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Comment by alrs | Hacker News Reader

I find Steve Jobs repellent, but he was once committed to manufacturing hardware in the United States.

The minor undercurrent of criticism since his passing has been Apple's manufacturing vendors in Asia. Forgotten is the drag on NeXT by its decision to build a factory in Fremont, CA. It was way overbuilt, and sucked up a lot of the money fronted by Canon and Ross Perot to keep NeXT alive while it was largely unable to sell much of anything.

http://allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/places/fremont/place/light...

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Steve Jobs took it up publicly before he died about how the American government could make manufacturing in the US to be a more attractive option for companies like Apple.

I dont buy it.

in the good ole days even before Standard Oil, fierce competition and W-2 (and IRS/SS in that matter), the reason behind owning any business was not to get rich or satisfy the board with higher dividend, but to give people job and ability to keep their families respected.

to me its a simple math: Apple produce stuff in China saving 40% of production costs, then sells its goods in America putting 40% profit margin on it. I smell greed, regardless if people accept to be ripped of or not.

"in the good ole days even before Standard Oil, fierce competition and W-2 (and IRS/SS in that matter), the reason behind owning any business was not to get rich or satisfy the board with higher dividend, but to give people job and ability to keep their families respected."

I don't know of any such time. Which good ole days are you talking about? I think you're dreaming of a romantic past that never existed.

There are many (successful) idealistic business leaders during the industrial revolution who might have fit the description you've quoted.

Don't blindly buy in to the cult of human selfishness.

Half the people who came to America did it for money. It was the place where you didn't owe anybody anything, and nobody owed you anything either. That was the beauty of it.

> to me its a simple math: Apple produce stuff in China saving 40% of production costs, then sells its goods in America putting 40% profit margin on it. I smell greed, regardless if people accept to be ripped of or not.

So, you expect Apple to manufacture in the States, and then sell it to you without a margin (over production costs)... And how exactly are those poor Apple engineers and Apple Store Employees are supposed to make money?

If some day Apple manufactures iDevices in America, then an iPad would cost $799, or Apple would go out of business.

This is not to say I'd like Apple's partner (Foxconn) to enslave chinese workers so I could buy an iPad cheaper... I'd be happy if my iPad would be $549 (instead of $499) AND those workers were receiving more money for their hard work.

One of the reasons manufacturing costs are so high in the united states is due to labor costs. Put simply, America cannot beat the cost efficiency of Chinese production. Samsung however decided to put a plant into Austin for production of the A5 chip. (A Korean company building in Texas for a product assembled in China)

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/12/16/samsungs-new-texas-facto...

On a more cynical note, Apple's shareholders would not be happy if they could be making more profit by making it in China and selling it for $549. Another downsides to having shareholders run your company.

Maybe something like 'iPad RED'?

"I'd be happy if my iPad would be $549 (instead of $499) AND those workers were receiving more money for their hard work."

I have thought that for years.

> So, you expect Apple to manufacture in the States, and then sell it to you without a margin (over production costs)... And how exactly are those poor Apple engineers and Apple Store Employees are supposed to make money?

Apple has over $80 billion in cash. That's all left over after their employees have been paid. They could afford to manufacture their goods in a first-world country, sell their products at the same price, and still pay their employees the same rate.

Ok, change the world, buy some Apple shares, enter shareholders meeting, put up your proposal to vote. Wath your shares value drop to one third and be happy.

Bullshit is not even a big enough word for that drivel. Elephant shit, Mammuth shit...

Entrepreneurs were always in it for the money. Even if you want to help humanity, you still have to be in it for the money, because otherwise you go broke and can't help humanity anymore, either.

From what I understand of what I read of Jobs, what you posted isn't the issue. He wanted to bring the manufacturing of Apple products back to the US but there were other issues at play such as labor laws and extraneous fees that came with building and supporting manufacturing plants in the US.

I don't know the details but this is supposedly one of the issues he spoke about to Obama.

The original macintosh used to be built in Fremont too.

http://www.onedigitallife.com/2006/03/21/flickr-find-mac-fac...

As I recall, the US stupidly made that uncompetitive by enforcing anti-"dumping" duties on DRAM chips. We required that RAM sold to the US should be really expensive, to protect our (then largely hypothetical) local suppliers. So clone PCs built abroad could include cheap DRAM chips while Apple could not legally do the same.

Eventual solution? Move Mac assembly offshore to places like Cork, Ireland.

That is not correct. What happened was an earthquake in Taipei in the early 90s leveled most of the worlds RAM factories. This sent the price of RAM through the roof and took years to level off. Other IC manufacturers, sensing an opportunity, started making RAM as well. Then the factories in Taipei got back up and a price war ensued in the late 90s.

US memory makers had exited the arena long before. Now it was multinationals fighting other multinational corporations for an edge and they knew they could use the US court as their proxy.

PC manufacturing left the US because the labor was expensive not because of the price of any of the components. No matter what you heard the US still manufacturers a lot of things but: a) it's mostly automated, b) really highend specialty c) unlike the car factory, these manufacturing jobs really do require a degree.

There were many rounds of US dumping investigations involving DRAM, some of which caused the manufacturers to raise prices voluntarily and others of which actually caused duties to be implied. This process started as far back as 1985: http://www.japanlaw.info/lawletter/april86/eoq.htm

Here's an example a few years later (in 1991/92) of Apple trying to get its own memory boards excluded from such actions: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_n1935_v38/ai_...

Quote:

> 'The papers also disclosed that Apple Computer had filed a last-minute request that "a product imported by Apple containing Korean DRAMs not be considered within the scope" of the dumping ruling. Micron Technology, which initiated the dumping complaint, opposed the Apple petition'

The earthquake you're talking about happened in 1999, right?

FWIW, the Fremont Mac plant was extremely automated, well ahead of its time in that regard. The anti-dumping duties applied to memory imported alone or in circuit boards but did not apply to memory chips in finished products - that last possibly for the practical reason that nobody wants customs inspectors tearing apart VCRs to see if they can find untaxed memory chips.

Yes you are right I was confused, I thought it was the Taiwan earthquake that caused RAM prices to spike (and it did), but this was earlier. I think the previous RAM spike might have come from the Windows 95 release. A Google search on Japanese earthquakes only displays the one from last year. One chatroom mentions the '93 earthquake.

FWIW, no matter how you cut it California is still an expensive place to do business. All the automation in the world couldn't save that factory. Not for what they were making. Now it's about specialization, automation (in the short term) is still more expensive than millions of chinese factory workers.

This was discussed a bit in the Issacson book, both the NeXT factory being overdone and Jobs talking to President Obama about business in the US.

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