
Trump wants Apple to make iPhones in the US. There is just one problem - arcticbull
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/trump-wants-apple-to-make-iphones-in-the-us-there-is-just-one-problem-20180910-p502r9.html
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hourislate
I left this comment on the last thread about how it would be impossible to
build the iPhone in the USA.

In and around 2004-2005, Nokia had the largest cell phone manufacturing plant
in the world located in the Alliance Free Trade Zone in Ft.Worth, TX. They
manufactured millions of phones out of that location. There is no reason why
the iPhone can't be manufactured in the USA. Foxconn is looking to replace
most of it's employees across all the products they manufacture. Will labor
really matter in the next 10 years at the pace of automation? People continue
to call the supply chain into question, well where are most of the parts
coming from?

Here is a list of countries that provide the parts. As you can see sourcing is
not a problem since China has to source these parts also.

[https://www.quora.com/Where-is-the-iPhone-originally-
made](https://www.quora.com/Where-is-the-iPhone-originally-made)

This article is more opinion than fact.

~~~
arcticbull
I guess my gut feeling is that if there's no labor involved, what does it
matter where the phone is manufactured? No jobs are created, and the wealth
flows to the owning corporation one way or the other.

~~~
peteretep
> if there's no labor involved

There will never be _no_ labour involved. As automation increases, there will
be a smaller number of higher-paid positions, and those are definitely worth
having in your country.

~~~
arcticbull
Immaterial quantities of labor, the real work is in the design and
implementation of the systems and those are the jobs we should want. Assembly
workers should be retrained or given basic income imo. Then products should be
built where it’s most efficient - and if that means centralizing in one or two
countries, that’s just fine.

------
proee
It would be cool to have a phone that could be assembled 100% by a robot. You
load all the parts and assemblies into the machine and out pops the finished
product.

There is still a TON of opportunity to improve automation in modern
manufacturing factories. Tesla is obviously trying to do this in a disruptive
manner, and learning that in the short term it's not as easy as you might
think.

However, I suspect with the model Y, they will focus on design-for-
manufacturing-automation so that they don't run into the same problems as they
have with the 3.

~~~
mtmail
Foxconn is already replacing workers with robots ("Foxconn replaces '60,000
factory workers with robots'"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11770463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11770463))
and I'd argue so do car manufacturers for 50 years step by step. I don't know
if they could reach 100%. In other industries, e.g. food processing, it seems
humans are only needed to fill up the ingredients, watch monitors and do QA.

------
arcticbull
It was always my understanding that the raw cost of manufacture of a product
in the US and China was comparable (while China has much lower cost of labor,
their cost of energy is much higher [1]) - and that the reason that products
are manufactured in China these days has much more to do with supply chain.
That all products are made there so manufacturers only have to drive a truck
from supplier to supplier and drop it all off at the final assembly facility
before shipping it to the rest of the world.

[1] [https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/17/news/economy/china-cheap-
la...](https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/17/news/economy/china-cheap-labor-
productivity/index.html)

------
adiusmus
Just one problem?

I know a bunch of companies are packaging chips, displays etc in the US but
are surely not even remotely at the scale Apple needs.

In reality the industry would probably need to re-tool multiple manufacturing
capabilities involving multiple disciplines to the massive scale required.
This is not impossible but it’s going to cost and it will take entire tech
ecosystems and supply chains to be built. At least five years to a decade to
be actually considered “operational”. Maybe this is the end goal: investment
needs to occur and pressuring Apple is the way to start.

Maybe Trump is trying to get Apple incentivised to repatriate some of the
ocean of cash they have.

