@Harlequin: I wouldn't be so sure about transportation costs: it's true that a factory in the US probably has to import lots of goods from the Far East, but if you move your factory down there you then have to ship a large part of finished products back to the US (which is still one of the largest markets in the world). Shipping finished products costs a lot more than shipping plain components, so I doubt that's a major factor.
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Blue Ink
C you
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elmer
I'm on my very last life.
Assembly-line robots - even the chinese (e.g. FoxConn) are phasing out the use of humans. You could run a robot-based line anywhere, and the cost differences won't be as dramatic as a human-based line.
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Bass
I need better writers.
Apple is such a huge company that investing in industrial automation might make some sense. Every time they use Foxxconn or the like to "contract" out their manufacturing, they piss away some of their profit..
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16 hours ago, Maddus Mattus wrote
Seems like rougly $400,- more expensive,..
You and the article's author are assuming the labour costs involved. Apple will most likely leverage its experience in manufacturing automation to keep cost down.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9234477/A_U.S._Apple_factory_may_be_robot_city
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14 hours ago, GoddersUK wrote
*snip*
That's Tim Cook's point - everything isn't made in the same area...
Yup. Quite a lot of their ancillary components are made in the US then shipped to China for assembly.
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6 hours ago, Bass wrote
Apple is such a huge company that investing in industrial automation might make some sense. Every time they use Foxxconn or the like to "contract" out their manufacturing, they piss away some of their profit..
It would make a whole lot of sense. And once they have the systems in place then I can see them handling all the manufacturing themselves. All the equipment and machinery used by Foxconn, Sharp etc. to build iGadgets is already owned by Apple (which is why they get snippy if their manufacturing partners use the machines to build laptops for competitors). So all that Apple is really paying for is the cheap labour. If the labour isn't needed…
Apple has taken a lot of flak for 'supporting slave labour'. I wonder what the petitioners will say when Apple stops 'supporting' it and puts thousands of ChInese out of work.
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I already buy some of my Schiit assembled in the US.
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Proton2
Gary G Mount
Apple, which until the late 1990s made and assembled many products in the U.S., moved manufacturing to Asia to take advantage of the region's lower labour costs.
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Apple announces that they will start assembling some of their products in the U.S. and they are suddenly declared as redefining modern manufacturing. Meanwhile HP has been producing their workstations and other products in the U.S. for decades.
http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Data-Central/HP-PCs-Manufactured-in-the-USA/ba-p/127945
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@Jim Young: And this clearly demonstrates the problem with the IT press these days: rather than focussing on the story, they focus on attracting page hits. IT journalism is pretty much dead.
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