"The US manufacturing of Mac Pro is made possible following a federal product exclusion Apple is receiving for certain necessary components."
Is this sort of a "if you don't make us pay tarrifs on component X, we'll build component Y in the USA?"
Also I'm happy to see Apple doing this. Even if it's 50% press fluff, I think it'll make other companies in the industry think harder about their own practices because Apple commands such a great reputation.
> Is this sort of a "if you don't make us pay tarrifs on component X, we'll build component Y in the USA?"
Yes, that would be my assessment.
Here are the criteria used by the US Govt to grant the tariff waiver [1]:
> Whether the particular product is available only from China and specifically whether the particular product and/or a comparable product is available from sources in the United States and/or third countries.
> Whether the imposition of additional duties on the particular product would cause severe economic harm to the requestor or other U.S. interests.
> Whether the particular product is strategically important or related to “Made in China 2025” or other Chinese industrial programs.
At first, reading that there's an exemption process, I thought that the bill was better-thought-out than I initially had thought. But then seeing the existing exemptions, I'm realizing that this stinks of lobbying. It's clear that these exemptions are targeted at specific products, and are almost certainly there because some company lobbied to bypass going through the normal exemption process.
That’s not the bill. That’s from the federal register, which records decisions of administrative agencies. Assuming you’re talking about Annex A, that is a recording of specific products that the USTR has ruled are excluded in response to existing exclusion requests:
> As set out in Annex A, the exclusions are reflected in 38 specially prepared product descriptions, which cover 46 separate exclusion requests.
As is clear from Section C, these are decisions on publicly filed exclusion requests that were the subject of public notice and comment. There is in fact a whole website dedicated to explaining what these exclusion requests are and how to apply for them: https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/enforcement/section-301-investi...
As discussed above, criteria for exclusion are things like products that are only available from China, whether the product is strategically important to China, etc. But the decisions are made case-by-case and that’s why the list of excluded products is literally a list of specific products.
This is just a funny misunderstanding, but a lot of “the government is so corrupt” type ranting is rooted in these sorts of erroneous readings of legal documents.
> This is just a funny misunderstanding, but a lot of “the government is so corrupt” type ranting is rooted in these sorts of erroneous readings of legal documents.
Great point! I have seen my views change on many things once I started to read up/listen to experts who know the law.
But the list of criteria itself looks like a lobbying piece. It's not, say, medical products. It's among others products that are part of China's own industrial strategy.
If you are punishing China, why would you leave out the sectors China considers as most important and on which it aims for strategic dominance?
Presumably, it's because the regulators concluded that these were areas where we'd be cutting off our noses to spite our faces. It's widely thought that that applies to the entire bill, but even aside from that, this is basically what lobbyists are for.
They are representatives from the various American industries, hired to make their case in front of the regulators. The regulators are full-time bureaucrats, who know a lot about the domain at hand but also need to know what particular American companies want. There's no one answer to it; what the bureaucrats do for a living is make judgments about what's needed and what's not.
A big company that hires the best lobbyists (the ones with the most experience and the most contacts) definitely has a leg up, but the regulators aren't solely at their beck and call. (Usually. It's not that regulatory capture doesn't exist, but the vast majority of day-to-day dull grind of government really is just ordinary people trying to make good policy.) Often, small companies band together to hire a decent lobbyist; DC is chock full of organizations with names like "Vegan Caterers of America" and "Society of Diesel Mechanics" that don't have tons of money but they do show up at regulators to make their cases on matters nobody cares about except them.
I'm not really here to defend the system or make the case for it one way or another. It's just that DC works very differently from the way it's portrayed on TV (including the news), in ways that are simultaneously more interesting and excruciatingly boring. I don't have any specific info on this case, but it does sound like exactly the kind of hodgepodge that results from making a lot of little decisions rather than one big sweeping gesture.
And if you read the Background section, you'll see that this list is the result of a process where the USTR asked for exclusion requests, and companies had to provide the codes of the specific products they want excluded.
"Under the June 24 notice, requests for exclusion had to identify the product subject to the request in terms of the physical characteristics that distinguish the product from other products within the relevant 8-digit subheading covered by the $200 billion action. Requestors also had to provide the 10-digit subheading of the HTSUS most applicable to the particular product requested for exclusion, and could submit information on the ability of U.S. Customs and Border Protection to administer the requested exclusion."
So... it's not exactly a surprise if the list reads like it was compiled for the benefit of individual companies. Because... it was.
Yes exactly but you're reading too much into the intentions.
Lets say there's a tariff to encourage those little bags of screws that home depot sells to possibly come from the USA instead of China, or at least tax the Chinese because they do govt funded product dumping to make the market unfair. Really it doesn't matter why. The point is we want to discourage retail sales of Chinese screws for whatever reason, possibly even valid reasons.
Given the above... if I'm importing screws to build cars, and our govt likes domestic auto production, the govt doesn't want to screw me over with high screw taxes such that people buy Japanese cars instead. What they want is people at home depot not buying little bags of chinese screws, what they don't want is instead of "making" 1 cent of taxes on screws they'd lose 1 dollar of taxes on my electric cars because my cars would be too expensive compared to untaxed japanese cars or whatever.
So I apply for an exemption, but seeing as you don't employ me, so I'm gonna spec "M3-0.5 16 mm long SSHS grade 6 anti-corrosion finish screw". There's no point in me paying my lawyers to get an exemption for "screws" in general, just so that you don't have to pay for an exemption to import screws for your internet connected toaster. I mean, good luck with your internet connected toaster product... but pay for your own lawyers.
It is admittedly kinda silly to try to centrally control large scale industrial operations by taxing material components, why not do social control of operations directly by tax codes for electric car factories and internet connected toaster makers, but here we are doing tax code stuff on the parts that make those toasters or whatever.
> why not do social control of operations directly by tax codes for electric car factories and internet connected toaster makers, but here we are doing tax code stuff on the parts that make those toasters or whatever.
The West pretty much doing that already in more ways than one.
Last G7 was all about finding new ways to tax new industries
> > LED lighting fixtures, a kind of used in horticulture, containing over 5,000 LEDs spread across 6 light bars
Also, really makes one wonder if that sort of specific setup is perhaps the subject of an existing patent.
Imagine being in a position whereby there can be no innovation beyond a specific exclusion on a competitive cost basis, and that exclusion being wholly owned already.
Seems an alarming way to either enrich incumbents, or stifle Innovation full stop, or both.
This insinuation is simply false. Anyone building any product can apply for a waiver under the same general rules. The waivers only apply to the specific products that apply.
Big companies like Apple can easily put many people to work applying for exemptions, while small business owners can’t afford to. The mere existence of such a system is rigged in favor of incumbents.
This is the “well anyone technically could have” excuse, aka the first chapter of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.
So, my interpretation is not the same as yours. It does not appear that there is any consideration in this list for something along the lines suggested by the GP. Namely, I don't see "Company agrees to bring production of some other product into the US" as grounds for granting the waiver.
Is there any evidence that this was a quid pro quo sort of arrangement?
That's the vibe I got from the Apple PR. "Yay, still made in USA. This wouldn't have been possible without the exemption we got from the govt for us to import these parts w/o high tariffs." (Simultaneously prostrating ourselves and indicating our resolve to move production if necessary)
The point is that Apple tried to build a Mac in Texas, but would have to pay a tariff on some component X. So Apple said maybe it's better to build a the whole thing in China since we're paying tariff anyway. And the administration said OK, you can import X without tariff to enable the assembly in TX. It's not Apple's that the tariff pricing structure had perverse incentives.
> I'm happy to see Apple doing this. Even if it's 50% press fluff, I think it'll make other companies in the industry think harder about their own practices because Apple commands such a great reputation.
Apple also operate at a scale most companies can't, which means that even without federal product exclusions Apple would still be in a better position to do this than most companies. Those companies in the industry can think all they want, but they're unlikely to get the same federal exclusion, and even less likely to be able to execute anything like this anywhere near as efficiently as Apple.
I really don't see how federal subsidies of any kind can be seen as benign when they explicitly target market giants.
This is also specifically the Mac Pro; which is just insanely expensive to begin with (even before this latest one). With this going mostly to businesses and corporate clients, they can afford to do more domestic assembly or even component sourcing and just pass it on to that limited customer base.
Also because this product is more targeted at business use, assembling it in the US may open the product for more customers. I work in defense and some of our HP computers have to come from a special division of HP that assembles the computers in the US.
The previous, "trashcan" Mac Pro was apparently also assembled in the US, and Apple wanted you to know it: https://youtu.be/IbWOQWw1wkM?t=110 . I assume that keeping the Mac Pro in the US is primarily a political/public-image decision (or indeed a public-spirited one), and maybe secondarily a way to maintain some expertise in manufacturing in the US, just in case.
BTW, the last time that Apple manufactured primarily or exclusively in the US was probably a long time ago. Back in the beige-case era it did a lot of assembly in places like Ireland.
Also comparatively low volume. If you're going to research a big change to manufacturing processes you start with a lower volume unit.
If they did this with the iPhone then the shareholder meetings would be pandemonium.
Doesn't hurt that it's also the device with the least need for miniaturization. Even if from the standpoint of an American it's a little insulting that they're giving us a device that a monkey could build.
This is the one product Apple could build anywhere on the planet and still make a profit. Will probably run between 30 and 50k for configurations that most effects houses would want in any case, so the higher cost of production is no sweat off their backs.
I wonder how true that is. The volume is probably going to be pretty low which means it will harder to amortize the NRE. It’s not just all the hardware engineers either. There probably a ton of specific software, not to mention drivers, in this product too.
One aspect of this that's usually pretty clear in these discussions is the huge chain of suppliers for anything that's available in China. If the US wants to tip the balance to the point that starts existing again in the US (and as efficient as it's in China today), Apple's subsidies could have a network effect that also benefits small US companies.
That may be the case for some large companies (though I'd still be skeptical of the extent of the beneficial effect), but at least in Apple's case, they have a long history of curbing this network effect by securing exclusivity of their supply chain. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3194836
> Apple also operate at a scale most companies can't, which means that even without federal product exclusions Apple would still be in a better position to do this than most companies. Those companies in the industry can think all they want, but they're unlikely to get the same federal exclusion, and even less likely to be able to execute anything like this anywhere near as efficiently as Apple.
This is also tells of that even an entity the size of Apple+Flex+Foxconn can't run a whole vertical manufacturing themselves.
It is kind of a myth that Foxconn came to South China when "there was nothing," and did everything in house. Foxconn was a whacking huge buyer of everything in Guangdong since the very beginning, going back to times when the biggest foreign manufacturers in China were Japanese (true, Toshiba, Shrap, NEC, Sanyo all had factories in the middle of what is now Futian district of Shenzhen)
Apple’s scale is a limiting factor, not just a benefit. I’d be surprised to see MacBooks or iPhones made in Texas because the scale of manufacturing is so much higher than Mac Pro.
>Is this sort of a "if you don't make us pay tarrifs on component X, we'll build component Y in the USA?"
They're basically responding to these stories by WSJ and Bloomberg saying that they're moving production of the Mac Pro back to China. That was never confirmed by Apple and Tim Cook denied it when asked on an earnings call.
I'm pretty sure that it's referring to the requirements to state that a product is "Made in the USA". Typically it means that atleast 51% of the components are USA-sourced.
I think that Apple just got a waiver from the Govt to say the Mac Pro is "Made in the USA" despite not meeting whatever arbitrary guidelines to fulfill that requirement.
> It will not be considered a deceptive practice for a marketer to make an unqualified U.S. origin claim if, at the time it makes the claim, the marketer possesses and relies upon competent and reliable evidence that: (1) U.S. manufacturing costs constitute 75% of the total manufacturing costs for the product; and (2) the product was last substantially transformed in the United States.
Note the key measure here is cost, and manufacturing costs includes indirect costs like land rent. An easy workaround here would be for Apple to use a shell company to own the land/plants and lease it at exorbitant rates (to hit the 75% threshold)
Sort of tangentially related, Gamers Nexus is one of my favourite PC hardware news outlets, they usually publish articles on their own website [1] with sources backing up what they say in their videos or just expanding with more info[2] (on their Youtube channel, you can often find links to related articles in the video descriptions).
Does it matter in which country the robots are doing the work? Ultimately that's the future we're shooting for, so this appears to be re-arranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.
It takes about 5 people to run a whole automated factory. The design and development is where the real money is. Let the assembly go to the lowest bidder.
Even with automation, it takes a lot more than five people to run an electronics manufacturing operation. I know first-hand; I supported one earlier in my career.
I'm confident that's true but looking into the future, I can't imagine the trend is going to be more people in automated facilities making more money. This is a transient state. The future is basically full automation in manufacturing facilities with zero humans. We need to design society around that instead of pining for the good old days of banging away at metal with a hammer for money.
Hyperbolically, this is turning America into a renaissance faire as a make work project.
Barring some disaster that sets humanity back significantly progress will accelerate. There will be a point where most people can't keep up, maybe there will be cybernetic modifications to learn faster. I think there will have to be a new form of economy to support people because already we are straining to assign resources efficiency in the US.
There is a photo of the top of the Graf Zeppelin, sister ship of the Hindenburg, being repaired mid-flight[1], so the roof was accessible from inside (through the scaffolding of the interior gas bag area, rather than neatly for passengers), provided quite a large platform, and claimed to be stable in-flight. The gondola had promenade / viewing areas with "large windows which could be opened in flight" visible in the photos in [2], to address concerns about air pressure or temperature.
I don't know if they ever did put deckchairs on top but had they thought of it and wanted to do it, it might have worked out ok. (View was likely better inside, looking down).
Haha, it's a reference to the 2006 White House press correspondents dinner that Colbert hosted, and absolutely destroyed Bush at. It's on YouTube, and it's a great watch.
Colbert was hilarious when he played a blowhard obnoxious conservative. Now that plays a blowhard obnoxious liberal it's not nearly as funny, like he's not putting the same effort into this persona.
That line is critical because it means they will effectively be manufactured in China but some token amount of assembly will happen in the U.S. so that they appear to be seen to be manufacturing in the U.S. when in fact they are made in China in any meaningful non-political sense.
A lot of the components are not made in China though. The GPU is most definitely not, nor is the CPU. A lot of the low value chips are Chinese, the mainboard probably is, but on a value basis, the most expensive components are not.
Well, if you don't count that parts not coming from this China, comes from that China.
And yes, by far the semiconductor dependence on Taiwan is like another tip of the iceberg thing to the whole process.
Just as American big co extremely naive in thinking that they can replace Chinese labour and factories with Vietnam (whose total industrial output is like one district o Dongguan,) it is equivalently naive to think for mainlanders that they can run away from dependence on Taiwan when even Koreans and Japanese can't do it now (Samsung tapes out a lot of ICs at TSMC and UMC, despite having own fabs for cutting edge stuff)
Royalty doesn't cook their own meals. Their time is more valuable than that.
Likewise, America doesn't make it's own underwear. We have China to do that. Similarly, they have us to make safe airplanes and complex satellite equipment.
Closing trade to the extent that we're making our own underwear INSTEAD of satellite parts can't really be chocked up as a win. It just promotes the notion that China should build their own satellite parts and we should make our own underwear.
If making underwear isn't enough to feed a Chinese family, why would we with that destiny upon American families?
Tl;Dr, America makes complex, high quality machines and equipment. Refined oil products. Things that require quality over quantity. Things that you can't substitute a generic for. Those are our bread and butter exports. Cheap crap that gets thrown away, like Apple computers, are China's bread and butter. We can either accept these facts and balance markets accordingly (and stay on top at the same time) or we can compartmentalize the world and all be stuck spinning our wheels and duplicating lots of effort, cold-war style, but with stupid-crap like personal computers instead of nuclear weapons and spaceships.
Manufacturing is a ladder. You use the previous generation manufacturing to create the new. Once you lack certain manufacturing processes by moving it over seas you are in a sense kicking your own ladder out from underneath you. The trade wars now are a response to realizing large pieces of the ladder are gone.
I remember a few years ago reading how Dell had lost the ability to make their own computers gradually over time. On the face of it, every bit of manufacturing and design they moved out of the US made sense, but all of it added up over time meant that they had effectively lost control of the computers they were selling.
It was an interesting story that but my google-fu isn't strong enough to find it.
At some point, your manufacturing partners in China are going to realize they control the means of production and can capture the added value by developing their own front office to market and sell the goods they already manufacture.
At what point do places like Dell become just licensing operations?
I thought Dell has always been reliant on ODMs. Were they at any point manufacturing components themselves?
Dell was still building PCs from off-the-shelf parts in the 90s so much of what they have was developed in the last 20 years. I've got to imagine they still have people in house who know how to setup manufacturing.
Even most of the assembly is overseas now. Eventually Asian companies are going to just market their own brands instead of letting Dell be a supply chain manager and marketer.
You might say the same thing is happening in software. As everything is outsourced to specialty services, eventually you aren't building or running anything but the glue. If a service goes down, and there is no replacement, you can find yourself in a position where you don't know how to rebuild your own product.
I recall that article and also can’t find it. The punchline for me was the chairman of their Taiwanese partner, who said something like “Americans are happy with their ratios. (ie reduced inventory) I am happy with cash.”
Actually US businesses were doing fine for the most part, except for those trying, and failing, to compete with the ladder replacements that moved overseas. There is a militarily strategic reason for keeping domestic production of your full supply chain, but most businesses don't care because (and this is a shocker) corporations aren't Americans, nor are they Chinese or any other nationality. They are greedy and self-interested and don't give a hoot about their country of residence.
Caring about the market, and not societies, is the kind of capitalism, that the US has been heavily promoting for quite a while. But seems like young people are starting to catch on to this social-democracy thing..
You might be interested to know that your notion of a successful macro-economic policy has been thoroughly tried throughout history, and has been deemed a colossal failure, see e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
Right. China using slave labor, in dangerous, polluted, deadly manufacturing hell holes, to make ladders 10x cheaper than the USA with human rights, polution controls, unions, etc. etc.
One problem is that of distribution. Many Chinese families are seeing their livelihood improved by the "underwear" jobs. However, a small group of US families are profiting from the sales of "satellites".
2nd problem is we're buying $336 billion more underwear than selling satellites. At some point we have to have a balanced flow or we'll go broke.
Except, and this point gets bungled in the media all the time, the trade deficit doesn't matter. There are some economic reasons (the entire world's currency is based on the dollar) and there are some political reasons (all countries benefit from the free movement of goods so anyone trying to force a balancing would be ostracized), there is also the fact that the US military is strong enough to defend against seizure but, here are the two really big reasons you should walk away with:
1. We are no longer on a precious metal standard so there is no limit to the supply of money.
2. States don't do business with states, individuals do business with individuals - you, personally, likely have a severe trade deficit with Apple (or your computer vendor of choice) you have purchase their services for money but they have never directly purchased yours. This does not matter you are at a deficit and surplus with a variety of players and the world keeps on turning.
The U.S. balance of goods and services trade is one component of a complex economy. Of course it matters, but the simple balance does not imply that it's a bad thing, or that it will harm the U.S. economy in the short term or long run.
> Yes, but I do not have a trade deficit on the whole as well.
Presumably you mean that you add net value to your wealth each year, despite having a "trade deficit" on most economic relationships. Well, so does the U.S. The net change in the national income is called GDP growth and it is mostly positive in spite of the negative balance of trade.
Why? Because the U.S. economy is primarily internally driven; trade is only about 15% of GDP. So more important than the balance of trade is how that trade impacts the domestic economy.
Would we experience even more economic growth if we had a positive balance of trade? Maybe. If we kept imports the same and grew exports, that would be great, but that will either happen or not based on private industry. The government does not have a magic lever to create new exportable goods and services.
But the government does have a variety of levers to reduce imports, some of which it is pulling right now. To predict the economic effects, it's not enough to just look at the balance. You would need to untangle the domestic effects of reducing imports that may be inputs to domestic economic growth. It's certainly possible to use trade restrictions to create a positive balance of trade, and create negative GDP growth at the same time.
> Because the U.S. economy is primarily internally driven; trade is only about 15% of GDP. So more important than the balance of trade is how that trade impacts the domestic economy.
That's almost scarier, really. It's a big shell game with money just moving in circles.
Not at all (inherently). Most economies have traditionally been internally driven with a lot of wealth production from agriculture, raw material gathering and the finishing of those materials - it's only in the industrial era that we saw the export of goods for finishing in other countries emerge as a thing that could occur. But, if some rare earth minerals are imported into Fakistan and then turned into an iPhone - then the labour exchange to add that value would be within the "internally driven" header mentioned above... as that's value that's been created domestically and can either be used to exchange for new goods abroad (where it becomes a trade deficit) or else just consumed domestically.
> Yes, but I do not have a trade deficit on the whole as well.
Yeah you (as in, most people) do, people just call it a mortgage, a car payment etc.
I.e. they enjoy the present-day use of assets whose total price today is something they'll be paying for down the line, because they think having them today will contribute to their future growth.
The exact same logic is at play when countries decide to indebt themselves. Public debt just amounts to borrowing from the future.
There's plenty of articles explaining why deficit is not a problem, but despite of all the economic theory I find this view very weird. In the bottom line, if you're consuming more than you're manufacturing, mostly likely you're in trouble.
>If you consume more than you produce, you're creating a debt. Sooner or later this debt should be paid.
Few things: firstly, trade imbalance is not debt. That is a gross oversimplification of the macroeconomy.
Secondly: debt repayment doesn't even guaranteed with personal debt (bankruptcy, for example, discharges personal debt). The state has mechanisms for discharging debt available to it that personal debtors do not have.
Not all consuming is importing, and not all production is exported. This distinction is actually crucial. The balance of trade is only one part of a bigger picture, the other is domestic production and consumption. You can't understand one without also factoring in the other.
If a country has a very productive, vibrant and innovative domestic economy, it can increase the value of it's domestic net assets. It generates valuable new technology perhaps, it finds ways to maintain it's standard of living using fewer resources, or simply increases it's standard of living at current prices. It becomes a wealthier nation, without trading externally at all. Maybe it even attracts foreign investment.
In 2018 the US trade deficit was $890m (10% higher than 2017, thanks Trump), but it's GDP growth was $1trn.
If internal activities increase the value of the domestic economy by more than the trade deficit, then the trade deficit really doesn't matter. It's already paid for.
Finally, the only way to buy goods abroad is for someone to sell your currency and buy theirs. If you're buying more abroad than people buy from you, the balance is exactly equal to the 'deficit' in trade of your currency. Well, nobody is forcing anyone to buy your currency but if they do that's implicitly an investment in your economy.
It's been increasing dramatically since the early 80's, regardless of who has been president. So I'm sure you meant thanks {Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump}.
> If internal activities increase the value of the domestic economy by more than the trade deficit, then the trade deficit really doesn't matter. It's already paid for.
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue for? Are you saying we should ignore things as long as we can afford them (so there's no reason for rich people to insulate their houses or close their windows, so long as they can keep paying their electric bill), or that there's secretly some benefit of running trade deficits as long as you can afford them? To me this sounds like the captain of a boat denying that a huge hole in the boat is a problem so long as the water gets pumped out slightly faster. The thing is if you are a net exporter you are getting richer, and if you are a net importer you are getting poorer (richer and poorer than you would have been otherwise). If you live in some bizarro universe where that isn't true, explain why companies keep trying to sell us stuff? Why do farmers try to sell more corn than they buy for seed every year? Why does China, and every other country, try so hard to stay competitive and increase their exports? The answer is as obvious as it is true, whatever other wealth you generate, if you export goods you get that money too, just like the rich guy who insulates his house gets to keep his rich guy bank account AND the amount he saves on his bill every month.
> Finally, the only way to buy goods abroad is for someone to sell your currency and buy theirs. If you're buying more abroad than people buy from you, the balance is exactly equal to the 'deficit' in trade of your currency.
This makes the opposite point of what you are trying to make. There is a net flow of funds towards China. That means China is holding USD, which means our currency is made more valuable and their currency is made less valuable, since we have less dollars in circulation domestically. This makes our exports more expensive in terms of foreign currency, which means we sell less stuff to every country, and especially to China. Meanwhile having a currency that actually gets more valuable is an economic disaster, it will throw the country into depression if left unchecked (if you don't know why then you shouldn't be commenting on economics: https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/978/economics/definition-...). So we have to print more money to keep the value of our currency stable, so the effect of 'china's investment' is exactly nothing, apart from China building up huge wealth exporting to the US and the US not building up wealth exporting to China.
Deflation is falling prices inside your economy, as valued in your own currency. It's got nothing much to do with external exchange rates in other currencies.
Yes it makes stuff bought from abroad cheaper, but maybe your domestic economy doesn't compete in those goods? In which case who cares, you just get more stuff for less. It also means inputs into your own manufacturing from abroad are cheaper, so you can capture more value add.
Deflation is a problem only when it affects the economy as a whole, because it means wages get depressed and investment dries up, but it's usually an effect of those things as much as a cause. Individual goods getting cheaper happens all the time, and it's great. The entire computer industry is an example of a whole economic sector built on deflation.
So you don't know the difference between the national debt and US-China trade deficit. Please continue to share your extremely valuable insights into economics.
Or you consume more than you produce, and output other forms such as debt or a lower dollar, so foreign companies will day be able to purchase things you’ll produce in the future. So everything balances out it the end, doesn’t it?
It only doesn't matter until all of a sudden it does. The global economy is constantly in flux. It might not be too long before a majority of countries decide it's in their best interest to not use the USD for international settlements and when that happens the bubble pops big time.
To further that point, when country X does not respect country Y's copyrights and begin undercutting country Y's market for those items, it creates a further imbalance.
There’s so little of substance in this post and so much xenophobia and hyperbolic thinking I’m surprised it’s not been downvoted to smitherenes.
China is the second largest economy in the world. They’ve got many smart individuals in business and engineering and everything in between.
And for someone writing on a tech board like HN to think that tech won’t pull China and India and the Philippines and other countries onto the same plane as western powerhouses is just myopic. Tech and education over time lifts all boats.
Except e.g. Uyghur boats. Those get summarily sunk. Hong Kong boats will be set on fire instead.
No, tech is not a universal equalizer by itself. Without an entire socioeconomic environment to support innovation, gains will be at best temporary. (On the flipside, we lately seem to be entertaining the idea of converting the US to an autocratic environment too, so we can certainly achieve leveling that way)
Yeah ... the heavy handed nature of a Communism and Xi’s leadership, I think, will lead to a revolution one day. But even if not there’s a growing middle class that will propel consumption ever more. Who would have thought that China would be such a large global economy say 30 years ago?
> Closing trade to the extent that we're making our own underwear INSTEAD of satellite parts can't really be chocked up as a win.
If you remove the instead part of that (which doesn't make sense as an either-or), it's a big win if your goal is to remove manufacturing, jobs and capital from a strategic superpower competitor like China.
If in-sourcing underwear to the US results in only 1,000 net additional jobs - making a billion pairs of underwear per year - and results in the loss of 20,000 low paid manufacturing jobs, supply chain, infrastructure, tax revenue, etc. in China. That is a win, if your goal is to make China slightly weaker. If the US nets out to even and China loses, it's a win for the US - if you view China as a superpower competitor for the next century (which nearly everyone in DC does today).
If the US could use increased automation to pull back every bit of outsourced manufacturing, even in a fictional zero net gain scenario (ie no net job gains, no net tax benefit, no net capital retention benefit, etc), it makes the US more powerful versus the rest of the world, as the rest of the world loses trillions of dollars in outsourced manufacturing value (ie an enormous injection of capital to be used to build out their nations, as in China or presently as is happening in Vietnam). If you're a politician in DC you would view that as a useful increase in US hegemony.
Apparel in-sourcing, as one example, has already begun globally. It's only going to get more aggressive over the coming decades. Developed nations will pull back various pieces of their manufacturing chains, as substantial automation gains make it reasonable to do so. When you combine those gains with the upside of geographic location - being close to your customers, eg for rapid trend adjustment purposes in apparel - the in-sourcing advantage is strong.
Microelectronics, both cheap and expensive, is really the same technology. You move out the high volume base, engineering careers become dead ends and low volume high value products become problematic too.
"Let's move production to China and keep R&D here" is a pipe dream.
Not when it's illegal to export your IP. Those are the contracts where America makes money. All the non-descript brown buildings you pass by on your way to work are the manufacturing/heat-treating/welding/plating shops that make every piece of machinery that flies overhead.
Name me one piece of a commercial airliner that you are allowed to source from China. I'll wait.
So when you consider what we're currently making, Apple Computers in a massive factory with suicide nets over the windows is a race to the bottom. Nobody wants to compete with Chinese manufacturing on their home turf of cheap Wal-Mart goods. We'll be living in dog cages too if we do that. We want to make airplanes and spaceships and meaningful technology.
> Name me one piece of a commercial airliner that you are allowed to source from China. I'll wait
Boeing have opened a plant there which seems to do interiors now, and it moving into other areas in the future.
Rudder parts are made at a separate facility in a different. These are for the 787 and 737. The link claims there are 9,000 Boeing’s flying with Chinese made parts.
This comment is so laughably wrong. China started with cheap plastic toys and now manufacture extraordinarily complex devices like iPhones and have spearheaded development of an entire new class of vehicles (EVs) that they can export to the rest of the world.
The analogy with planes is that planes pay the bills. Spaceships pay the bills. Coffee cups and Wal-Mart items won't pay the bills.
Building iPhones doesn't pay China's bills (they're citizenry is impoverished) so why would we want to compete with them for jobs to build iPhones? Let them keep doing it! We keep building spaceships and airplanes.
The analogy is.... We're currently building high-tech, high value items where the engineering matters. The manufacturing matters. China buys airplanes from the USA because no commercial airport (including the ones in China) would allow a Chinese-made plane to land there.
Our country isn't held afloat by manufacturing jobs at Apple, or Samsung, or Fisher Price, or Vtech, or Daewoo. It's held together by General Dynamics. General Electric. Boeing. Rolls-Royce. Airbus. Big spenders who contractually must source the highest possible quality out of a domestic supply chain irrespective of price. These are $30-50/hr jobs that put food on America's table.
Making iPhones is a $10/hr job with marginal quality. Throw a handful of iPhones and see what sticks. We're competing with China for jobs they're willing to do for $2/hr jobs. For what?
It ultimately doesn't matter much. What matters is that you have the ability to manufacture a product. You can own as much IP as you like, but if you don't have the capability of using that in a production process then it really is the Emperor's New Clothes.
Having the capability is important. Outsourcing has removed the crown jewels from many companies, leaving them little more than marketing shells. The real value is in the technical know-how and skills of the people who actually made those companies run. Without that, there is no company and no product.
Owning the rights to ideas isn't a sustainable future unless you also have the influence or the power to force people to respect your imaginary property.
If ultimately the only thing you end up owning over others is ideas it becomes increasingly attractive simply to opt out of such rights.
I suggest readers to draw their own conclusions from this article. To me, it does not make a convincing case that the scale of IP theft in 18th century USA is anywhere near as comprehensive as what is happening today in China.
And to me there is a big difference between the Government encouraging recruitment of those with knowledge through immigration vs a Government who IS the 'primary' stakeholder in all Corps + actively using state resources/agencies for theft.
Why would you compare the actions of a developing country 200 years ago working within that timeframe's norms to the actions of a developed country working within today's norms?
200 years ago, the behavoiur of the US was not consistant with the "norms" at the time. The UK had clear laws on this, and the US violated them. US leaders encouraged it.
How is this not the same as what China is doing now?
But it’s not the norm in China. If you are to decide what is normal, do you do this based on geography or population? Either way, China is a pretty big place.
This is something I wonder about a lot. How long will IP be of value? IP only has value when it is completely secret or when a government enforces the monopoly for the owner. How can we expect governments to agree to enforce these monopolies reciprocally (or at all) as the cost of information copying and distribution continues to plummet? If a big country decided to drop out of the WTO, what would prevent them from just manufacturing anything they want? Would governments erect trade barriers?
I think you're overplaying the 'cheap crap' argument. China is quite a ways better than they were when that stereotype was passable. They can totally match what the US is doing in a large set of technology based industries. And also, because of the way supply chains work (they naturally form clusters around manufacturing hubs and engender very strong network effects) the US might not be in a position to make any high-tech product at all. It would be cheaper to manufacture it overseas rather than ship every single part/material to the US.
You really need to recalibrate. Apple writes its own software for its own hardware and users buy it because they like it. There's nothing hostile about building a walled garden and staying inside the walls.
Microsoft charged OEMs even when they didn't ship Windows ("per-processor licensing"). Google dictated what other devices and software OEMs could build ("non-fragmentation"). That's not staying inside your walls.
As for great reputation, there's a reason Apple routinely is #1 on Fortune's most admired companies list.
I think you can see something pretty hinky right there in the article where they tout a massive $350 billion investment being made and then reveal that's actually what they intend to pay their suppliers for goods and services. They call $60 billion paid to suppliers last year an investment in those companies.
Another thing that is odd is that's about how much tax they are withholding from the US until a lower tax-rate can be forced.
One thing very strange is how the EU had to take them to court again and again and again to get them to stop advertising a one year warranty to upsell Applecare while the law compelled them to provide two.
How they have responded to hardware flaws in recent years - bent iPads, delicate cables, the keyboards etc has been a travesty - none of these problems triggered a replacement program until Apple had downplayed and dismissed the problem. Except exploding batteries they couldn't dodge liability for. I think the final verdict on bent iPads was you accept a warped tablet.
I think they are really struggling with honesty and ethics in some ways.
It's a company's job to be anti-competitive, in the sense of vanquishing its competitors. It gets pathological in the case of regulatory capture, but I don't think Apple has managed that.
No it isn't, it literally isn't. A company's job is to be competitive. While there may be all sorts of libertarian apologists out there anti-competitive action is still... anti-compeititive.
Apple's walled garden of an app store among various other tactics aren't about producing a better product - they're about preventing competing products.
I beg to differ. The App store is known to have a higher quality bar for apps than the play store, and that’s helped by the $100 developer fee and strict review processes.
Not to mention Google tries hard to employ the same practices (you have to do some really roundabout stuff to install non-Play store apks).
This article on how to install the Amazon App store and third party APKs pretty much sums up the situation. On the surface it seems like a great idea to allow third party apps, but in practice it actually leads to a degraded experience, viruses, and vulnerabilities, as evidenced by the editor’s note at the top of the article recommending against doing what the article is saying.
They also pay 0.005% tax in Europe, sure it's legal, but is it morally ok? They certainly benefit from all the European infrastructure and academic research that they are not contributing back to. Some put the figure owed at 14.5 billion dollars:
I agree with you in like an end-state kind of way, but this issue was super ridiculous & used by nearly every multinational company over the course of decades. I don't understand why the EU has targeted Apple specifically other than that they're a big fish, but this was a colossal screwup by government and it went on forever. If you want to tax corporations, tax corporations. There's a million tools at your disposal to get it done. The reason it doesn't happen is because people are ill-informed, elect charlatans, allow revolving doors between biz + government, etc. People need to stop pointing the finger outward, problem is 180 degrees away.
The richest company in the world with the best lawyers will always find loopholes to exploit. I would argue it's the spirit of the law that counts. One way to tackle it is to rebut any claims of self-righteousness from said corporation.
Oh bloody hell. Another day another complaint about the morality of company X not paying tax.
I'm sick of hearing this: Tax is not a moral issue.
If the government says to corporation X "we're increasing your tax by 20%" they'll just put their prices up to cover it and in the end YOU will end up paying THEIR corporation tax.
Companies pay tax depending on certain market characteristics. Additionally, people paying taxes rebalances their consumption behaviour and can realign incentives across the marketplace.
I cannot move myself to a low tax jurisdiction very easily, but a large corporation or wealthy individual can - if we had international agreements in place, the corporation would be forced to pay a tax and would be unable to avoid it - just like me.
With regards to you thinking I am wrong, this is a matter of simple accounting: costs go up (enforced tax in this case) therefore prices MUST/WILL go up.
Customers will pay the tax bill.
Imagine a shareholders meeting: "the government have just enforced an additional 20% tax onto us which is going to cost X Billion a year. We're going to eat that cost. Is that ok?"
There's not a chance that the shareholders will accept that... prices WILL increase to cover it.
Sure, they will likely squeeze suppliers and look for savings elsewhere but that will only cover some of it as I would imagine suppliers are squeezed hard as it is.
So, yes, the government will likely get more tax in the short term but it won't be paid by the corporations.
Apple already have the largest margins in the industry. They are sitting on a 245 billion dollar cash pile. They have so much cash they literally don't know what to do with it. Meanwhile, infrastructure and public services in both our countries are failing. But I guess voters, like you, "are sick of hearing about it", which explains a lot.
I'm from the UK as it happens but I am sick of hearing about it, yes!
It's not Apple's fault that your infrastructure is failing.
So the US government spending nearly $1 Trillion annually on the military is worth every penny I assume. Imagine your military budget was halved. What could you do with an extra $500 Billion a year?
The fact that the US government spends nearly $700 Billion annually on Medicare and your health system is utterly broken doesn't bother you.
Or that your government bailed out the banks to the tune of around $16 TRILLION doesn't piss you off.
Or that your debt pile is so big your grandchildren are already in debt before they are born!
I am not American, but if I was, much of the above would also upset me. But you are invoking a straw man, my point was that Apple should pay more tax (especially to Europe), not solve all the worlds problems. I get that you don't care.
Apologies for assuming you were from the US but I hear this from Americans quite a lot about their tech giants.
I wasn't trying to create a strawman but I stand by my argument as counter to yours.
Tax isn't a moral issue. It's a financial one.
Also, it's not that I don't care but I stand by my assessment: If you increase Apple's costs, the consumers will pay it. You are basically taxing the consumers.
It depends on the company, and their market position. If you tax an interchangeable commodity with thin profit margins, the producers of that commodity will raise prices in order to stay in business.
If a company makes a high-margin product with little competition (i.e. most tech companies), they're probably already charging whatever price they think is optimal to maximize their revenue. If taxes go up, they can afford to keep prices steady. If they can raise prices, there's no particular reason why they wouldn't have already done so before these new taxes.
A lot of companies are somewhere in the middle -- if taxes go up, they might eat part of the cost, but also raise prices a little bit.
Random anecdote: I was in Harbor Freight the other day, and someone asked an employee about the impact of Trump's tariffs on their business. The employee said yeah, it's sort of a problem but their profit margin is high enough that they can just eat the cost and keep prices mostly the same. Maybe the employee is just repeating some overly-optimistic view of the situation that the leadership wants to project, but if it's true it's an interesting reminder that even businesses that appear be barely breaking even might actually be generating a very comfortable profit. (Harbor Freight is also privately owned, so they don't have to conform to shareholder expectations of financial performance.)
>They also pay 0.005% tax in Europe, sure it's legal, but is it morally ok? They certainly benefit from all the European infrastructure and academic research
Not entirely sure how they benefited European Infrastructure and Academic Research if we assume Apple made 100% of its R&D in US.
And it is morally OK fo me to not paid a single dollar of tax if I didn't make ANY profits.
A lot of people seems to have an idea where Tax should be based on Revenue and not Profits, which is basically what GST or VAT really is.
As long as profit is taxed in the country the sale is made, nobody would complain. Now it’s just transferring money and making sure to pay the taxes in the most beneficial country.
> How would you decide on any other number and justify overpayment to the shareholders?
How do they justify a 245 billion dollar cash pile to the shareholders? To decide on a number, pick one that beats all competitors, then advertise on all boxes and websites that you pay more tax than anyone else.
> Sounds like Europe has tax problems then. Pass some laws.
The worlds richest company has the best lawyers, they will always be able to find loopholes or refuse payment (see prior link). The best way to tackle it is via public rebutal of their self-righteous image.
Take Apple's non-compete scandal with other tech companies that effectively kept the salaries of engineers across the entire industry down. If you are a programmer, Apple hurt you salary prospects. [0]
Or what about collusion with other publishers for price fixing. Literally that Apple violated federal antitrust law. [1]
because the happiness of those around oneself is inherently prioritized as more important than others -- it's more involved with personal success than the happiness of those further.
is that appropriate? I don't know. It's totally normal, though.
I'm interested as to whether this has a quality impact, or if it is purely a marketing gimmick and tax thing.
I closely with the fashion industry in the UK, and one of the things that surprised me a lot was finding out that "Made in the UK", at least for clothing, meant lower quality. While we used to have great manufacturing expertise, that has all been lost over the last 50+ years as manufacturing was shifted overseas.
Now not only is getting clothing manufactured elsewhere cheaper, it's also better quality, going against what consumers typically expect, because we lost the skills that we had.
I'd imagine that the US has similarly lost manufacturing skills as operations have been outsourced. Does US-based manufacturing (of computers in this case) actually result in higher quality products? Is there any evidence of this? Or is it all just PR and looking good for politicians?
It's not just skills, it's the supply chain surrounding the manufacturing. There's several articles you can find with a quick Google search about how Apple had so much trouble finding a source for small screws for the Mac in the USA, whereas in China it was trivial to find a supplier that could provide the massive quantities needed. So building the thing in the USA will probably end up costing a lot more, not just because of US labor rates at the final assembly factory (which probably isn't that much of a factor really), but because all the logistics leading up to that point in the manufacture are now so much less efficient.
But, it only takes one big company like Apple to move some production and companies will start to pop up again.
Smaller companies are also bringing manufacturing back to the US. I've listened to podcasts where the https://originmaine.com owner discusses the local supply chain of leather and other material in order make clothing like jeans and boots.
Leather has the advantage that one animal produces multiple things -- US beef and milk production produces leather as a byproduct. If people want local beef and milk, there's also going to be local leather. Leather keeps better than meat, so as long as the demand for beef (measured in cows) exceeds the demand for bovine leather (also measured in cows), stocks go up and prices go down until someone decides a local supply chain is worthwhile (or until someone decides it's not worth it to pay for the warehouse for unsold leather).
What kind of lame attempt at policing and changing language is this? Yes, animals absolutely do produce leather. Go read a dictionary!
Similarly, my stomach produces stomach acid, my sweat glands produce sweat, etc., and none of that is "mechanized" or used for any kind of industry, it's just how my (and your) body works.
We similarly mechanize the growing of organisims in their own biodegraded guts and eat them afterward. Everything sounds grusome when you frame it that way. Being an apex predator comes with advantages as well as responsibilities to best utilize ourselves as we nessarily consume other organisms and not dirt.
Slaves are people, and like other people, at least in general tend to be capable of moral consideration. Your house cat will eat your dead body without considering the moral implications.
The cat might eat your dead body because it's trying to avoid starvation (after all, your ghost presumably isn't continuing to feed it, and it's stuck inside with your corpse and doesn't know how to use your cellphone to call for help), just like humans did in the Andes mountains, as seen in the movie "Alive". There's nothing immoral about eating a dead animal to survive.
You missed the "without considering the moral implications" bit. Your house cat isn't even aware of the concept of morality, or any recognized expression of it, and will avoid eating your body mainly because it's gross.
Yeah, it's almost like trade deals completely decimated domestic manufacturing the last 3 decades and it's impossible to build things here because everything already moved overseas. All the 'little screw' suppliers went overseas or went out of business because their customers went overseas.
Apple announcing they will continue to build mac pros in the USA is their signal to suppliers that they should follow them back to the USA. If the incentive to small-parts suppliers is good and the reverberating feedback are strong enough (small-suppliers bringing large suppliers, large suppliers bringing more small suppliers, rinse repeat), it'll lead other manufacturers to come back. If automation is going to take over labor, then location and labor-wages will matter less than supply-chain and the regulatory environment. If USA can get back the supply-chain, the USA rule-of-law environment, is probably preferable to China's rule-by-law environment.
It's also important to measure the amount of stuff made; US factories not only produce more expensive products but they produce more of them. This is particularly true of durable goods. From parents article:
"""The production of electronics, aerospace goods, motor vehicles and machinery are at or close to all-time highs.""'
I don't buy it. Those stats must be including things assembled or repackaged in the US. Almost everything I own is made overseas. Computers, appliances, furniture, clothing.
It's also not clear if these statistics are subject to the same types of laws as claiming something is 'made in America'. If I buy a box of parts from offshore and assemble and end product out of those parts, is that made in the US according to those stats?
It depends. If you are buying high priced stuff (i.e. Borders wool) then it is going to be high quality.
What people don't realise is that in the North there are people working for 50p/£1 an hour making clothes for Primark et al (some of this isn't even branded as "Made in the UK").
So the reason quality is lower is because no-one will pay for quality anymore. These jobs go overseas or they done here under illegal/slave labour conditions (the UK is a bit like the U.S. in that there is basically no oversight of these breaches).
Also the "skills" required aren't that high. That is why the jobs went to China.
I hear this a lot and in my experience, I tend to disagree.
Learning how to sew a shirt is much harder than say making a solid timber table or welding something together. It's certainly harder than any desk job/IT role I've had. Having spent 30yrs in professional development, I'd say that programming is about as hard as making a table: once you know the libraries inside and out is the same as knowing chisels inside and out. After that it's just design and then implementation of said design. (Yes, I got bored with professional programming: c++ games -> automation -> finance & web).
I've looked at a huge range of skills since winding down my programming life.
Making clothes is actually challenging ... For me at least. No piece of cloth is perfect, like a program can (almost) be: it moves as you measure it and cut it. It reacts to heat/cold and humidity. Then there's style (a thing I'm seriously lacking in). It goes on. Such as how a complex flat plane shape, combined with other flat plane shapes, when sewn can generate a 3d image -- but you put it together inside out! It's pure mathematics made real.
So, to say that it's unskilled, since having tried to learn it... Is simply not true.
I'd say it's only a few notches easier than trying to visualise the curvature of space time when you're studying the theory of general relativity (yes, I dabbled in that too)
So, I'd say that appreciation for the skill set has disappeared, and that is due to a managerial thing: metrics. Once your job is analysed in terms of metrics, then it can be analysed in a clinical way. It's what almost completely happened in our industry: hence the migration of a lot of development to India/Indonesia, and manufacturing to the cheapest country.
I will have to continue to disagree with you. A prepubescent child with no education can learn how to make clothes, most of the clothes in the world are made by children...so it probably isn't skilled work. Even more complex pieces, i.e. trainers, that require more than just finishing machine work can be made by children. Some work requires specialist knowledge (i.e. tailoring suits) but the majority does not.
Welding and metalworking is more complex but not by much. When Japan and Korea were getting into shipbuilding, there definitely was a learning curve which meant places in the West surviving for a short while after their entry...but after a decade or so, they had caught up.
Shipbuilding? Not sure what you mean but these places are known for making floating oil rigs, supertankers and cruise ships. It's fairly more involved than making a tshirt. No developed countries should have troubles making clothes, or even small boats.
> So the reason quality is lower is because no-one will pay for quality anymore
That's seems overly simplistic. Many people in the UK /can't/ pay for quality.
I've tried to seek out quality and many times I've been bitterly disappointed.
Paying for quality can be waaay above what even an above-average earner would want to pay, and with little guarantee about the quality. Is something 2-10x more expensive going to last 2-10x longer?
Take carpet for example. £50-100m2 vs £15-30m2. The latter looks nice (can even get a wool mix in that price bracket) and if kept clean might last 10 years. With the former, which will probably outlast even you, you might lose money if you move, damage it or fancy a new design. It can also be just as liable to a manufacturing defect, with no promise of better customer service.
> Paying for quality can be waaay above what even an above-average earner would want to pay, and with little guarantee about the quality.
There is your problem buddy. There are still masses of companies making high-quality products in the UK but the issue is that most Brits expect to pay the same price as Primark.
It is totally illogical: why would you expect an adult in the UK to make clothes for the same wage (i.e. produce a product that costs the same) as a 9-year old in a Vietnamese sweatshop?
Whether it is worth it is really up to you but I have not come across a British company making products where the extra price isn't worth it (ignoring the ethics of having small children make your clothes)...and that is why they exist. Yes, most Brits don't pay for this stuff anyway but the companies that focus on quality generally operate in areas where that premium pays (your assumption is presumably that high prices are just about corporate greed...this isn't the case).
You can buy a pair of a suit shoes made by a child and they won't last very long. You can buy Church's and they will last until you die.
I also don't really think most people in the UK being poor. Relative to what most UK workers produce, they are paid a fucking bomb and are able to consume (and do) almost all of their income. The issue is that they spend their money on cheap tat (this is something in the national psyche, Brits love the idea of getting something for nothing...from what I have seen, other countries will pay for high quality products).
I don't have a problem thanks. As I said, I've bought "quality" and had bad experiences. Funny you mention Church's. I bought a pair of Church's and the sole came off after a week.
I think we disagree on whether a large part of the population is financially able to spend £400 on a pair of shoes or £100 on a jumper or £5,000 on carpet. Especially now with our weak pound: things might be made in the UK but many materials come from abroad.
> So the reason quality is lower is because no-one will pay for quality anymore.
Unwilling or unable? I can't find a way to distinguish something that's expensive because it's high quality from something that's expensive due to branding. Price is an unreliable signal, brand is an unreliable signal, reviews can't take longevity into consideration, So I just buy cheap shit and hope for the best.
I mean this is a standard story in economics, right? Something about lemon cars. If the information isn't available symmetrically, then the person selling the quality is going to lose out on the person selling the branded fake quality.
I am so sick of hearing that same old story "people don't want to pay for quality" because it's bullshit. I try to, but it's not always on offer, half the time it's just a more expensive (probably nicer-looking) version of stuff that lasts about as long.
I'm not talking about shoes. In fact I grant your point on shoes, if dress shoes were the only kind of shoes we need. Which is of course nonsense and I'd love to hear where you get for instance running shoes that last a life time.
But jeans. I've bought expensive jeans, I've bought cheap jeans. There is zero correlation how long they last. It's a gamble. In fact, because the cheap ones will occasionally surprise you with some serious longevity, the best gamble is in fact to buy the cheap jeans and see which keep best.
But unlike shoe stores there's usually nobody around who can tell you about their relative quality. Or they will tell you anything. Again, that's the lemon game. Lack of information. Not unwillingness to pay.
I am certain that many people calling out the "people don't want to pay for quality" are just trying to signal "I can afford expensive stuff" and kind of forget about the part where they can also afford to occasionally buy something expensive that is also shit, doesn't last quite as long as the premium suggests, but not feel it in your pocket and keep telling yourself you buy quality.
See I can afford $400 shoes, but I can't afford to "try" $400 shoes.
Actually my example came from the world of luxury fashion. For coats at a ~£1500 price point, quality can be worse in the UK than abroad because we don't have the skills.
Watch American Factory on Netflix. It would support a bit of what you are saying... Not only is the glass factory in China way more efficient, at least through the end of the documentary, the quality of the Chinese glass also appears to be higher. Of course, in that case there's the confounding factor of the age of the factories which complicates the comparison, but it is all in all a very interesting documentary which looks at this exact question.
> I closely with the fashion industry in the UK, and one of the things that surprised me a lot was finding out that "Made in the UK", at least for clothing, meant lower quality. While we used to have great manufacturing expertise, that has all been lost over the last 50+ years as manufacturing was shifted overseas.
Reminds me of the IT Crowd episode with the fire extinguisher made in Great Britain. As an American, I didn't realize "made in the UK" had that reputation before watching that episode.
The stereotypes about British engineered and/or assembled cars (and their... "quirks") are well-known in the US, in my experience. Perhaps you've heard of those in particular?
Yeah, I was about to respond with this too. British cars have been infamous for terrible reliability for a long time. It's frequently joked that Jaguars became more boring, but much more reliable, when Ford bought them.
You mean British cars are considered bad in the US or the UK? Any imported car would be worse in the US, because additional import costs and harder to get service for compared to local ones. It doesn't necessarily mean that the car is bad as a car.
For another example, French cars are among the best and most popular in France, cheaper and easier to get service for. If you asked a few people there to name some American cars, they probably wouldn't be able to.
European guy speaking here. I think he meant in the UK and more general, in Europe. Sometimes, it's a point of pride as well. I heard an investor guy on the radio years ago, saying he drives Ashton Martin because it looks fantastic and is unreliable -- it made driving an adventure.
I meant that they're considered unreliable (different than "bad") in general regardless of location. Your reasoning really doesn't hold for Japanese cars in both the US and most of Europe, in my experience. Import costs are rather trivial for cars between the US and EU/EEA. Most of the reputation of the unreliability of American and European is actually warranted (which is why it's generally shared across the ponds) and the rest tends to be due to national biases.
Why is this downvoted? It's absolutely true, and disproves the parent's point. Japanese cars are probably the most popular here (I'll take his word for it, it certainly looks true just looking at the cars I see on the road, and if it isn't true, it's close), and they aren't expensive to fix at all. Parts and service aren't a problem at all.
The parent obviously doesn't remember the terrible reputation British cars got in the 70s.
It doesn't disprove anything. Some Japanese manufacturers have a good supply chain and service to the US, it doesn't preclude that plenty of other brands don't.
The supply chain wasn't the problem with British cars, the problem was the engineering was terrible. They were renowned for being extremely unreliable.
Really? When I lived in France there were Ford dealerships all over, or at least I was surprised by their frequency. I saw a lot of Fords on the road as well iirc.
There is a fair amount of Fords, that's the only US brand available there. I am not sure what are typical American cars, but Jeep and Chevrolet for example are non-existent here.
There are a rapidly increasing number of Teslas, a decent number of Jeeps, a bunch of Chevy/Opel rebadged cars, and even the occasional Ram pickup truck where I live in Switzerland.
>There are a rapidly increasing number of Teslas, a decent number of Jeeps, a bunch of Chevy/Opel rebadged cars, and even the occasional Ram pickup truck where I live in Switzerland.
What is wrong with the Swiss? Jeeps and Rams are literally the worst, most unreliable vehicles made by American manufacturers. It's pretty well-known that any pickup truck is better than a Ram. If you have to have an American pickup for some odd reason, Fords and Chevys are both much better. Jeeps are also terrible vehicles. Of course, both Jeep and Ram are made by Chrysler, which has the very worst ratings of all the mainstream car manufacturers. Why are the Swiss picking the very worst American brands?
Where something is made has almost no bearing on quality. There may be some loose correlations, but you will find both high quality and low quality manufacturing in the US, UK, France, China, Vietnam, Turkey, etc.. Some countries, like Japan and Germany, manufacture certain items for which the “quality” is synonymous with the item or brand itself (Leica, Japanese knives, etc.), but that’s about it.
What’s more is that “Made in USA” doesn’t even really tell you much about where something is actually made. It’s more an indicator of where something is assembled. So many things that say “Made in USA” are made from 100% Chinese components and just assembled or “finished” in the US. The standard is so loosely enforced by the FTC that it’s almost meaningless. And while the language of the law about country of origin seems explicit (“all or virtually all”), it’s anything but. Even flagrant violations can often act with impunity for decades, only to be tied up in court for years more if the FTC takes action. Most companies don’t even exist long enough to get caught when they are outright lying.
Globalism happened and there is no going back. Country of origin is pretty meaningless.
Cars have a section in their invoice that breaks down the value of the car’s make on a percentage basis. My Acura is around 70% by supplier/assembly standards. Perhaps the same could be done for electronics, though I wonder if anyone would really care.
This is likely tied into something I call "the tyranny of the China price". Basically, years of offshore production have set customer expectations and market-competitive pricing at a certain level. If you want to on-shore production, you have to achieve that same price point (or close to it) to sell your product. Of course, on-shore labor costs are probably going to be higher, as are rent, materials, environmental compliance, and probably a few supply chain contributions. So to meet the price point, you either have to automate everything (reduce labor cost) or cut corners on something else. In a lot of cases, that "something else" is some combination of materials quality and quality assurance.
In summary, it's not that producing on-shore inherently reduces quality or that there's no domestic expertise left, it's that to maintain the same end product quality you often have to significantly increase your price point, and mass-market customers usually don't like that.
>and one of the things that surprised me a lot was finding out that "Made in the UK", at least for clothing, meant lower quality.
Again it depends. There are lots of thing Made in UK that are extremely good but just not very well known. The Brits, may be due to their tradition and culture are just not very good at marketing. Sunpel [1] 99% made in UK and still one of the best quality clothing I have ever had.
( I think their had their first product using Spanish Cotton only in the past few years, and their explanation was it had nothing to do with Cost, it was Simply the best they could find. )
And of coz there are lots of Suit and High End Bespoke items in London, that aren't really known in general public.
It's not that the tradition is lost, it's that nobody can or is willing to afford that. People dress in Mark and Spencers, not in tailored suits or Channel.
Even the claim of quality is dubious. Better than H&M, possibly, but who cares. In this price range the competition is all clothes in existence, including bespoke and luxury brands who can make good clothes too.
>Even the claim of quality is dubious. Better than H&M, possibly, but who cares.
I do, and a lot of people. It is bit like arguing about Cars whether Bentley is any better, when they drive and accelerate , ( and all spec talks ) are similar to Toyota. It is one thing to admit something is good enough for you, it is another thing to admit something is better but not of value to your or you cant afford it. The latter understanding is severely lacking in todays world.
The point was to do the comparison with other high end shops, not H&M. These expensive clothes are factually not better than other expensive clothes. There is plenty of good choice if you're willing to put hundreds of dollars in a garment.
If you were buying a car, you'd be putting Bentley against BMW, Porsche or Rolls Royce. Don't think Toyota has anything relevant. (You'll forgive me, I'm not sure where Bentley stands exactly, I am not American)
If the shirt lasts 4x as long, on average, its worth nearly 4 shirts. A 25 dollar shirt is not crazy, why should 100? Its all short vs long term thinking, coupled with lack of product knowledge.
It needs to last much longer than 4x. Otherwise why not chose the 4x cheaper shirts and have more options for color and style? Plus you can buy the cheaper shirts over time, so you'll be more up-to-date on trends.
Nevermind that cheap T-shirts can last a long time already.
There's just no value in spending more to make a shirt 'better'. The only reason to do it is as a status symbol.
Yup, seeking quality can be a very frustrating and tiring experience. Also given that there is quite a small pool of people purchasing the products and sharing their experiences.
Sunspel is great, but I think it would be equally great if manufactured outside the UK, perhaps in Portugal, and probably quite a bit cheaper. The UK just isn't that skilled at this anymore – those who had the skills retired out of the workforce and we don't have many with the experience to train a new crop of workers.
>Sunspel is great, but I think it would be equally great if manufactured outside the UK, perhaps in Portugal, and probably quite a bit cheaper.
Absolutely, Sunpel could be the QA, just like what Apple is doing to their Manufacturing and Supply Chain. But more often than not, when you outsource manufacturing, the insight, and detail view of the product is gone. And quality starts to decline after a few years.
In the example of Apple, manufacturing are more like partners or extended part of Apple, where Apple dictate every single details. Something that is extremely hard to replicate without the volume, price and market share to function. I.e Your manufacturing will likely decline those request of Sunspel and find another client.
Even if the US has lost its manufacturing capability and this leads to a worse quality more expensive product, it's worth it. Do we want to go down the path of not being able to produce anything and outsourcing all our products until we have no talent? Where will that leave us in a generation?
I recommend reading Crouching Tiger about US China relationships. Manufacturing and sustainability is very important to war fighting capability past day X (where X is when our current inventory is attrited). So this is something those seeking our security will want regardless.
The last thing to mention is about comparisons with countries which do not have the same labor laws / pollution laws. Yes, given the same assumptions they will make stuff cheaper. They don't have the same regulations. This is one reason why tariffs to help offset this imbalance (minus shipping across a gigantic ocean) are necessary - regardless of political views. Either the US has the same regulations as the competitor or they offset the difference somehow (I get it that our current tariffs are much more than that, I'm simply mentioning tariffs in general).
That depends on what part of the manufacturing stage you're talking about. Will the MBP in TX have its printed circuit boards made there? Or will this just be a final-assembly plant, where they ship in the completed components and have some laborers screw them together so that they can claim "assembled in USA!!!"?
The final assembly is likely mostly by hand, maybe using some fixtures to speed things up. PC board assembly, however, is usually automated except perhaps for larger connectors which may be hand-placed before reflow soldering. Those machines, however, cost an absolute fortune (the ones capable of the very high volume needed for consumer electronics), and are usually made in Japan or Germany, and then shipped to China or Taiwan where they're used by contract manufacturers. I would honestly be surprised if Apple actually made the MBP PCBs themselves instead of just outsourcing it to a CM like FlexTronics.
I was surprised to see how much of the iPhone assembly was done by hand. There are videos out there showing the assembly line and it's basically humans doing each step.
I think the change is that Apple isn't closing the plant all-together.
"Apple made the previous Mac Pro in Austin, Texas, beginning in 2013. But with the new Mac Pro unveiled this month being made in China, Apple is "shifting abroad production of what had been its only major device assembled in the US as trade tensions escalate between the Trump administration and Beijing," The Wall Street Journal reported today."
That said, this all feels somewhat self-inflicted. One wonders if the tariffs on imports from China hadn't been put in place, perhaps Apple wouldn't have wanted to move production of this model out of the US.
I mean it has to have been all but closed for years right? The only thing they ever made was a giant flop that never got a meaningful update. What could they possibly have been making for the last several years?
Yes, my point is how many units could they possibly be making. Even when it was new it barely sold, how many units could they be making today? Dozens a month?
Probably more like a few hundred a month. But still, I can't imagine it employing many people at all unless they also used for overflow assembly or something.
Anecdotally, I've literally never seen a trash-can Mac pro outside an Apple store (and I even have friends that work at Apple).
That a huge change from a decade or more ago, when Mac pro towers were under every desk on designer teams and ubiquitous at Mac developer shops. The MBP laptops just didn't have enough grunt at the time.
With the previous Mac Pro they made a big deal right away from the fact that it was being made in Texas. Since they didn't do that this time around many people were wondering if they shifted production over seas. This is Apple quelling those rumors. Also:
> The value of American-made components in the new Mac Pro is 2.5 times greater than in Apple’s previous generation Mac Pro.
Good point. I'd like to see one of the absolute numbers in addition to the ratio; otherwise the cynical interpretation (which is kind of the appropriate interpretation for PR speak) is, "So the American-made portion used to be 1% of the cost and it's now 2.5%, eh?" (Or 1.25% if the MSRP has a constant ratio to the parts cost.)
There's a documented white paper about what it does and you can examine network traffic to determine if it's doing anything claimed. Even today, there are people that have flags and filters set up for traffic coming from these devices. I don't think there's much to worry about here but it's good to see that people are skeptical. People take their data for granted far too often.
In addition to real time encryption, it also handles sound and siri, which presumably involve some form of remote communication. I trust Apple as much as NSA, MacOS is closed but it's pretty controllable, T2 Chip is not.
He/She is just trying to be cute. The T2 is a security chip that, ironically (in the context of the parent,) makes spying more difficult since it's on-device security.
Based on the price, I figured it was going to be made in outer space:
"When you look at how much the components inside the base Mac Pro actually cost, you'll be shocked at Apple's profit margin. But when you understand why Apple is charging you so much cash, you'll just be angry." [0]
The fact that you pay a premium for the Apple brand shouldn't come as a shock to anyone. I've been proudly buying $200 Android phones and $500 laptops for years.
I would have agreed with that statement 5 years ago, but it simply isn't true today. Most manufacturers now offer some premium laptop line that is competitive with MacBook performance and build quality (often better) for a fraction of the price.
Even some of the less-premium lines have significantly improved in the last half-decade. A family member recently got a Dell Insperon and I was very surprised at the build quality.
In today's market you buy a MacBook for macOS and a logo. You just happen to get a decent laptop bundled with those.
That said, you'll have to make some sacrifices at the $500 range. At that price point, I always tell people to just get a used, high-end laptop instead of a new, crappy one.
It wasn't true 5 years ago either. Lenovo, HP and Dell all have professional lines of laptops that have been running for decades and have always been better than MacBook price/components wise.
Admittedly they can be obscured by the sea of consumer laptops.
Better build quality than Mac for a fraction of the price?? Either you're engaging in hyperbole to win an internet argument OR this is actually real, in which case, do tell? I'm in the market for a new laptop.
Also, I will not use Windows until they stop all involuntary telemetry collection. So if said amazing laptop also supports a Linux with great interop, perfect trackpad function etc., like macOS does - I'll eat my own hat. Please and thank you.
In terms of build quality, it's a very subjective subject but I think the XPS, Surface Book, and Razor Blade all have superior build quality to modern MacBook Pros.
I'm a fan of the XPS in particular. The base models for the XPS are only a couple hundred cheaper USD less than a base MacBook Pro, but MacBooks dramatically increase in price for minor spec improvements so the XPS gives you much better performance value at the high end.
> So if said amazing laptop also supports a Linux with great interop, perfect trackpad function etc., like macOS does - I'll eat my own hat.
Last I checked, macOS runs on Darwin, not Linux. Do you mean you're installing Linux on a MacBook?
So it's not good enough for me to provide examples that support my claim. I have to find examples that also meet your own criteria.
If you want a high-end Linux book, I would suggest an XPS. They have a "Developer Edition" that ships with Ubuntu. It's cheaper than a MacBook, but not by a huge margin. I can't attest to the Linux experience on non-developer-edition models.
I said linux because I’m aware macOS isn’t ever going to be available on non-Apple hardware :-) my other criteria are simply about restating that a MacBook isn’t just its build quality but also the privacy conscious, secure and developer friendly macOS experience.
At any rate, I’m not here for an OS flame war, but power to you if you think that a Dell XPS running Ubuntu is:
a) comparably smooth to using a macbook and
b) is available at a “fraction” of the price.
In the meanwhile I’ll go back to my skeptical perch and wait for a true challenger to emerge (which seemingly may never happen based on history, sadly).
Trust me, I'm not advocating for Windows here. macOS has plenty of advantages, especially in terms of privacy. And I'm not even trying to argue that the MacBook is a bad purchase.
I just think much of the market has caught with Apple in terms of build quality - especially in light of recent issues surrounding the touch bar and keyboard - so I don't think the Fiat/Audi analogy was a good one for the modern laptop market.
No, it's not. There are some great budget laptops out there which _outperform_ the MacBook Pro. Maybe the mac looks better, but that's it. Your analogy doesn't work here.
I figured the new Mac Pro was priced as such along with that monitor and stand as to spit in the faces of the fans that had been badgering Apple for years over the debacle that the Mac Pro had become. As in, Apple said fine, but you aren't the customer we want and you cannot afford it. Then again I am not even sure Apple wants any of that market, the machine by looks and its monitor seemed tailored made for influencers. that monitor stand was just a shark jumping moment if ever.
Seriously though, while the modular portion is an interesting take it is a convoluted method to deliver the upgrade path people wanted but worse it traps people to Apple which of course benefits Apple.
FWIW, custom configurations of iMacs are US assembled too. For the EU I think that work is done in Ireland.
You cannot buy Afterburner for a PC, but solutions like this exist in PC world for ages - hardware video encoders/decoders [0], not enough? FPGAs on PCIe are also here for ages [1,2]. Apple is great at reinventing the idea (and providing working ecosystem), but Afterburner is really nothing new.
We'll have to see real world benchmarks once it ships, but it could be that there’s no equivalent software + FPGA solution in the PC world.
Their crazy expensive monitor is another example. There simply isn’t something equivalent in the industry. It’s probably the best monitor for its niche application.
Out of all the product's in Apple's lineup, the Mac Pro is probably the one with the smallest price differential relative to competitors' products. Go ahead and spec out a similar workstation from Dell or HP: you won't see much difference in price.
Base price doesn't really matter to the buyers of these machines anyway, they're not consumer products. These are being used by professionals who generate revenue way in excess of what the computer costs, and stuff like enterprise support contracts (where you can have a replacement machine at your desk ASAP if yours dies, because otherwise you're losing money by the second) matters much more to them.
The articles you linked are just dumb clickbait using the logic of consumer product pricing where it isn't applicable.
Not to be pedantic but the Dell machine is on sale, and Apple isn't.
It's list price is $4,420.29 which is still about $1500 off. But that comes with Windows that supports 4 cores so you would need to upgrade to the 4+ cores one thats another $100 so more like $1400.
So basically $1400 is the difference between a top tier Dell and a top tier Apple. Still a fairly large margin, but after a certain number the amount matters less. People who are buying $4500 computers typically don't care about spending another $1000.
Yep. Dell's website will always show a sales price. Even better, use a different browser or refresh a hour later and the price will change as well. Even Lenovo and HP do it.
The best is when you enter the configuration for a PC build and hit refresh and you see individual items change in prices.
Also if you go via a Dell sales rep you easily get 10% extra off that "sales price" for low volume buyers and if you are a large volume buyer you can easily get as much as 50% off the list price even for high ticket value items.
Wait what? Apple rarely if ever has "sales" on their products, I've seen student discounts and itunes gift cards, but that's about it.
At Dell/HP/Lenovo meanwhile half their products are "on sale" the same way that furniture stores have "sales" - its "sale" price is basically it's real price.
Speak for yourself. My laptop cost almost $5,000, my desktop cost almost $3,000 to build, and you can bet that another $1,400 would have made a huge difference either way. Not to say things wouldnt have ended up the same way, but I definitely would have cared about another $1400.
When you're talking about numbers like that for individuals, 15% is a lot. Even businesses would care about a 15% increase in costs
I think it hurts when the last $1400 is basically 12 Thunderbolt 3 ports and the power allowance for them. There's no value in that many TB3 ports for most people.
They could have put most of those TB3 ports and controllers in optional PCIe cards and the $4999 base model would still be Pro. Because the point of the Pro devices is to be the more-powerful option.
The iPad Pro doesn't have any TB ports and the Macbook Pro and iMac Pro only have 4 each so I think 12 is simply unnecessary for the "Pro" moniker in addition to greatly exceeding most people's requirements.
If I were to guess the reason for the difference, I'd notice:
- Your Dell has a SATA SSD, the Mac Pro has an NVMe SSD
- Your Dell has no wifi/bluetooth, the Mac Pro has WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0
- Your Dell has 1 gigabit Ethernet, the Mac Pro has 2x10 gigabit Ethernet
- Your Dell has no Thunderbolt 3 ports, the Mac Pro has 8
- Your Dell doesn't come with a keyboard and mouse, the Mac Pro does
- Your Dell doesn't have any equivalent for Apple's T2 chip or Afterburner card
Although the Gizmodo one doesn't have a lot of these, either. Most of the price difference seems to have to do with yours being a Precision 5820 and Gizmodo's being a Precision 7920. I'm not sure exactly what the difference is here, but it might have something to do with expandability?
If you're not concerned with expandability, the iMac Pro seems to have better specs for a lower price, and may be a fairer comparison.
The 'Afterburner card' isn't present in the base configuration of Mac Pro we know the price for.
Dell can add an NVMe SSD, wifi, bluetooth, 2x10 gigabit ethernet, and a keyboard and mouse. Those increase the price by $400. Dell will do two thunderbolt ports for $70, so 8 would be $280.
So unfortunately the things you've listed only explain $680 of the price difference.
Yeah, like I said, a lot of the difference seems to be that yours is a Precision 5820 and Gizmodo's is a Precision 7920. Understanding the reason for the price difference there is probably pretty relevant to this.
Apple has designed fully custom I/O controller chips for things like SSD interfaces and the Afterburner MPX modules that have some insane specs. Simple top line specs just don't tell the whole story.
Current Imac Pros are already getting 2.4GB/3GBbytes/sec SSD RW. Even the current macbook pro gets 1.7GB/1.4GByte speeds. Nonetheless, if these high impact details don't matter to you, don't buy it. No big deal. Just don't oversimplify the comparison. Of course, we haven't even mentioned the OS differences...
You're also paying for 12 Thunderbolt 3 ports. They really could have made some of those optional since there's PCIe slots too. In addition to expensive parts I believe TB3 requires licensing costs too but I'm not sure if Apple has to because I think it was partially created by them.
I feel like most businesses at that level of need have long moved away from the MacPro, or they are out of business. For the rest of us mortals wanting a tower mac, the price of entry is too prohibitive. Base for my 2008 MacPro was in the ball park of $2900, and it was a beast. What is the base now, $6000? It's basically hackintosh from here on out, which works amazingly well now.
Yes, I actually had planned to buy a new Mac Pro if it had been similar in price to your 2008 Mac Pro. I am currently using a 27 inch iMac and am looking for a desktop machine with a decent GPU and decent internal storage. So at 3k for a Mac Pro plus some money for upgrades, I could have grudgingly justified. At 6k it is just way too expensive.
I've been using Mint (ubuntu derivative) for a few years now on my laptop and I'm absolutely loving it, more so when you consider the price difference. (am a software dev so linux is great for me)
Hackintoshes are great but I would never rely on one for any kind of production work if my business depended on it. I had a Hackintosh tower that went completely dead after something happened with device IDs. The machine was unusable. I had system updates disabled too so I'm not even sure what happened. Had to reinstall the OS and Clover (or whatever the loader was at the time).
I had an older (2013 or 14) Lenovo TS140 sitting around that I recently installed Mojave on. It took a little bit of experimentation to work out the kinks, but I've got it working almost flawlessly with a NVME drive in a PCIE adapter, 32GB RAM, and a Broadcom wifi card to enable Airdrop/continuity/handoff. Not bad for an older machine and less than $250 in
extra parts, most of which I had already purchased over the years.
The only thing I haven't been able to solve/fix is I can't use software that depends on WiBu Codemeter[1] - some sort of piracy prevention. This includes stuff like newer versions of Antares AutoTune, and other audio production software. WiBu installs a third-party kext, which doesn't play well with my audio interface for some reason (RME, also installs a third-party kext) - causes a lot of pops and clicks or dropouts until I uninstall WiBU. If anyone has any suggestions on workaround for this, please respond here!
PS: after losing my system too many times in the past, now I keep a mirror image backup of all my systems in case I break something... Esp. with hackintosh it is just too easy to lose a system.
I just spec'd out a HP Z6 to the min spec of the Mac Pro - it came to about $4000 (and that is EU prices, I am sure the US prices are less) - so 20% difference.
An maxed out z8 is $50k - but that is way over what most people need, or you can do with a Mac Pro
If you look at other manafacturers - you can get insane performance for much cheaper.
2 x AMD Epycs (64 cores per CPU, 128 cores / 256 threads in the box)
1TB RAM
2x2TB SSD
2 x Quadro RTX 6000
Is $38,000. It is not even in the same sport, let alone league as the mac pro
Besides that you can get equivalent machines at a lower price, as some comments here have shown, the other big problem with the Mac Pro is, that there is no other true desktop machine available from Apple, e.g. accessible components, supporting a graphics card. In the past, the Mac Pro would work as a slightly oversized deskop machine. But the new Mac Pro is priced completely out of that region, basically twice of what its predecessor cost. And I remember the times, when the entry level G5 PowerMac was slightly cheaper as the G5 iMac, the latter of course having a 20 inch lcd.
You're joking, right? I'm currently looking at the Mac Pro build page on Apple's site and literally every component upgrade costs nearly twice as much as if you got it individually - £360 to upgrade to a 1B pcie SSD (as opposed to 170 on amazon), just as much for 16Gb of DDR3 ECC memory (180 on other sites), etc.
"Finding a motherboard to match the Mac Pro's specs wasn't entirely straightforward. So, for the purposes of our price comparison, I simply searched for "Xeon motherboard" on Amazon and picked the most expensive."
They received a few minor tariff exemptions, but not enough to matter. The warp and woof of this move is fundamentally moral, not economic. The dream of perfect international comparative advantage is not likely to be achieved when one country is run like a trillion-dollar mafia. Hence, a moral push to assemble in the U.S. I think this will make sense to a ton of consumers around the world.
On a personal note, I was not going to buy one, but now I’ll buy two.
To those posting "this is not newsworthy since it's been unchanged since 2013", you must consider the radically different economic context, namely the threat of tarrifs (which was not as much of an issue in 2013).
Apple's statements on the reason for non-US based manufacturing has been that it is not the labor cost but the (lack of domestic) skills that drive them abroad.
The Mac Pro, a low volume flagship product, was long the only US manufactured product, until Apple announced it was moving offshore a well.
Apple gets tariff exemptions on the import of the parts for the machines, so it can do the assembly in Austin.
Meanwhile Apple is shifting a very significant volume of manufacturing away from China to ... India.
Both Apple and the Administration get to send out 'feel good' PR.
They were supposed to move it to China and shut down the facility in Texas. But they reversed after I assume tariff threat from White House? Not sure but that's what I'd imagine.
What is that, 0.01% of their production? I'm a Mac Pro 2013 user, still haven't met another.
This headline is equivalent to "Toyota manufacturing floor mats in the US" only it is made to sound sexy because it is apple and people mentally conflate Mac Pro with MacBook Pro.
I recently bought a domestic vehicle. What a mistake. The assembly quality is awful. I don't know how they assemble the body panels I thought it was all done by robots, but robots would not miss spot welds or misalign parts and retry welds after a miss. I think there was just a bunch of drunks manually assembling that Ford vehicle. The paint is peeling on the roof of a NEW car.
From my experience, don't buy made in the US. It is too expensive and the quality is bad. I think the pay structure in this country is such that nobody is paid "enough" to do quality work.
Toyota builds some of their trucks here and puts a sticker on the back "built here, lives here" or something of that nature. I wonder if I can get something similar for my Mac Pro?
Toyota doesn't even bother trying to market the Tundra outside the Americas, since cowboy cosplay isn't terribly popular abroad, so it makes sense that they are made here.
It's made sense to build Japanese and European cars in the US for a very long time. Honda has had 2 plants in Ohio for at least a couple decades now, and Toyota, BMW, and others have had plants here for a long time too. The US is the world's largest auto market, and US labor rates are lower than Japanese or German labor rates, plus there's a savings when you don't have to ship a 3-5000 pound object across an ocean, so of course it makes sense to build the highest-volume models here where they're bought (especially models that don't sell outside the US).
As for "cowboy cosplay", the Tundra doesn't make much sense elsewhere because gas prices are generally higher in other industrial countries, and in less-wealthy countries with low gas prices (like the middle east) they buy smaller trucks (and wealthy people there don't buy trucks at all), so a large pickup truck obviously isn't going to sell well there. America is just a unique place where 1) gas prices are low, incentivizing buying larger vehicles, and 2) personal wealth is high enough for middle-class people to afford a very large truck, and 3) owning a truck for use as a commuter vehicle (rather than a utilitarian vehicle) is esteemed for some odd reason.
I've owned 4 cars in my life, a crappy 1995 Dodge Neon (May She Rest In Peace), a Jeep Wrangler, an F-150, and a 3-Series BMW. By far the most enjoyable driving experiences were with the Wrangler and F-150 - because of the height of the cab. Sure, the BMW drives "better" and has tighter steering and suspension etc, but sitting at that height gave you a view of the road that not only made me feel safer while driving it also was just more comfortable (I'm tall, 6'3"). I was in the military with those middle two cars, and they obviously had other utility for me than the comfort. It isn't just "cowboy cosplay".
The Wrangler is an utterly terrible vehicle by every measure, except for one, and only one thing: going offroad. For any other use-case, it's the worst pick. It sucks for fuel economy, reliability, value for money (they're expensive), interior quality, stability (wheelbase is too short), towing (again, the wheelbase), comfort, etc.
The truck at least is good at towing and carrying stuff, but how often do you really do that stuff? For most truck owners, almost never; that's why I was talking about using them as commuter vehicles being odd. You don't see this much in other countries, and even for actual work use, they tend to use vans instead of trucks. It's mostly Americans who love trucks (and some middle easterners, who have found Toyota trucks are an inexpensive and reliable platform for mounting a machine gun).
If driving height were really important to you for a commuting vehicle, you'd get an SUV or CUV. Something like a Honda CR-V has ride/seat height along with a much more comfortable cabin for passengers, and a more sensibly-sized engine for good fuel economy, plus an overall smaller size so you aren't hogging parking spaces in lots with smaller spaces.
This is what I was referring to (and what someone else here coined as "cowboy cosplay"): Americans buy vehicles that are entirely ill-suited or excessively large for what they're actually using them for.
> owning a truck for use as a commuter vehicle (rather than a utilitarian vehicle) is esteemed for some odd reason
That seems like an odd way to put it. I drive a truck as a commuter vehicle because I can't afford to own and insure a second vehicle as a 'utility' vehicle, nor can I afford for my only vehicle to be of low utility
Thailand is a huge market for pickup trucks, though more often of the smaller variety. The HiLux is made in Thailand (and exported to places like Australia from there).
I doubt "cowboy cosplay" is a primary driver of pickup sales in the US so much as utility and affordability (the US has wider roads and cheaper fuel than Europe).
I think it's wrong to discount the strong cultural element to the ownership of pickup trucks in the US. Listen to a bit of country music and count the name-drops of pickup truck models, or drive down the road and count the lifted pickups -- there's more than just "utility and affordability" going on here.
A family member is starting the search for a new vehicle and is expressing interest in pick ups. It was surprising at first to me since he hasn't owned a truck in 20+ years, but then I was over while he had his country music on (he started listening to it almost exclusively the last few years) and I noticed how much they talk about trucks and it kind of clicked for me.
Affordability? Have you priced out F-150 sized trucks lately? The F150 starts at $28K, but you won't find one at that price. They typically average closer to $40K. Tundras start at $33K, but they too typically sell at over $40K. And both guzzle gas like it's going out of style.
Good. It'd be also wise of them to diversify to other countries besides China. They started doing so in India (after India basically banned their shit if they don't make it there), but I hope they now see the lack of wisdom in putting all their hundred billion dollar eggs into one basket.
As to Mac Pro, even if it's mostly assembled by robots, at that price level it better be assembled by red blooded, gun totin', tobacco chewin' Texan robots. There's just no excuse to do otherwise when your computer costs like a midsize car.
To the extent that Apple is successful at lobbying for tariff exemptions, what has happened is that Apple has diverted resources from the thing it is actually good at (hardware and software) and has diverted them into legal and lobbying fees.
We can't expect firms to excel in their core competencies when they are hamstrung by politicians that are trying to reduce economic freedom worldwide.
Apple Computer exists because of economic freedom, not in spite of it.
It's odd to me to describe that as "over $1 billion".
Either it's 2B, or the other part of that math isn't correct.
"To date, Apple has invested over $1 billion in American companies from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund — deploying the entire $1 billion initial investment and 20 percent of the $5 billion it subsequently committed to spend."
But that's really not a plain English reading of their statement:
"To date, Apple has invested over $1 billion in American companies from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund — deploying the entire $1 billion initial investment and 20 percent of the $5 billion it subsequently committed to spend."
"Apple has deployed the entire $1B and 20% of $5B."
Is there a part of the sentence I'm missing which implies your reading is correct?
Rephrasing: I suspect you're right about reality, and the sentence I quoted was written by someone who didn't understand the reality, or was trying to misrepresent reality.
While this may be something that allows Apple to receive exemptions from tariffs on other products (e.g. iPhone), it may not be the major reason. It just makes sense that they'd continue assembling the Mac Pro 2019 in the same facility as the Mac Pro 2013.
It's hard to imagine Apple selling many of these at their ultra high price points, but perhaps it's only by selling a $10,000 Mac that Apple can make them in the USA and maintain their desired margins?
Just checked on bestbuy.com, the Lenovo X1 Carbon 14" 1080p 8GB RAM 256GB SSD laptop is $1580 where the Dell XPS 13.3" 4k 16GB RAM 256GB SSD is $1500. Doesn't Dell make the xps 13 in China?
Dell makes them in China (received one of XPS today for my son). Difference between 4k and 1080p can cost you about approx. 600-1000 USD (from my experience of reviewing this market extensively few weeks ago). RAM difference - about $100.
When that happens, acquiring a Mac Pro will become ever more so difficult for many of us. As it is right now I can't afford it. I can only assume pricing will go up when production starts in the US.
Why would I as a buyer care what state or country the thing is built in? Seems to me that is makes no difference as in both cases it is thousands of kilometers away from me.
The authors of the articles likely weren't anticipating the U.S. to start a trade war with China and implement protectionist measures that involve waiving tariffs to specifically incentivize Apple to maintain manufacturing in the USA:
"The US manufacturing of Mac Pro is made possible following a federal product exclusion Apple is receiving for certain necessary components."
What I wonder is whether or not this is sustainable moving forward or only intended to be a temporary "win" to create headlines. And can any company that wants to manufacture in the U.S. avail themselves of "federal product exclusions"?
The Mac Pro was already being made in the US. This is essentially a retention of the status quo.
However of course anything is possible. The government can squeeze every company until all manufacturing is back in the US (though it's still a smaller segment than it was when the housing crisis hit). That would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater, though, as the US completely loses sight of the dynamics that made it the richest country in the world.
We're talking about assembly of the Mac Pro not semiconductors. Presumably Apple chose Texas back in 2013 because they gave the biggest tax break, just like every other company.
Though there are fabs in Texas. The 2 that I know of for sure are Samsung is Austin about 5 miles down the road from the Flextronics plant that builds the MacPro.
National Semiconductor has a fab up in Arlington Texas.
I'm not sure if Texas Instruments still has their fabs open or not, but they had several at one point too. Sure there are more that I don't know about.
If you're referring to the 'Samsung Austin Semiconductor' in Tech Ridge, I wonder how well the fab is aging. The last building I remember was built primarily for NAND flash production back around 2007 ( https://phys.org/news/2007-06-samsung-largest-wafer-austin-t... ).
serious question: who is going to buy this machine (and the very expensive monitor)? My best guess is that it's aimed squarely at video producers? Is there another market?
Hackers from a variety of languages could be attracted by the high core count, which allows one to test parallel programming easily and reap its benefits first-hand.
I myself code in Clojure, have trivially parallelized some productivity tooling.
this headline is absurd, so many people will immediately jump to the conclusion that this is related to China and tariffs, but no, it's been built there for 6 years.
Even though I dont care for Mr Trump, I do like that Tim Cook and Trump meet now and then to discuss various matters. I suspect Tim has educated Trump on the complexity of global supply chains. And Trumps opinions may influence Apples decisions a bit too.
That's an interesting term. I hadn't heard it before. All worldviews rely on a narrative of sorts. "Things were bad, X came along and provided a new way. But Y and Z are still problems. Here's where it's all destined to go. You can join and be a part of that."
Did you even read the article? Mac Pros have been built here since 2013. The only reason they aren't moving production overseas is because the administration exempted them from some tariffs.
I am constantly baffled by people who support the Trump administration and simultaneously claim to want less government interference in the economy.
This is good news only to those who devalue economic freedom. Thanks to the tariffs (taxes) imposed by the administration, Apple has had to pay millions of dollars in legal fees and undertake a buildout in Texas that is very likely not the best business decision.
In a few years, when the consequences of the suboptimal business decision have occurred, nobody will remember that it was political games and meddling that led to the wasting of (what will by that time) likely amount to billions of dollars in added costs.
In my view, if we think Donald Trump is so good at making computers and phones, we ought (as individuals) invest in his competitor to Apple and await its success.
If not, then we ought to keep him as far away from the business decision making of private sector firms as possible.
Already, government gets between $60 to $80 on every iPhone sold (sales tax). When is enough enough?
Google and Amazon have both branched out much more than Apple, though Apple is trying to open a Seattle office.
I'm just surprised they would choose Austin for manufacturing, as it means they have long supply lines and have to build an industry that doesn't currently exist in Austin.
Mac Pros have been coming out of Austin since 2013; the article details as much. Furthermore, Austin's been a major center for the US semi-conductor industry for quite some time.
Here are just a few orgs that have an Austin presence:
- Dell (HQ in Round Rock)
- Apple
- Nvidia
- Qualcomm
- Intel
- Samsung
- AMD
- Silicon Labs
- Cirrus Logic
The MacPro is built by Flextronics and they have had a factory in Austin for a while. Not sure when they opened it, but I used to work at a building in the same complex. It was there when I was at that job in 2011.
This announcement is for the new Mac Pro, not Macbook pro. In addition to the waver Apple received to manufacture this with imported parts, I'm sure the vertical targeted by the Mac Pro (see $45k top spec) and the relatively low demand makes this viable.
I have completely given up on apple. I think the products are horrible. However, I will purchase any computers which I can assembled in berry compliant countries. Double points for the USA, apple just earned 10k from me.
"computers which I can assembled in berry compliant countries"
???
So "can" must be an adverb, which isn't something I've seen before. To "can assemble" something could be that you assemble it while it is in a can, kind of like building a ship in a bottle. Alternately, it could be that you used a can to do the assembling, similar to "screwdriver assembled" but you used a can. Hmmm.
To be "berry compliant" means following the rules of the berry. I'll guess this relates to Berry Bitty City, where Strawberry Shortcake and her friends live. You have to follow the rules, as we learn in the episode "Too Cool for Rules".
As a european, i wont be buying this product as long as it’s not built in Europe. If the us is pushing hard for buying made in usa, europeans have the right to buy made in europe only.
Manufacturing jobs in the US has been on a long, steady decline[1]. My pet theory is that 1) people don't want these jobs and 2) people elsewhere (like China) are more willing to take manufacturing jobs because it provides a greater life quality boost there than it does here. What value does it bring for the government to subsidize these industries? Other than helping someone's chances in election cycles, I don't see the point.
I think the only reasonable way to stay relevant long term is for the US to forget about manufacturing and focus on intellectual endeavors. Focus on creating new technologies, exploring space, giving people greater mobility and less red tape. Just my 2 cents.
Manufacturing employment has been on a long, steady decline. Manufacturing output is experiencing steady growth and has never been higher.
The US is the second largest manufacturer in the world and will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Giving up on it would be a huge mistake. What we can’t do is count on it to employ the masses.
Isn’t that just cooking the books though? I mean if the rump of manufacturing gets done in a low cost economy, and mere assembly is performed onshore, what kind of manufacturing is that really
No, the US builds lots of real stuff. It’s not just assembly. Not by a long shot.
The reason the trends are in opposite directions is because of increasing productivity. The number of worker-hours needed to build a car is much lower than in the past because of improved efficiency.
> My pet theory is that 1) people don't want these jobs
Ask pretty much anyone who has worked in manufacturing if they liked their job, and wanted to keep it, and you'll generally get a positive answer. People were (and are) proud of their jobs. I've previously worked in manufacturing; the vast majority of people there loved their job and the company. Many were highly-skilled professionals. I've been in quite a few factories over the years, and it's the same story in most places. People like to do real jobs making an actual contribution to the society they live in.
The assumption you're making here is kind of typical for views expressed here on HN by people who have precious little real-world experience with life outside software. Very little modern manufacturing is dirty and dangerous heavy industry where people work like slaves. The vast majority is light industry with great work conditions. The world doesn't run on software, it's merely a facilitator. It runs on manufacturing. Don't forget that manufacturing is the fundamental basis of all our first-world economies.
> for the US to forget about manufacturing and focus on intellectual endeavors
"Intellectual endeavours" are mostly pointless if you can't turn them into something real and physical. You can't base an entire economy from doing nothing in the real world.
>I think the only reasonable way to stay relevant long term is for the US to forget about manufacturing and focus on intellectual endeavors.
A seriously small fraction of the country is capable of this type of work. Not everyone can "learn to code", and a former line worker isn't going to become a firmware engineer overnight - if ever. Manufacturing was a way for those folks, predominantly men, to find worth in their life and a steady paycheck they could support a family with. Discount this as "electioneering" all you want, but the situation is more nuanced than "well the Chinese are more willing to do this work as evidenced by their lower wages". I guarantee that a lot of Gig Economy folks would trade the unknown and inconsistent schedule (I get it that that works for some) for steady hours and a predictable paycheck.
Is it possible that the manufacturers simply want to pay as little as possible to get these things manufactured, and that they can pay people elsewhere (like in China) far less that they can pay US workers? I am no expert, but this site claims that rent prices in the US are, on average, 150% higher than in China and the cost of groceries are 72% higher.
It seems to me that Apple can get the same work done in China and pay the worker far less than they would have to pay a US worker (in terms of equivalent spending power).
The cost of living in China has been rising steadily for the last few decades as the country has gone from a backwater to a manufacturing powerhouse. Chinese labor rates actually aren't that much less than US ones any more, and so some manufacturing is going to even cheaper places now (e.g. southeast Asia, Africa).
As for milk and cheese, it's the same in Japan: those aren't big parts of the local diet, so the supply is very small and the prices high. Cheese is probably the biggest complaint about food I've heard about in regards to Japan from westerners in all the things I've read or watched on YT: the food in Japan is generally considered wonderful, except cheese: it's hard to find much variety, really tiny, and very expensive. The US isn't that different, if you're looking for some food that's common on the other side of the planet and not well-known here: try finding a durian or starfruit in your local grocery store. You'll probably have to go to an Asian grocery store to get it, unless you have a fancier store near you and a large Asian population.
That's true, also government programs to create jobs are pretty misguided in an environment with all-time-low unemployment. We should be trying to create employees.
I think people do want these jobs, not everybody can be a programmer after all ... but without specific policy intervention it’s just not possible to make these jobs cost effective. Where economics is ruled by the [EDIT economically (rather than socially)] liberal free market mindset, which does effectively maximise profits, you’re not going to get this value judgement in favour of expensive low skill jobs ...
EDIT the alternative is to put all the displaced employees on welfare, which may actually be cheaper overall ... but that’s another value judgement ...
Certainly some people want those jobs. However if you talk to young people, most of them seem to be more interested in becoming Instagram famous than stamping out widgets for 40h a week.
Yep - a minimum wage of 7.x is murdering American jobs still. Not because low skill labour pays that, but it bases its increases on that incredibly insulting baseline.
You can survive on welfare rather than eke out a miserly living on shit jobs that take up your life, which also allows for black market income. Either go for a living wage linked to food and housing/leasing costs that is evaluated periodically, or go for a universal income minimum - it would at least be more honest than that.
Our political system is incredibly dysfunctional and the main cause of this. Instead of forming alliances like a multi-party system in Europe, we're forced to choose between ideological (not practical) extremes. It serves to further cement that disparity.
"The US manufacturing of Mac Pro is made possible following a federal product exclusion Apple is receiving for certain necessary components."
Is this sort of a "if you don't make us pay tarrifs on component X, we'll build component Y in the USA?"
Also I'm happy to see Apple doing this. Even if it's 50% press fluff, I think it'll make other companies in the industry think harder about their own practices because Apple commands such a great reputation.