits at the top of the ladder and Apple have lost touch much like the Microsoft Corporation.

For example a 2012 Ivy Bridge MacBook Pro running OS X Mavericks is just as productive and far more flexible than these latest abominations with all the useless bling.
 
Americans (majority..not all) are pretty stupid. We will always need these types of grunt jobs. It'd take a major refocus on education to reverse this trend. But we're too busy handing out participation trophies, overreacting at the slightest criticism, and trying not to hurt people's feelings.
They let this happen to their nation and look at the comments and china is now running this nation and much of Europe.


We had these jobs. You can't expect to keep a skill set if you move production overseas!
 
Apple, please, make brand new Thunderbolt displays for brand new Mac Pro and brand new Mac mini. The LG UltraFine ones are UGLY!
Aside from the display itself being drop-dead gorgeous, I guess the black bezels aren't, like revolutionary or anything. But uh... what would you prefer?
 
To answer the question.

This is the lineup going forward. This is what they refer to as the mac line up from the apple site. Mac mini gone, Mac Pro gone.

compare_large_2x.png
And the MacBook Air won't be around for long. I don't think it's unrealistic to expect MacBook, MacBook Pro, and iMac as the only macs within the next 12 months.
 
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Please add "according to Bloomberg" to the headline. Otherwise it's not much more than clickbait.
 
They don't have the requisite skills.

Bingo. And there's millions of "shovel ready" jobs that nobody seems to want to do either. It doesn't help that our society looks down on technical/trade schools. Apparently everyone "needs" an MBA, which is great if you want to start your own company but nobody is going to hire you out of school to run theirs.

So we end up with a glut of under qualified "graduates" with liberal arts degrees who can't find jobs and only want to work managerial positions without any experience. Meanwhile, you can't find, say, HVAC techs who easily get $30-40/hour. It's the same with other trades.
 
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Americans don't want to do factory work. We're a first-world white-collar country now.

Tim Cook is smart enough to know this.

While I agree with this, and I am smart enough to understand that the growth of blue collar jobs is very small in the US; it is still a fact that there are many former blue collar workers that are being displaced in large numbers due to the change.

Is it not reasonable to try and make attempts to create at least some new blue collar jobs, similar to how we provide support for those with welfare, and food stamps? Instead of saying "hey, get an educated, so that you can provide for yourself" (or in the blue collar workers case "hey, specialize in something else, with a growing market, so that you can provide for yourself"), we provide support in the some manner.
 
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