Apple Computers Used to Be Built in the U.S. It Was a Mess (2018)

When I started programming in the early 80s, it was on an in-house manufacturing system, so I got to know many of the managers and line workers.

* Many mid-level managers were heavy drug users, doing cocaine.

* High level managers had no clue their direct reports were addicts

* I would say about 25 to 40% of the line workers were very drunk after lunch.

* Numbers at Month/Quarter end was everything, not quality. That means as Fiscal End approached and numbers were bad, some managers would "cheat".

* This cheating would alienate our customers.

By the end of the 80s, the company was in bad shape, going chapter 11 in the early 90s.

That was my experience in a rather large company. And from talking with friends at other manufacturing companies, things were pretty much the same there too.

Now here is hardly no manufacturing taking place in my area.

I cannot speak to how things are in sat China, but I kind of doubt it is even close to what I describe above.

The way I read it, the article identifies two problems: the first being the lack of a strong manufacturing culture, and I think that was an issue that the U.S. had been developing by the 80s for sure. The other problem is simply that neither the Macintosh nor the NeXT machines really had the volume needed to make it make sense. Who knows; had they managed higher volumes, maybe the landscape of manufacturing would look different today... Maybe not.

I mean, look. I think we all get it, to some degree. Everything from the land to the labor to the materials is pricier in the U.S., for reasons. It will also continue to get pricier in China. We also know that people don't want to do menial factory work for minimum wage, and that automation isn't quite solving that problem as quickly as everyone hoped. So even if we wanted to bootstrap everything in the U.S., from raw materials to advanced electronics, it's all going to cost more and we're not going to have the labor necessary to do it at the scales needed.

I think we should absolutely work on this problem, but it's a tough one, and it seems like it only gets harder over time.

Steve invested heavily in automation for the Mac and NeXT factories. There are videos of these factories in action:

We Are Manufacturing (Apple): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk306ZkNOuc

The Machine to Build the Machines (NeXT): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSj6kvv7_Sg

Infamously, he caused a ton of issues for both factories when he demanded that the machinery be painted to colours of his liking.

> When Jobs took a tour, he ordered that the machines be repainted in the bright colors he wanted. Carter objected; this was precision equipment, and repainting the machines could cause problems. He turned out to be right. One of the most expensive machines, which got painted bright blue, ended up not working properly and was dubbed “Steve’s Folly.” Finally Carter quit. “It took so much energy to fight him, and it was usually over something so pointless that finally I had enough,” he recalled. [0]

> Jobs demanded that all the robots in the NeXT manufacturing plant be painted in coordinated shades of gray and black. 2 of his top manufacturing engineers worked through a weekend to paint the assembly line, repeating the process 4 times until they got the finish just right. [1]

Ultimately, even that significant automation investment couldn't overcome the core challenges that other commenters have pointed out. I find the culture aspect ironic. Deming was American, yet American manufacturers largely ignored him until the Japanese applied his methods and began outcompeting everyone.

[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/steve-jobs-designed-apple-factor...

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/happy-40th-birthday-apple-443330

1) Because Apple never had any volumes even remotely large enough to move the needle.

The Commodore 64 moved way more units than anything Apple ever did until the iPod and the PC dwarfed even the stuff Commodore did. Apple doesn't even move a half-million laptops in a year today. Everybody caters to Apple's low-volume stuff solely in the hope of getting access to the iPhone volumes.

China's current "supply chain expertise" is a result of massive, long-term support from the Chinese government. And I say that with envy! There is nothing in particular stopping that from being formed here in the US other than that long-term support. We have all the pieces, but nobody is going to take the risk to expand significantly beyond their current demand without guarantees from the government (and that's just smart business).

2) Because nobody in the US wants to manufacture

Everybody in the US wants to be "fabless" because that optimizes profit. The problem is that somebody has to do actual manufacturing, at some point. As we found out with Covid, "fabless" translates to "last in the queue" when things go wrong.

Nobody in the US wants to do the capital outlay and risk to do physical manufacturing. See: the current grief with Intel or the Chinese-owned steel mills in the UK. By contrast, if those were Chinese companies, the Chinese government would be pouring money into them as they would regard them as a strategic asset.

Very much so.

They invested in their electronics manufacturing (both public and private investment) and went from the laughing stock of quality to the premium quality choice.

This country could have done that, but even in the 1980s, we were on the path to no longer building things here.

People are interchanging manufacturing and quality. There was a huge quality issue in the US.

The US auto industry got hurt because the 'big three' operated like an oligopoly, with the United Auto Workers (UAW) acting as the coordinating organization (and reaping most of the 'monopoly rents'). The Japanese were able to disrupt the oligopoly because they weren't beholden to the UAW; many studies were done, and some found that the American companies' costs were simply higher than the Japanese's (due to both direct labor costs, and other costs related to their CBA), so the Japanese could either make cheaper cars, or higher quality cars for the same price as the big three.

>“We don’t have a manufacturing culture,” Mr. Gassée said of the nation’s high-technology heartland, “meaning the substrate, the schooling, the apprentices, the subcontractors.”

Silicon Valley still doesnt have any of those.