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Foxconn's Plans to Restart Apple Device Production on Monday Were Called Off By Chinese Health Authorities [Updated]
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Those Chinese assembly lines are hardly "skilled labor." Instead, they are simply a massively well organized supply of low skilled assembly workers. It doesn't take a high amount of skill to assemble iPhones from their component parts. Which is why Foxconn is moving rapidly to use robotics for these mindless, repetitive tasks. What Steve Jobs pointed out, and others as well, is that there would be difficulty in getting the large number of Americans to agree to work for those low wages, in those conditions, e.g., living on site in massive dorms ready to be awakened to increase production lines, etc. Hence, the factories were built in China and now other countries, such as Vietnam (because their low skilled assembly workers will work for even less.)
The other difficulty Jobs pointed out, and he felt it was the most significant challenge, was having a sufficient number of engineers to design and maintain the factories and assembly lines. The massive increase in factories and manufacturing facilities in the past three years, resulting in millions more employed in American manufacturing, shows that manufacturing in America is more feasible than people realize as we reduce dependence on amount of low skilled workers through automation and superior technology.
It wouldn't add up anywhere near $3K for an iPhone, but certainly would be more expensive as they would have to pay a much higher wage than Chinese workers receive, to those low skilled workers to induce them to work on assembly lines.
Pretty sure you’re the only person that thinks that.
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Apple’s exposure here is down to its willingness and model of exploiting cheap foreign labour en masse. China is a super risky environment to do business in due to overbearing state control and questionable health and safety and labour policies.
Chinese culture has a questionable (to be diplomatic) respect for animals, as evidenced by the massive trade in exotic and endangered animals and animal products; including the live trade where animals suffer immense cruelty. This is suggested to be the source of this new virus (bat products?).
Tim Cook has to wear these failures, but I’m sure he sees it as a cost of doing business; and worth to be able to exploit cheap Chinese labour and lax environmental regulations in China. As is the capitalist way: ethics, morals, health and the environment don’t matter in pursuit of the almighty dollar. Ironically, it’s also the Chinese way.
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I also have a BTO MBP order in - not looking forward to seeing that arrival date slip, supposed to be coming this week but still shows “processing”. Wondering if by the time we get them something new will be on the horizon already 🙄
Naive you seem to be foolish friend. LOL! Who in the first world would be willing to do such boring jobs for that amount of money with those long working days? Just look around, who is paving your driveway for 3$ per square foot? Who is picking Oranges for $8 per hour? Americans? Don't think so.
The factories that make most of the parts that go into the iPhone are close to the factory where the iPhone is assembled. That allows your supply chain to react much more quickly to demand. You can ramp up production when you need to, and you don't have piles of inventory sitting around when it's not in demand.
All of the posters ignore the fact that it wouldn't come to the US, it would go to Mexico and be shipped up through NAFTA/USMCA. Companies like Lenovo, Dell, HP do this today, not to mention the auto industry.
Dell shut down US plants and moved production to China in the mid-2000s. Some went back to Mexico. US is limited to government contracts. Similarly, HP manufactures government contracts and some ultra-high value/low volume systems in the US, nothing else. IBM moved PCs to Mexico I think about two decades ago, and Lenovo inherited the plants.
That's not an issue, you can air freight in parts from foreign factories, it's 48 hours added max. They air freight the finished product out of China today, so it's not any different.
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There isn't a shortage, but rather an imbalance. There's too many 4-year college/BA educated mechanical engineers with too much theoretical background and want to sit at a desk.
Manufacturing is short of 2-year community college/AA educated industrial engineers/manufacturing technologists who can be on the floor troubleshooting and optimizing machinery.
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Apparently it's a thing. https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/yale-university/719832-mechanical-engineering-bs-or-ba.html
Today I learned.
Huh.
Well, if anyone with a BA in engineering tried to get a job from me, they’d have an uphill climb.
They didn’t care before and they won’t care after.
Here we see a prime example of the college degree snobbery that got us into this situation, as well as the student debt crisis.
Not snobbery. First, presumably the BA costs the same as the BS. Second, if someone intentionally chooses to get the “easier” degree, why would I hire them to design CPUs? What does it say about their judgment?
Remember, for every slot I interviewed for, there are many applicants. Why would I pick the person who decided to take the “easy-A” major over someone who worked hard and showed they deserved a B.S.?
Someone with a B.A. may very well be able to do the job, but so can someone with a B.S., and why should I hire the person with the B.A.?
And if you think someone with an associates degree is even a possibility, guess again.
AAPL is not the only one, the supply chain for thousands of companies around the world is about to be disrupted. Reports from China now say 250M+ under quarantine, and here in the USA the military has been ordered to open eleven new quarantine facilities near major airports.
Peak appears to have occured on Feb 4, although this may be a false dawn: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/
Not sure if serious.
Apple’s production demands are not only totally different, they dwarf Tesla in volume, works needed, and skills needed.
Also, Tesla sources parts from all over the world, including China and a Dell has operations in Mexico, as does HP, along with other parts of the world.
Tesla’s manufacturing prowess isn’t even the best in the car industry, let alone the world. BMW has far more advanced production facilities. We can argue all day about the product provided, but that’s a separate issue.
The US doesn’t have enough qualified workforce to do what Hon Hai does and moving the complete automation for devices as small as Apple makes and fully assembled electronics is still years away.
Apple’s supply chain is the best in the world. Only someone like Boeing is even close and they have their issues lately.
Because you have to pay them more. And the whole reason why things are going offshore is because they get paid less. Money is the bottom line.
This is also why these Asian economies get better results. Rampant fraud (China, India) or simply a lack of effort in higher ed (Japan) means candidates are evaluated on their skills, not a piece of paper.
Again, American degree snobbery at work. Who cares about what skills are in demand, or actual performance? I have a piece of paper that says I took a bunch of 1-hour paper tests written by professors who have never been employed in industry and that entitles me to fat paycheck.
Why do people make this argument? For years things have been manufactured in the US and prices were fairly similar. What I believe will happen is that Apple probably will make profit of $400 on each iphone manufactured in China compared to only $100 per iphone manufactured in US.
Either way, they don't have to manufacture in USA, they can build factories in a country with similar wages like India.
The chances that someone with an associates degree is going to have the skills necessary to design a CPU is essentially zero. There may be a few people out there that can do it, but the effort I would have to go to to figure out whether a particular applicant falls into that small bucket would be so high that it would be not worth it at all. Whereas if someone has a BS in electrical engineering from U.Mich, RPI, Stanford, or whatever, and has decent grades, I know they have at least the capability to learn to do the job (whether they are willing to put in the effort to do so or not is a separate question).
Your argument is based on so many false premises. Show me a B.S. of electrical engineering from Illinois Urbana, or a M.S. from Austin, or a B.S. in CSE from RPI, and I know that you learned the skills I demand. It’s not at all about gaming test-taking. And contrary to what some people like to pretend, most engineering schools really do teach skills that industry demands.
Again, your argument is completely flawed. When somebody submits a Linux kernel patch, do they submit their CV? How about RISC-V? IEEE standards process has a degree audit step right?
Honestly, I'm not surprised you think this way at all. It's actually why the people that work in Shenzen, the IC designers in Hsinchu, and the garage-level startups in Silicon Valley can do things technically better, faster, and less money than the big slow moving American firms, including Apple.
A lot of it is ingrained corporate CYA: Employee A doesn't work out? Not my fault, I found this guy from Berkeley.
Perfect example: go try to get a PCB laid out in this country. Taiwan will do it in half the time at 1/10th the cost, because they teach that. US schools don't.
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You are committing a blatant logical misdirection. I never said anything about PCBs or linux patches. I talked about ME and who I would hire to design CPUs. There’s a very good reason that people at Intel, AMD and Apple are designing better CPUs than these RISC-V processors you refer to (And also better than the IC designers in Hsinchu). And there aren’t garage-level startups in Silicon Valley that are designing CPUs with people without B.S. degrees.
If you can’t calculate the effect on wire transmission delay in the presence of cross-capacitance between two transmission lines, or you can’t calculate the leakage current as an effect of gate doping and physical profile, etc., because you never took those classes, you cannot do the job that is done designing these CPUs. You just can’t. Maybe you can learn “on-the-job,” but I can’t afford to hire someone that may or may not be able to learn when there are already 10 qualified applicants who want the job.
And as an extension I noted that you are the problem in the US.
Completely false. I took the bare minimum of electromagnetics and solid state as an undergrad and made a change into the field. I taught myself solid state physics.
You're caught in the very flawed and very common belief that a formal education teaches you all you need to know, and the only way to know stuff is by a formal education.
In a decade, we'll have photonic interconnects on CPUs and I guess you'll be obsolete because you didn't learn about lasers, optical phase shifters, and AWGs in school.
It’s not about Apple’s margin; Apple will make their margin on iPhone. It’s about the price you’ll have to pay to buy it.
If it would cost Apple an extra $65 to manufacture in the US, your iPhone would be $100 more expensive. If it costs Apple an extra $200, the selling price goes up $300.
Using the numbers in your example, Apple can’t sell an iPhone that costs them $800 for $900. Sorry, but that’s a $1,200 iPhone. Apple’s not going to take the hit, you are.
But if they can drive that $800 cost down to $600, then that’s a different story. Now you’ve got yourself a $900 iPhone.
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This picture reminds me so much of a car factory I visited in Germany. They explained how the stop where they put the engine in the car used to be a 12-man job in 3 work shifts a day... so 36 people... now they have 4 robots do that, they work 24 hrs, 7 days a week and 365 days... without making mistakes.
Just insane the level of precision a robot can give you and how replaceable a human is these days.
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