The article doesn't go into why building the Macintosh or the NeXT machines in the USA failed. I can see the problems of bringing manufacturing back to the USA but why did it fail in the first place?
* 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.
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
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.
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.
This is insanity. When was the last time your looked for a job? People literally send hundreds of applications to companies and don't hear a peep or are automatically rejected.
Right now, the unemployment rate seems to be relatively low, despite people reporting widespread difficulty applying to jobs. Not 100% sure what this suggests. I think we can reasonably conclude the application process for software developers in particular is hopelessly broken. (Or at least, moreso than it was before.)