I was just coming here to ask this; why do robots not do this and why, if robots can do this, is this not done in the US? Robots cost a lot of money (getting cheaper, but slowly; wait for the 3d-printable robots), but it makes more sense keeping it in the US anyway?
You need a manufacturing base. Raw materials, parts, tools, it all has to be made nearby your plant to be able to automate efficiently. The US doesn't have that anymore.
There's only about a million industrial robots in operation worldwide today. For Foxconn to turn around all those iPads (for example) in only a month or two requires about million people right now. The scale of what they do is just staggering, imagine how much it would cost to go to a third party like Siemens and buy a million industrial robots with the dexterity of human hands and fingers.
Well, with this new internal development project Foxconn will do it all by itself in just 2 years. This will DOUBLE the number of industrial robots in the world and make China the leading robotics country. Impressive stuff.
That is very impressive. I find it more impressive though that we are not farther along with this. Only 1 million?
(I have no idea about this, you seem to:)
Isn't it so that you don't need the human dexterity? They are making the same movements on the same iPad the entire day; would that not be a prime candidate to NOT need humans for? It's not as if they create a custom iPad per client?
