Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I used to say this as a joke, but with today’s crazy times: we could start having US prisoners build iPhones / Foxconn style jobs for the incarcerated. TSMC partnership with the BOP
Everyone immediately seems to jump to talking about how much an American made iPhone would cost but ignore the fact that we can’t make them here. We just don’t have the capability. We couldn’t open a single chip plant without importing half of the workers from Taiwan. How are we going to build an entire supply chain?
2 Likes
Apple has known that a China-focused supply chain has been a problem for at least 5 years, and TC has to be the best supply chain CEO in the world. Maybe fixing the China Problem will be his final great act as Apple’s CEO.
1 Like
On Jason’s de minimis example with the cheap USB tester sold direct, won’t it be charged at the point of importation rather than sale?
So that’s a sizeable chunk of work for customs and couriers to do. There must be millions of these parcels a day.
1 Like
The problem is, you can only fix it by moving to poorer countries where large numbers of people are happy to work in large factories for slave wages. Where, in America, are you going to find several hundred thousand people in one city that are willing to work for 12 hours a day in a factory doing hard labour for a pittance?
1 Like
That’s already been in progress for years. Their supply chain is arguably more diverse now than it’s ever been.
1 Like
And for the seller to do the math to determine how much to pay.
“ He said a company that previously might have had only to calculate one duty rate might now have to figure out three or more levies depending on where the goods were made, whether the items contain steel or aluminum and whether the shipment is compliant with the trade pact known as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.”
That implies that we even have that many people who have the skills to build these products. We do not.
There’s a confusion about China. And let me give you my opinion. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor costs. I’m not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago. The reason is because of the skill, the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill it is.
Like the products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with the materials we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. You know, in the U.S. you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields. It’s that vocational expertise is very deep.
Source: Trump Believes Apple Could Manufacture iPhones in the U.S. - MacRumors
1 Like
Correct, although the wages are still low, compared to an equivalently skilled worker in America.
1 Like
That’s a fact - it’s not so much the cost of labor, but the lack of a local supply chain. When I was at a factory in Taiwan or Mainland China (When I was a Technical Manager for 3 different major Companies before I was a retired gentleman drinking single malt and listening to music 
) I could have an idea, scribble up some quick drawings, write some instructions and pop over to uncle Cho’s down the block and have them whip up a quick test unit so we could play around and figure out which way to go with the idea! Can’t do that here…
1 Like