Apple is very tied to Chinese manufacturing in a way that is hard to replicate in US.
They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government, but if it goes as well as last time, they will stop as soon as they can.
In china they were often able to iterate on designs and have custom screws and other parts made and ramped up in very short times. Something about having the whole supply chain in one place and very motivated and it all fell apart when tried to move to US.
So things that took weeks became hard on anytime line.. per Apple in China book.
> Something about having the whole supply chain in one place
I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines. The companies that process the raw materials are located mostly inland, then the companies that form those raw materials into metal and plastic stock are next door, and then the companies that take that stock and make components are next door to them, and the companies that input those components and output subassemblies are next door to them, and so on all the way down to the harbor where the companies that produce finished products output directly onto the loading docks where the ships await.
The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation. How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean?
You don't need to brand efficiency and structure-at-scale as "authoritarian"; how painfully American of you. I know it's a completely foreign concept for anyone that has grown up in America, but it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing. Typically this is evidenced by tremendous social progress, which we see in evidence with the rapidly rising standard of living in China over the last few decades.
It's easier when your government is proposing "hey, let's build all the factories the best way we can" and not "hey, let's impose illogical and continually-changing tariffs on everything and let Howard Lutnick's kids steal all the proceeds". You're right as an American to be skeptical of the government - it's not operating in your best interests unless you're one of the elite insiders. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.
For all the progress, you lose me immediately with the "social credit" system. If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent.
Only need to look to the recent changes in Hong-Kong and the obviously hostile takeover of a democratic government to see how "pure" these changes really are.
As an engineer, I do think there’s some mild but noticeable correlation in bulk. But there are other categories which would be much more predictive. And most of the correlation with engineers are actually a confounder effect from things like multigenerational socioeconomic status, or religion.
If you were to control for other variables I doubt there’d be much correlation. After filtering out engineers who belong to other categories with stronger associations to authoritarianism, you’re more likely to be left with the hyper-individual-freedom types than the hyper-authoritarian types.
Except in 21st Century America, where libertarian is really just masked authoritarian. Essentially, that means “free to do whatever you want as long as it’s our way.”
That guy is so annoying his subpar analysis has become such a trope. America used to build things too. Lawyers have been part of the founding and fabric of both societies. Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.
I've only listened to one interview with Dan Wang, but I understood him to be particularly talking about the politicians, not the country as a whole.
I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.
And that was true when we built things too. So what point are you making? If only FDR was an engineer then maybe we would have ramped up production and taken on the Axis across two oceans. Like I just don't get it.
Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism and lived abroad in Iowa of all places. The world is too complicated for this type of analysis, sorry. Dan Wang does the same spiel on every podcast and it is always terrible and seems predicated on credulous hosts who know little about the history of either country and certainly not enough about both who just use his lame analysis to engage in this current fad of Western self-pity. Instead of reform and asking hard questions let's just throw soft balls at Dan Wang's cheap analysis that anyone with a Wikipedia level education would know is absurd so we can keep propping up the same impoverished China v America tropes.
Why don't we demand better honestly we should be ashamed that one guy can just come up with such a dubious thesis suddenly appear everywhere and no credible debate or pushback once. The only thing Dan Wang convinces me of is the poverty of the modern intellectual environment.
It gets repeated because we actively incentivize repeating it.
It's a popular trope that confirms the audiences bias's and when you do that the monkey brain gets rewarded by seeing the number in the top right go up.
So, there’s a decent amount of electronics manufacturing in Anhui Province which is pretty far from the well-known hub of Shenzhen. Anhui is generally more known for their mining industry.
So, to your query, maybe somewhat? But not strictly.
And, to be clear about one thing (which I believe is also raised in the book): Much of this is the direct result of Apple investing literally a quarter trillion dollars and exporting critical western IP toward developing Chinese advanced manufacturing capability (among other American technology companies). The story of startups only being able to manufacture in China is a cute tale that is true for startups. For Apple, investing in the strategic capabilities of America's geopolitical rivals was an active decision Tim Cook and other Apple leaders made.
A big change from Steve Jobs' dream of a California factory where sand and other raw materials came in one end, and finished computers went out the other --- the NeXT factory was an excellent exemplar of early automation (greatly assisted by Canon, an early investor).
A company like Apple has very little incentive to care about geopolitics, other than by current or future government laws and regulations (a government mandate, tariffs, etc). In the absence of government intervention, Apple has determined that investing a quarter trillion dollars is the cheap choice; getting the same result in the United States would probably need much much more than a quarter trillion dollars worth of investment. If the United States thought that such investments by Apple would have undesirable geopolitical implications, Congress should have acted a long time ago.
Your learned helplessness is defeatist and boring. We need not be Moloch's subjects; Apple's business priorities are not the result of some natural and unstoppable force, and their leadership is not exempt from responsibility because of your belief that it is. Someone, sometime, in a surprisingly boring room, wearing a surprisingly boring suit, made decisions like those which opened a factory in China instead of Texas.
I do not have learned helplessness. Nor have I claimed Apple’s business practices are the result of a natural force. Nothing is natural here. I said that Congress could have acted. Is Congress part of the nature now?
In contrast you have provided no arguments for why Apple’s leadership bears responsibility rather than Congress.
Dell ate Compaq’s lunch with a BTO model. It’s pretty clear Tim Cook decided to put the factories out of reach after that experience. Putting the supply chain close to major customer markets is cheapest but invites competition.
Just as manufacturing in China took time manufacturing in the US will take time. The US has lost much of its skilled labor and mom and pop parts shop. If we have any hope of re-invigorating this some large company is going to have to bite the bullet. Chicken and egg problem imo. I'll leave whether this is worth it or not up to the economists.
No, US didn't lose it, we collectively decided that whenever we buy something, the price was the most important aspect.
It's like everybody forgot that their neighbour's job depend on them.
We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys.
What you're describing literally is us losing it. We lost in the market. Price was above all for the market and we didn't adapt and lost. I agree with the point you're trying to make but we did lose it in the sense that we do not have the manufacturing capacity we once did
The college educated white collar professionals who are grossly over-represented in policy discourse?
Middle america and, the formerly industrial northeast and the former bulk industry west have been complaining about this shit policy for over a generation.
Implicitly shuttering our manufacturing and heavy industry by subjecting it to policy that we knew would make it increasingly noncompetitive at the margin and would prevent continuing investment was a macro/federal level economic policy choice that was actively pursued for approx 50yr.
Our political/ruling class wanted more of the pie for themselves, dropped the trade barriers protecting American industry, and gorged themselves on the arbitrage as manufacturing flowed to our chief geopolitcal rival, who was quite happy to accept such a generous gift.
That's true, but we also collectively decided to buy cheap stuff from Walmart instead of buying from the local town store, creating a race to the bottom.
Or did stagnant wages drive Americans to buy what they could afford instead of products that would last?
We also have many US manufacturers moving sourcing their subcomponents from overseas to save a few cents per unit, there's no way to prevent that, nobody is going to check the BOM from everything they ever buy.
I think collective behavior is a large component but it is not quite right to declare it as the primary driver.
There is no contingent in the US federal government that has a coherent plan for doing what you're talking about.
The investment in capability that is necessary to build the next generation of manufacturing capabilities in the US is simply not within the public imagination.
I don't think it's something that can be centrally planned well.
If the US changes their environmental regulations to match China, lowered their tax-to-GDP ratio to match China, changed their worker regulations to match China, and then opened up free immigration from Mexico for cheap factory labor then the "free" market would likely take care of opening up quite a bit more manufacturing.
He’s at least getting companies to pretend like they’re going to try. That’s a starting point. Before, the best you’d get out of these CEOs is “LOL those jobs are never coming back, learn to code or whatever else hasn’t been outsourced fully yet.”
His predecessor worked with Congress to actually bring microchip manufacturing back to the US and tried to keep us competitive with EV manufacturing (not to mention the infrastructure investments that are necessary for any serious manufacturing effort). Those were real commitments.
Extorting CEOs to announce investments (like the Zuckerberg hot mic incident) is not worth anything to me. Meanwhile the US has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for the last year.
No amount of time will let the U.S. - a country of 348 million people - replicate what China - a country with 1.4 billion people - a can do with manufacturing.
This isn't "working harder".
This isn't "rebuilding infrastructure".
This isn't "training people in trades".
The numbers are so cartoonishly lopsided as to be a non-starter for categorically replacing Chinese manufacturing.
600 million people live in North America. 1 billion people live in the Americas. Another billion live on the Pacific rim in non-Chinese countries.
Establishing regulatory harmony across all those countries is obviously not possible in the same way it is in a single authoritarian state, but if the US made it a priority to create a trade bloc capable of replicating China’s manufacturing capacity, it probably could.
we don't have to entirely replace Chinese manufacturing to build back American manufacturing that's a false dichotomy.To compete we'll just have to be more revolutionary than the manufacturing industry already is.
Well, once AI takes over most of the white collar jobs, people will have to do something to put food on the table, and not all of them can be gig workers. Or do you see ideas like Universal Basic Income as an alternative for the US?
That's argument is a bit rough given manufacturing is one of the areas seeing the most automation progress and success. One of the main reason it's not more successful is labor costs can be lower than automation that wouldn't be true if we wanted to replace the income of white collar workers in the US.
If we end up in a place where AI and automation take over then yeah I think we start looking at alternative income sources and economic system. Just like star trek predicted we would do after WW3.
Why is that the only way to accomplish that? We'll have to restart manufacturing while also keeping wages livable and the work the US does competitive. As I said above we'll just have to be more revolutionary than the manufacturing industry already is.
There’s no world in which large scale manufacturing is returning to the US. Not only are our labor costs dramatically higher than in east asia, but we also lack the logistics infrastructure to quickly produce components and get them to their next stage of assembly quickly. And we can’t just build that stuff because we don’t have a totalitarian government that can just bulldoze farms and houses to run a highway or railway. We also are less interested in pollution, which raises the sticker price on US manufacturing.
If we’re serious about it, we are going to have to commit ourselves to economy-tanking tariffs (like thousands of percents) for many decades until the US worker is as poor as the Vietnamese worker.
In spite of no totalitarian government and things like environmental regulations the US still is able to be one of the most innovative nations on the planet. I don't think we need those things to be able to have manufacturing in the united states. We had it at one point and we can do it again. It's not going to be easy and it's going to need some real breakthrough ideas before we can actually compete. Apple here is the first step.
Came here with a similar comment, pasting here to avoid another top-level comment tree.
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I bought a mac mini a year ago for $599. Personally, I'm pretty sure I would pay another $50 if it said "Made in the USA" on it. Maybe $80. Not sure I would pay $100.
But I worry this will prove to be like when Daimler bought Chrysler and shipped the Crossfire fully assembled except the rims, which were bolted on in the US so they could say it was "made in the USA". They only sold 76,014 and now Daimler extracted itself from Chrysler, so maintaining them has become a bespoke hobby.
Crossfire was an interesting car - looked at them for a bit, but needed a 4-door..
If I was in the apple ecosystem (I prefer PCs with Linux, Android), I would pay $100-200 more for a mac mini made in the USA if there were actual benefits, like most of the additional cost went to paying domestic labor, better parts availability, better repairability, etc.
Well, um.. Forgive me for not being in the market for a showerhead in the last few years and / or not knowing about this one company that I didn't see at Home Depot/Lowes when I did buy a couple of them?
I admit I'm probably an outlier, but in terms of durable goods, I'd pay 30-50% more for lots of things if they were "made in the USA" or "made in Canada" (any western country) and it meant something - like, better parts availability, repairability, documentation, support, etc. Not all of them, but something - AND, it was paying domestic imports / reducing imports.
I'm not living paycheck to paycheck, but I'm not wealthy.
You’re not alone. I’m a self-funded startup founder and I still buy Made in USA goods (clothes, appliances, tools, supplies, equipment, etc). For me the price isn’t the main factor, it’s simply that I want to support the countries I like. Been doing this for 10 years now. Based in London so I also buy Made in England things too. Never ever support authoritarian regimes!
The term for China's manufacturing advantage is agglomeration. The US is never going to be successful with these manufacturing initiatives until the US government gets its act together and starts rebuilding all the infrastructure that has been destroyed over the last 50 years. That requires more than just tariffs. It requires actual investment. Investment in infrastructure, people education, power, everything. It's actually why silicon valley is so successful because it is an agglomeration of the tech industry. We need the same for manufacturing if we ever expect to do it again.
They won’t just have custom screws, they will sort them by incredibly small amounts of manufacturing error and make those correspond with devices that have similar amounts of manufacturing error, so it matches(like a slightly too large screw going with a slightly too large hole).
On production lines.
Obviously this is not plan A, but their ops team is insane.
> sort them by incredibly small amounts of manufacturing error and make those correspond with devices that have similar amounts of manufacturing error
I spent a little while unsuccessfuly trying to recall the jargon or the anecdotal company-name here, but IIRC there was an early pioneer in this where a company making radios (?) tried to develop a software system that would categorize non-conforming parts so that the flaws in different pieces would cancel out.
I don't think it worked for them, at the time it was far more efficient to just spend money on improving the quality and tolerances of the parts.
it's probably a good thing to have domestic advanced manufacturing if only to have real-world testbeds for development of advanced automation technology.
it's cool and all that boston dynamics can do what they do, but i wonder if one reason why the chinese robotics industry is so advanced is because they've been able to test in production on real production lines, experiment with dark factories and learn a ton in the process.
it's kind of funny when you think about it. both the west and east are facing down the same set of potential problems that come with real automation of industries that have served as true economic dynamos for decades.
> it's probably a good thing to have domestic advanced manufacturing if only to have real-world testbeds for development of advanced automation technology.
Yes, it's a good thing to have domestic advanced manufacturing, but this probably doesn't qualify.
According to the article, it's a site where they already assemble servers for Apple's own use, and will now start assembling Mac Minis as well. Electronics assembly is, for the most part, a pretty low-value part of the supply chain.
It's not nothing, but it pales in comparison to the scientific and technological sophistication and financial value of wafer fabs and IC test and packaging facilities. (I worked at Intel's flagship fabs in Oregon, and have worked as a consultant with other semi fabs around the world.)
Good point about the supply chain; and it seems like most responses mistakenly disagree with you.
Thomas Friedman talks about this after his most recent visit to China. Where China excels is through rapid supply chain development by fierce regional competition among several (state-supported/sponsored/seeded?) competitors.
I get fatigue when everyone claims that all these Chinese businesses are state sponsored.
Do we not recognize that western governments do this too? Do we not recognize that western banks and VC firms are quasi-state institutions? Do we not see western countries continually subsidize businesses by lowering corporate tax rates and giving out cheap loans?
The US government was giving out $7500 per car to buy EVs and the US carmakers still got demolished by better Chinese products.
It’s like the western zeitgeist can’t accept that China is simply out-competing them on pure merit.
It’s not possible for China to have every business be state-subsidized and running a loss. At some point the truth is that China is getting wealthy by selling the most competitive goods. It doesn’t matter that the state “subsidizes” it because the money for the subsidy comes from selling the best and most competitive products.
China is not state-subsidized / running at a loss on materials so much (although they probably get cheaper rare earth minerals) - they're running at a loss on wages. There's no "loss" there - the state doesn't have to buy labor and sell it to the companies to put into the product at a loss - the companies simply pay less overall in terms of labor, because that's the prevailing rate.
Even if you paid 5% more for materials for an iphone but could pay 50% less for labor than China, you could probably beat China.
How does the state sponsoring come in? The state represses the people and the wages and prevents them from leaving for greener pastures in many cases, which benefits the corporations.
The US government absolutely does not do what China does in this case. But the reason for my paranthesis and question mark was that I was not sure what call it.
> It’s like the western zeitgeist can’t accept that China is simply out-competing them on pure merit.
With a 400m head start in a 1600m race. It's a whole lot easier to out-compete somebody when you know the government will backstop you even if you misstep.
Solar and battery technology were two of those areas. China absolutely dumped cheap, mostly inferior solar cells on everybody else to wipe out competing manufacturers until they caught up. And China absolutely subsidized local battery consumption until their manufacturers had critical mass and market share. Even now, the RISC-V ecosystem mostly relies on China funding students to do the grunt work of porting everything over.
This is a smart thing. We used to do stuff like this in the US. (See: VHSIC, VLSI project, Sematech, etc.)
And now, BYD appears to be, at this point, simply a superior manufacturer and it doesn't appear to be close. It absolutely grinds my gears that I have to root for BYD to come into the US and bankrupt the automotive companies to finally move their asses, but we have been here before--back in the 1970s with Japan producing better cars.
The press release says they’ve been making their own servers there successfully so it doesn’t seem like there is a reason they would stop Mini manufacturing quickly.
They did the exact same thing with Mac Pro in 2019. I notice they don't say they'll stop manufacturing the Mac Mini anywhere else. This is a political thing and will change with the political winds.
> They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government
They'll also hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony with maximum fanfare, at which they'll be sure to fawn over Donald Trump, let him ramble at length, and maybe give him some sort of shiny award.
Let's call it The Steve Jobs American Technology Greatness Prize. It'll be a blindingly flashy PVD-gold-plated 12" silicon wafer with a Mount Rushmore-style portrait of Jobs and Trump etched into it.
Mac mini is a relatively low volume product for Apple, the margin hit would not be consequential to their bottom line. I'll believe it when they start making iPhone in the US.
This is the part that blows my mind. People seem to think the US is incapable of and does no manufacturing. It is the second largest manufacturer[1], and has a capacity about 65% of what China does. Which is 350% of the next largest manufacturing country.
What they stopped manufacturing was menial and low-end product; because it's not price-effective to have 100 Americans sit on an assembly line and solder SMT components for $7-18/hr. Instead, those potential workers pivoted into service jobs and office work.
There are synergies to having the high end stuff and the low end stuff in the same place. The story of IBM developing System 360 mentions the benefit from the ladies who wound the wire core memory and the guys who designed the computer on the same campus in New York. We gave that up when we outsourced the “menial” stuff abroad.
China at this point is hard in automation, beyond anything the US has. China is well past the peak of sweatshops.
As someone in the manufacturing space in the US, the biggest issue we have in the US is that manufacturing continues to die. Any manufacturing we have left is the old guard dying off. It comes from a range of issues from companies refusing to invest in younger employees, to the cost of real estate (both buy or rent) for commercial properties being absurd..
The US manufacturing situation is much worse than you suggest, and is top heavy with low margin boring industrial stuff. Largest sector for US manufacturing is Chemicals, which includes fertilizer, petrochemicals, pesticides, and some pharma. The second largest sector is Tobacco, Food, and Beverages.
I think some more "low margin" computer and chip manufacturing would be healthy.
It is apparently economic to do so in China and apparently any other place you want to outsource it to. Does smaller and one-off productions have as high of margins as high speed automated stamping machines running 24/7? No. But that doesn't mean it isn't profitable at all.
And quite frankly, who gives a fuck if top owners and investors get maximum returns, boo hoo they got 4% return instead of 8%, that is still far better than the average working class's deal. Our entire problem is a suffering middle and lower classes that need decent work, they will still be happy even if the product they make is a bit lower margin because they are paid hourly, not paid by dividends and stock options which is where all the higher margins profits go. Average citizens pay has not correlated with increased company profits, and increased company profits isn't what makes society stable, so the investor class is going to have to suck it up and take the hit unless they want their entire house of cards to collapse.
Yes you’ve hit on the reason. Very few people understand this.
The reason we don’t invest in manufacturing is because of requirements for return on capital.
Ask yourself why GM is doing massive stock buybacks in the era of global transition to electric cars. Why aren’t they using these huge sums of cash to invest in the next generation of products and instead literally just sending the money out the door?
Helene survivor here. What's wild to me is that, regardless of the small scale of this facility, it's only a few hundred meters from a 1% flood zone: https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search
The address I found for the facility is 9101 Windmill Park Lane Hudson, TX 77064
This seems ill advised given recent events like Hurricane Harvey
Industrial buildings are typically built at dock height. Even if they don't do any grading, that would put the building well above any plausible flooding in that area.
It also turns out that for insurance purposes you are allowed to use infill to get the corner of a property that's below the high water mark above it. At least in some states.
Some of the calculus is not about if it will flood it's about if you'll lose your investment if it floods. If an underwriter is willing to cover it, you might go for it anyway.
They will build to a much higher standard than normal US residential construction, as they do with most commercial buildings. Many people do not understand the vast difference between residential construction quality and the quality that mega corps get. I personally watched Apple build their new campus in Austin (I have daily progress pictures of the construction site, I work there), everything is solid concrete. These buildings can withstand any type of hurricane.
Flooding is also something which can be mitigated: build foundations to be taller, work with the topography to avoid the path of water, and build drainage solutions. You should see the drainage field that Apple built for their campus in Austin, it's absolutely massive and can divert an incredible amount of water.
> Many people do not understand the vast difference between residential construction quality and the quality that mega corps get.
It’s not limited to mega corps. Commercial construction is built to a higher standard. Some times you can buy commercial grade hardware and materials for your house if you want.
Larger buildings are also more robust at the foundation because it needs to be so much stronger. That thick concrete is necessary, not a luxury.
Likely a combination of business-friendly policies (low tax, no employer payroll tax, etc.) and proximity to ports. Houston is the 6th [1] largest port in the USA.
Apple also managed to build a Houston factory quickly there, it was announced in Feb 2025 and was starting production by August which is pretty impressive.
I moved from TX to west coast a few years back. Property taxes down, all other taxes and expenses up; total cost of living much higher now. It's also business friendly enough to make deals on taxes as needed, I can't imagine that will be a problem. I get the hate on TX but tbh outside of the heat, it can be a pretty great place to live across many dimensions.
Isn't this something where there is clear and easy to obtain aggregate data. What is the average tax burden for someone in Wi vs Tx instead of comparing a single data point from each? I have a feeling it's going to contradict you
In the video there are Chinese characters on the clothing above the front pocket area. In a picture of her later on in the news article the Chinese writing is gone.
Has it been photoshopped out for the press release images?
Is no one else interested in the "assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S." in the pictures? Are they using nvidia GPUS? Their own silicon? Is there any data out there on what these servers are like? I don't think we've ever seen a picture of them before.
It looks like they're cramming 32 Apple Silicon SOCs into each server - they're on upright daughterboards attached to both sides of the heatsinks. That's a lotta chips.
> Why does the video show them assembling rackmount servers and not the Mac Mini?
Because the video is of the workers in that specific factory, and they’ll only start producing the Mac mini there later in the year. It’s in the title. You can’t show real video of something which hasn’t happened yet.
It's the same situation as the Hyundai battery plant in Georgia last year. The foreign experts come to the US to teach us modern manufacturing. It's more accurate to describe it as Foxconn outsourcing to the US (for tax reasons), not Apple bringing manufacturing back home.
Apple PR did what they could with the art they had available and the need to pander to a gov't administration, but weren't inspired to do it more genuinely?
It's in the post: "In Houston, workers assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S."
I'm curious what "logic board production" really means. My suspicion is it means "soldered a thing onto a motherboard" where all the individual pieces were shipped from Asia and the soldering is done by robots.
Are you suggesting Apple is engaged in a massive subterfuge where they imported Black and Hispanic actors and hung a US and Texas flag on the wall in a Chinese factory as a staged photo op? Maybe the factory is really a sound stage.
My first job was for a startup created by Henk Rogers (Tetris). He was an avid photographer (our company set out to make photo management easier) and so he had a lot of photos. In the center of the office we had a server closet and it was the first time I ever saw xserve and xserve-raid racked up in person. I believe they were 100% dedicated to storing Henk's photo collection. Really really gorgeous hardware.
Mac minis are sold out in NYC these days because everyone gets them to try out openclaw. Even if this move by Apple is unrelated to the recent demand, it certainly was timed right for the policy and market makers.
It's so funny to me that HN seems convinced that artists have a sudden renewed interest in desktop computers, when LLMs have been driving mac mini sales for more than a year
Macs have "unified memory" meaning the GPU uses the same memory as the CPU and minis can have up to 64 gigs. So its a lot faster than running on a CPU and a lot cheaper than any other GPU based rig with similar memory.
Apple is amazing at marketing to make 1990s technology sound cutting edge. I'm sure they change something for plausible deniability, as a nominalist, not even 2 of the same computers are the same.
The Mac mini has a very good value for money if you need raw performance in a small silent package. Frequently available for between $399 - $499 discounted.
A VPS that can perform like a Mac mini will likely cost the same as a Mac mini in 12 months time.
To all critics . This is something good going on in the country. It’s national interest protection .
Together with robotics push , it has a chance , and even they do small things . Today they make body , tomorrow cpu , etc it’s a good thing going on regardless of politics
US manufacturing will not take off without fully autonomous robots because Americans don't want to work 18 hour days for pay that is competitive with Asia, and labor laws make it difficult anyway.
> It doesn't say the Mini will be exclusively produced at this US facility.
What's likely to happen is Mac minis for North America will be made in Houston. Otherwise, the ones for the rest of the world will be made at the same facilities they are now.
Just like iPhones for the US are made in India; iPhones for the rest of the world are made in China.
I imagine iPhones for India are also made in India. India has a lot of programs to promote production within the country, and IIRC, Apple moved production there to take advantage of that. Given they have production in India, it makes sense to use that production for shipments to the US given better tariff rates for things produced in India vs China.
Really looking forward to seeing how this ends up, especially over the next few years. I knew about their recent Arizona TSMC chips in iPhones, but this is nice to see.
The government is slowly waking up to how important chips are and how far behind domestic sources have fallen from foreign (mostly Chinese and Taiwanese) sources. That's what the 2022 CHIPS act was about.
These things just take a lot of time, there are tremendous headwinds to fight, and the US government + US media increasingly seems unable to see through projects past the next election cycle.
What folks don't talk about, is that the reason for all the offshoring, is good old-fashioned American Greed™.
Lots of billionaires in the US, got that way, by exporting all their production to China. Because they did it, lots of lower-tier people had to do the same, or go out of business.
Since we worship billionaires, that little bit never seems to get mentioned, as it makes them look bad.
The only cure is to cost some of those billionaires money.
Didn’t know they were also pushing education so heavily, I mean it makes sense, but still great to see that they don’t expect skills and knowledge to appear out of thin air and is putting money to improving it.
I understand apple's push for US manufacturing in general but what do they mean by AI servers? I thought apple's current AI strategy is using other AI models?
Thanks! I wonder how they enforce retention of personal data if a user adds identifying data and they use a model from anthropic or wtv like others said. maybe that is the wrong question at all if they are using their own models but i thought they didn't. Apple's AI strategy on the whole sounds coherent to me but the specifics are super confusing.
They are using M workstation class chips for inference on their own blades since Google's models are meant run on TPU's it would not have been difficult to port it.
They also use Anthropic internally (code/marketing/sales) which runs their models on Cerebras so they also seem to be agnostic so runs on the same Apple hardware.
> Apple's work on a new Mac mini factory in Houston wasn't a quickly-conceived plan to appease President Donald Trump. The reality is that Apple had a plan ready to do this long before the demands started.
They're cursory gestures at best, and stark condemnations of US manufacturing capacity at worst. The Mac Mini and Mac Pro are not complex or dense electronics in the slightest. They're carrier enclosures for TSMC technology, you could probably make them in Siberia if you wanted to.
The hard part is manufacturing Apple's high-volume hardware, namely the iPhone. That is not anywhere close to being onshored, and Apple seemingly has no interest in even attempting it if Indian labor is still an option.
As Tim Cook put it: "In the US, 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..."
You have to ask yourself, why does America beg Apple to onshore in the first place? Why is Apple offshoring things that can be done in the US?
It doesn't matter how many manufacturing experts America trains anymore. We lost this race; China has globally-competitive manufacturing, and the US doesn't. Apple doesn't want to willingly pay for American labor today, and a decade of manufacturing graduates will probably only ease the blow when big corps are forced to onshore again.
Currying favor with fascists is NOT good. What has meaningfully changed for onshoring to make sense economically? Nothing. All that's happened is an executive came into power who threatens tariffs and other retaliatory action via the DOJ / DHS / FCC if you don't do what Trump says. It's embarrassing and frankly insane that our business leaders continue to stay silent, have dinners at the Whitehouse, and put out puff pieces like this.
Mark Zuckerberg made up pledged "investment" numbers on the spot at one of their dinners and was caught on hot mic admitting it. This is hilariously corrupt and will not result in a US manufacturing boom.
Calling people fascists for any reason has completely removed the real meaning of the word. Putin did the same to incentivise the war in Ukraine, and in the US, if you're not the media companies benefitting from endlessly stirring people up to a frenzy with that word, you're the LLM trained on their very narrow input texts.
Luckily it's not just "for any reason" then! There are plenty of examples, where do you want to start? I'll start with a few: Steven Miller saying they have plenary authority, Bovino claiming a city was "theirs" after rolling up with CBP/ICE goons, JD Vance saying federal officers have "absolute immunity", CBP officers showing up in force at Gavin Newsom's rally, and the pardon of Jan 6th insurrectionists.
Also you didn't answer how the economics of onshoring have changed, I guess the fascist thing really struck a nerve... I wonder why.
It's all ass-kissing and not meaningful. Trump's famous line is always "in two weeks we'll do it" so tech leaders have caught on. Just promise a bunch and say "soon"
Because it’s important to have the domestic capacity to build the most sophisticated products. Political power is downstream of manufacturing capacity. The countries that have sophisticated enough centrifuges that they can refine weapons grade plutonium derive an incredible amount of political power from that fact.
Remember that, after World War I, the U.S. had most demobilized its military. The Japanese had more aircraft carriers than the U.S. in 1941. That’s why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor—it thought it could win!
But while the U.S. was weak militarily, it had been the largest industrial producer since the late 19th century. Within a couple of years of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had built a bigger air force and navy than the rest of the world combined.
That’s why it’s better to be able to make Mac Minis in Houston. Because you can repurpose those facilities to produce electronics for warships instead of having to buy parts from countries you might be at war with.
My wild guess is that Cook cut a deal with the IRS so that they build in the US, but get tax benefits other companies don't get, so that it looks good on the administration - like the tariffs are working - and still benefits Apple.
I don't think Apple wouldn't find a cheaper place to manufacture Macs than the US. The US is literally the most expensive place to build.
That, or the Mac Minis are 100% asembled by robots, which is also a possibility.
Legally no, but in practice the president has been trying to assert the power to unilaterally levy taxes, even in spite of the supreme court ruling that you need the legislature to pass a tax. People still paid the tariffs. I would be extremely suprised if that's the only place this admin is trying to tax by fiat, and tax policy enforcemetn is far less visible than consumer tariffs.
We already know exactly what the deal is, no need to speculate. Apple got large tariff exemptions in exchange for supporting Trump's "Made in America" agenda:
No. But you have to understand that American political rhetoric only allows for things to be made either in the US or China (and occasionally Mexico). In that framework, yes the US is the most expensive place to make things.
Good but they should be named 'Mac Donald' or Trump Mini or something and it should be engraved with gold letters. And they are too small, they should be huge
They’re literally opening a new 20,000 square foot facility I Houston. So I’m not sure what your comment implies, but it takes time to build things like that.
This is to appease pumpkin potus and his merry band of idiots
Update: For the record I do hate the POTUS. He’s ruined our reputation around the world. Allowed things like USAID to die removing aid from millions leading to many deaths. He’s incompetent and very stupid which will likely get us killed either in some war or in the next pandemic. Tarrifs are a tax. Congress raises taxes. If you support his right to tax without congress then go live under a king. I’m an American. We don’t want kings. Need I go on?
And hating POTUS for what he’s doing to the country is my right as an American. We weren’t perfect. But we were at least respected. Now the world laughs at us.
He works for me. And you. And he’s doing a garbage job at his job. Why continue to give him a free pass. Would you give someone like this in your team a pass?
Here’s hoping his managers (congress) fires him (impeaches) him.
Your ability to rationalize would make you a king in a true failed state where might makes right and appeasement actually works. Stand for something or you’ll fall for anything like justifying the moron in chief.
So what? Even if you hate who the president is, it is in the best interest of everyone that the president does a good job. Wanting the president to fail and millions to suffer is scorched earth hatred, not strategy.
This President isn't doing a good job on really any level. Its not that I want anyone to fail, it's that the President today is currently in a state of failure, and those failures like enriching himself can have long term devastating effects on our society.
Now, you might disagree on whether blocking immigration from unsuccessful countries is a good thing or not. Maybe you disagree that those immigrants will bring the problems of their home countries to the U.S. But many prior Presidents have promised to do this and until Trump they have all failed.
Obama managed to deport many without the vitriol or the killing of American citizens. Are you a one issue voter? Just showing a blind eye to everything so long as no brown folks cross into this country?
According to the LA Times, that statistic is misleading: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-deportations-2014... (“A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data… On the other side of the ledger, the number of people deported at or near the border has gone up — primarily as a result of changing who gets counted in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s deportation statistics.”).
I believe that the premise of the immigration laws is correct—that exceeding certain levels of immigration harms society for various reasons that have nothing to do with protecting sunscreen sales—just as Clinton and Obama claimed to do.
Again, you can disagree with the premise. But my entire life I saw presidential candidates promise to fix this particular problem, and Trump succeeded.
Haha very telling that this is what you find laudable. Onshoring manufacturing … it’s a low margin low skill (relative) industry compared to the services and things of the modern economy. We import goods made cheaper in other countries and benefit from it in consumer surplus… that the educated here on HN can invert a tree or whatever the latest leet code garbage is being asked in interviews but never took and economics class or basic ethics is beyond me.
If you were correct, it would be trivial for Apple to reshore the manufacturing. But it’s not. Because what China has proven is that, when you outsource the “low margin low skill” stuff, everything going up the chain will follow. China used its low-margin low skill work to bootstrap the rest of the stack, and now they can make air to air missiles with range exceeding US missiles: https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/china-first-close-...
Margin is the wrong way to look at it. Law and finance are high margin work. But lawyers won’t help you win a war.
Business will continue to business. POTUS is a failed businessman many times over who only increased his wealth by whoring himself to our enemies be extorting our allies.
The M4 is from 2024, the 5800h is from 2021. You should be comparing against the M1 or M2, which was Apple's actual competitor at that performance bracket and time period.
This is not for Clawdbot, this is a re-run of the 2019 strategy where Apple promises to manufacture a low volume of high-margin PC enclosures on US soil.
They mention Mac mini! They have like 3 other desktop lines going, and they mentioned the mini!
Also: "In Houston, workers assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S."
I think there was a rush during the early Intel transition because they were dirt cheap computers you can upgrade yourself and even dual boot Windows. I feel like there was another big bump for them as a set top boxes to run XBMC or something. Might be wrong though. M1 release also saw the Mini's be a cheap entry point to seeing what Apple Silicon could do.
The first Intel Mac minis came out in the era of Front Row, Apple's attempt to turn every Mac into a media center computer. They had IR sensors and remotes. I had one hooked up to my TV, which was a big step up from the first gen AppleTV.
Plex started as a Mac-only XBMC fork during this era. There were also apps like Remote Buddy which let you control pretty much everything with the simple remote that came with the Mac. Apparently Remote Buddy still exists and works with the current gen Siri Remote.
Was it such a sin that our electronics were made in the East? Was the west truly deprived and the east really abused? It’s nearly the end of of our lifetime (+-100 years is a margin of error), so the fact for our lifetimes is that our electronics got made there.
"Sin" is the wrong framing, but outsourcing most of your capability to actually make stuff can definitely cause problems for a country.
For example, on a military level, the US is concerned about how rapidly China is catching up in naval capacity, China is building new warships far faster than the US can. And it's hard not to notice that China's overall shipbuilding capacity is more than 200x higher than America's.
The US has a lot of pride over having been "the arsenal of democracy" in WW2, and it's well known that a huge part of why the US was effective in that war was sheer mass: the US simply made much more war 'stuff' than any other combatant. But if the US was to get in a shooting war with China today, it would likely be China that would enjoy an advantage in production scale, with the US trying to make do with fewer vehicles and munitions.
Tactical error then. I suppose I was hoping someone would make the human plea that the barter was mostly a net good for our lifetimes. Our neighbors made our clothes. You suggest tactically this a problem, but I’m wondering if we managed to live peacefully and goodly this way?
While shopping I look where items are produced and by whom company. When I see an item is manufactured in Texas I put it back on the shelf and keep walking. That State is too politically corrupt for me to financially support, same with Florida.
Apple is very tied to Chinese manufacturing in a way that is hard to replicate in US.
They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government, but if it goes as well as last time, they will stop as soon as they can.
In china they were often able to iterate on designs and have custom screws and other parts made and ramped up in very short times. Something about having the whole supply chain in one place and very motivated and it all fell apart when tried to move to US.
So things that took weeks became hard on anytime line.. per Apple in China book.
> Something about having the whole supply chain in one place
I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines. The companies that process the raw materials are located mostly inland, then the companies that form those raw materials into metal and plastic stock are next door, and then the companies that take that stock and make components are next door to them, and the companies that input those components and output subassemblies are next door to them, and so on all the way down to the harbor where the companies that produce finished products output directly onto the loading docks where the ships await.
The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation. How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean?
This reminds me of a great freakonomics podcast that talked about China being run by engineers and America being run by lawyers.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-a...
Authoritarian central planning isn't an inherent trait of engineers and nor should we aspire for it to be.
You don't need to brand efficiency and structure-at-scale as "authoritarian"; how painfully American of you. I know it's a completely foreign concept for anyone that has grown up in America, but it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing. Typically this is evidenced by tremendous social progress, which we see in evidence with the rapidly rising standard of living in China over the last few decades.
It's easier when your government is proposing "hey, let's build all the factories the best way we can" and not "hey, let's impose illogical and continually-changing tariffs on everything and let Howard Lutnick's kids steal all the proceeds". You're right as an American to be skeptical of the government - it's not operating in your best interests unless you're one of the elite insiders. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.
For all the progress, you lose me immediately with the "social credit" system. If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent.
Only need to look to the recent changes in Hong-Kong and the obviously hostile takeover of a democratic government to see how "pure" these changes really are.
There are bad things in China, but there is no "social credit" system being used.
Have you met an engineer? I'd say "being an engineer" is probably the single most predictive trait for authoritarianism in my experience.
As an engineer, I do think there’s some mild but noticeable correlation in bulk. But there are other categories which would be much more predictive. And most of the correlation with engineers are actually a confounder effect from things like multigenerational socioeconomic status, or religion.
If you were to control for other variables I doubt there’d be much correlation. After filtering out engineers who belong to other categories with stronger associations to authoritarianism, you’re more likely to be left with the hyper-individual-freedom types than the hyper-authoritarian types.
Possibly, but it's just as much a predictive trait of being libertarian, which for all its faults, is extremely anti-authoritarian.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. --Lord Acton.
It's not really so much one's belief system as it is what happens when one gets power -- and that's hard to predict regardless of the ideology.
Not really. Seeing what people do when they get power is as predictable as what they do when given meth.
Except in 21st Century America, where libertarian is really just masked authoritarian. Essentially, that means “free to do whatever you want as long as it’s our way.”
China hasn't done much central planning for many decades.
That guy is so annoying his subpar analysis has become such a trope. America used to build things too. Lawyers have been part of the founding and fabric of both societies. Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.
I've only listened to one interview with Dan Wang, but I understood him to be particularly talking about the politicians, not the country as a whole.
I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.
And that was true when we built things too. So what point are you making? If only FDR was an engineer then maybe we would have ramped up production and taken on the Axis across two oceans. Like I just don't get it.
Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism and lived abroad in Iowa of all places. The world is too complicated for this type of analysis, sorry. Dan Wang does the same spiel on every podcast and it is always terrible and seems predicated on credulous hosts who know little about the history of either country and certainly not enough about both who just use his lame analysis to engage in this current fad of Western self-pity. Instead of reform and asking hard questions let's just throw soft balls at Dan Wang's cheap analysis that anyone with a Wikipedia level education would know is absurd so we can keep propping up the same impoverished China v America tropes.
Why don't we demand better honestly we should be ashamed that one guy can just come up with such a dubious thesis suddenly appear everywhere and no credible debate or pushback once. The only thing Dan Wang convinces me of is the poverty of the modern intellectual environment.
It gets repeated because we actively incentivize repeating it.
It's a popular trope that confirms the audiences bias's and when you do that the monkey brain gets rewarded by seeing the number in the top right go up.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-what-...
So, there’s a decent amount of electronics manufacturing in Anhui Province which is pretty far from the well-known hub of Shenzhen. Anhui is generally more known for their mining industry.
So, to your query, maybe somewhat? But not strictly.
In Houston there is no zoning.
And, to be clear about one thing (which I believe is also raised in the book): Much of this is the direct result of Apple investing literally a quarter trillion dollars and exporting critical western IP toward developing Chinese advanced manufacturing capability (among other American technology companies). The story of startups only being able to manufacture in China is a cute tale that is true for startups. For Apple, investing in the strategic capabilities of America's geopolitical rivals was an active decision Tim Cook and other Apple leaders made.
A big change from Steve Jobs' dream of a California factory where sand and other raw materials came in one end, and finished computers went out the other --- the NeXT factory was an excellent exemplar of early automation (greatly assisted by Canon, an early investor).
A company like Apple has very little incentive to care about geopolitics, other than by current or future government laws and regulations (a government mandate, tariffs, etc). In the absence of government intervention, Apple has determined that investing a quarter trillion dollars is the cheap choice; getting the same result in the United States would probably need much much more than a quarter trillion dollars worth of investment. If the United States thought that such investments by Apple would have undesirable geopolitical implications, Congress should have acted a long time ago.
Your learned helplessness is defeatist and boring. We need not be Moloch's subjects; Apple's business priorities are not the result of some natural and unstoppable force, and their leadership is not exempt from responsibility because of your belief that it is. Someone, sometime, in a surprisingly boring room, wearing a surprisingly boring suit, made decisions like those which opened a factory in China instead of Texas.
I do not have learned helplessness. Nor have I claimed Apple’s business practices are the result of a natural force. Nothing is natural here. I said that Congress could have acted. Is Congress part of the nature now?
In contrast you have provided no arguments for why Apple’s leadership bears responsibility rather than Congress.
Dell ate Compaq’s lunch with a BTO model. It’s pretty clear Tim Cook decided to put the factories out of reach after that experience. Putting the supply chain close to major customer markets is cheapest but invites competition.
Just as manufacturing in China took time manufacturing in the US will take time. The US has lost much of its skilled labor and mom and pop parts shop. If we have any hope of re-invigorating this some large company is going to have to bite the bullet. Chicken and egg problem imo. I'll leave whether this is worth it or not up to the economists.
No, US didn't lose it, we collectively decided that whenever we buy something, the price was the most important aspect.
It's like everybody forgot that their neighbour's job depend on them.
We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys.
What you're describing literally is us losing it. We lost in the market. Price was above all for the market and we didn't adapt and lost. I agree with the point you're trying to make but we did lose it in the sense that we do not have the manufacturing capacity we once did
Homo economicus' desire for a 'good deal' or 'a bargain' will kill us.
“Why would I hire X when I can get it for $20 a month on ChatGPT?”
Hmm, I don’t like the sound of that.
Who's we?
The college educated white collar professionals who are grossly over-represented in policy discourse?
Middle america and, the formerly industrial northeast and the former bulk industry west have been complaining about this shit policy for over a generation.
Implicitly shuttering our manufacturing and heavy industry by subjecting it to policy that we knew would make it increasingly noncompetitive at the margin and would prevent continuing investment was a macro/federal level economic policy choice that was actively pursued for approx 50yr.
Not overrepresented enough given that middle America has disproportionate per capita voting power
We collectively decided nothing.
Our political/ruling class wanted more of the pie for themselves, dropped the trade barriers protecting American industry, and gorged themselves on the arbitrage as manufacturing flowed to our chief geopolitcal rival, who was quite happy to accept such a generous gift.
That's true, but we also collectively decided to buy cheap stuff from Walmart instead of buying from the local town store, creating a race to the bottom.
Or did stagnant wages drive Americans to buy what they could afford instead of products that would last?
We also have many US manufacturers moving sourcing their subcomponents from overseas to save a few cents per unit, there's no way to prevent that, nobody is going to check the BOM from everything they ever buy.
I think collective behavior is a large component but it is not quite right to declare it as the primary driver.
It needs a careful long term approach from real leaders. Not a run-and-gun, corrupt, chaotic president throwing tariffs (taxes) up on a whim.
There is no contingent in the US federal government that has a coherent plan for doing what you're talking about.
The investment in capability that is necessary to build the next generation of manufacturing capabilities in the US is simply not within the public imagination.
I don't think it's something that can be centrally planned well.
If the US changes their environmental regulations to match China, lowered their tax-to-GDP ratio to match China, changed their worker regulations to match China, and then opened up free immigration from Mexico for cheap factory labor then the "free" market would likely take care of opening up quite a bit more manufacturing.
He’s at least getting companies to pretend like they’re going to try. That’s a starting point. Before, the best you’d get out of these CEOs is “LOL those jobs are never coming back, learn to code or whatever else hasn’t been outsourced fully yet.”
His predecessor worked with Congress to actually bring microchip manufacturing back to the US and tried to keep us competitive with EV manufacturing (not to mention the infrastructure investments that are necessary for any serious manufacturing effort). Those were real commitments.
Extorting CEOs to announce investments (like the Zuckerberg hot mic incident) is not worth anything to me. Meanwhile the US has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for the last year.
No amount of time will let the U.S. - a country of 348 million people - replicate what China - a country with 1.4 billion people - a can do with manufacturing.
This isn't "working harder".
This isn't "rebuilding infrastructure".
This isn't "training people in trades".
The numbers are so cartoonishly lopsided as to be a non-starter for categorically replacing Chinese manufacturing.
600 million people live in North America. 1 billion people live in the Americas. Another billion live on the Pacific rim in non-Chinese countries.
Establishing regulatory harmony across all those countries is obviously not possible in the same way it is in a single authoritarian state, but if the US made it a priority to create a trade bloc capable of replicating China’s manufacturing capacity, it probably could.
we don't have to entirely replace Chinese manufacturing to build back American manufacturing that's a false dichotomy.To compete we'll just have to be more revolutionary than the manufacturing industry already is.
both are pretty big numbers and I think are pretty capable to do mass manufacturing. As evidenced by many industries that US had and still has.
it could be less economical, so Apple has to innovate to be competitive on pricing - with automation, robots, etc.
Are you sure that’s actually what you want though, competing with China in skilled labor?
Well, once AI takes over most of the white collar jobs, people will have to do something to put food on the table, and not all of them can be gig workers. Or do you see ideas like Universal Basic Income as an alternative for the US?
That's argument is a bit rough given manufacturing is one of the areas seeing the most automation progress and success. One of the main reason it's not more successful is labor costs can be lower than automation that wouldn't be true if we wanted to replace the income of white collar workers in the US.
If we end up in a place where AI and automation take over then yeah I think we start looking at alternative income sources and economic system. Just like star trek predicted we would do after WW3.
Of course I do. Competition can only be good here.
You willing to work 996? I would prefer some form of work-life balance.
Why is that the only way to accomplish that? We'll have to restart manufacturing while also keeping wages livable and the work the US does competitive. As I said above we'll just have to be more revolutionary than the manufacturing industry already is.
There’s no world in which large scale manufacturing is returning to the US. Not only are our labor costs dramatically higher than in east asia, but we also lack the logistics infrastructure to quickly produce components and get them to their next stage of assembly quickly. And we can’t just build that stuff because we don’t have a totalitarian government that can just bulldoze farms and houses to run a highway or railway. We also are less interested in pollution, which raises the sticker price on US manufacturing.
If we’re serious about it, we are going to have to commit ourselves to economy-tanking tariffs (like thousands of percents) for many decades until the US worker is as poor as the Vietnamese worker.
In spite of no totalitarian government and things like environmental regulations the US still is able to be one of the most innovative nations on the planet. I don't think we need those things to be able to have manufacturing in the united states. We had it at one point and we can do it again. It's not going to be easy and it's going to need some real breakthrough ideas before we can actually compete. Apple here is the first step.
> In china they were often able to iterate on designs and have custom screws and other parts made and ramped up in very short times.
This becomes less of a problem as the product matures.
The Mac Mini is a good example of a design they likely stabilized a while ago.
even if the form factor looks similar, the production will change overtime, esp the internals
if you look at Mac Mini design, it didn't change much in many years (2011-2024 is practically the same)
https://preview.redd.it/always-loved-the-design-of-the-mac-m...
so maybe that's the reason they chose it. They just designed a new iteration in 2024, so maybe they don't expect much change for a while.
The guts on the inside changed several times during that timespan.
Came here with a similar comment, pasting here to avoid another top-level comment tree.
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I bought a mac mini a year ago for $599. Personally, I'm pretty sure I would pay another $50 if it said "Made in the USA" on it. Maybe $80. Not sure I would pay $100.
But I worry this will prove to be like when Daimler bought Chrysler and shipped the Crossfire fully assembled except the rims, which were bolted on in the US so they could say it was "made in the USA". They only sold 76,014 and now Daimler extracted itself from Chrysler, so maintaining them has become a bespoke hobby.
Crossfire was an interesting car - looked at them for a bit, but needed a 4-door..
If I was in the apple ecosystem (I prefer PCs with Linux, Android), I would pay $100-200 more for a mac mini made in the USA if there were actual benefits, like most of the additional cost went to paying domestic labor, better parts availability, better repairability, etc.
The conversion rate is actually 0%. Nobody will pay more for a USA version.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43787647
That's because his American-made competitors charge $50 less than he is charging for his Chinese-made showerhead: https://www.waterchef.com/products/waterchef-sf-7c-premium-s...
Well, um.. Forgive me for not being in the market for a showerhead in the last few years and / or not knowing about this one company that I didn't see at Home Depot/Lowes when I did buy a couple of them?
I admit I'm probably an outlier, but in terms of durable goods, I'd pay 30-50% more for lots of things if they were "made in the USA" or "made in Canada" (any western country) and it meant something - like, better parts availability, repairability, documentation, support, etc. Not all of them, but something - AND, it was paying domestic imports / reducing imports.
I'm not living paycheck to paycheck, but I'm not wealthy.
You’re not alone. I’m a self-funded startup founder and I still buy Made in USA goods (clothes, appliances, tools, supplies, equipment, etc). For me the price isn’t the main factor, it’s simply that I want to support the countries I like. Been doing this for 10 years now. Based in London so I also buy Made in England things too. Never ever support authoritarian regimes!
The term for China's manufacturing advantage is agglomeration. The US is never going to be successful with these manufacturing initiatives until the US government gets its act together and starts rebuilding all the infrastructure that has been destroyed over the last 50 years. That requires more than just tariffs. It requires actual investment. Investment in infrastructure, people education, power, everything. It's actually why silicon valley is so successful because it is an agglomeration of the tech industry. We need the same for manufacturing if we ever expect to do it again.
They won’t just have custom screws, they will sort them by incredibly small amounts of manufacturing error and make those correspond with devices that have similar amounts of manufacturing error, so it matches(like a slightly too large screw going with a slightly too large hole).
On production lines.
Obviously this is not plan A, but their ops team is insane.
> sort them by incredibly small amounts of manufacturing error and make those correspond with devices that have similar amounts of manufacturing error
I spent a little while unsuccessfuly trying to recall the jargon or the anecdotal company-name here, but IIRC there was an early pioneer in this where a company making radios (?) tried to develop a software system that would categorize non-conforming parts so that the flaws in different pieces would cancel out.
I don't think it worked for them, at the time it was far more efficient to just spend money on improving the quality and tolerances of the parts.
it's probably a good thing to have domestic advanced manufacturing if only to have real-world testbeds for development of advanced automation technology.
it's cool and all that boston dynamics can do what they do, but i wonder if one reason why the chinese robotics industry is so advanced is because they've been able to test in production on real production lines, experiment with dark factories and learn a ton in the process.
it's kind of funny when you think about it. both the west and east are facing down the same set of potential problems that come with real automation of industries that have served as true economic dynamos for decades.
> it's probably a good thing to have domestic advanced manufacturing if only to have real-world testbeds for development of advanced automation technology.
Yes, it's a good thing to have domestic advanced manufacturing, but this probably doesn't qualify.
According to the article, it's a site where they already assemble servers for Apple's own use, and will now start assembling Mac Minis as well. Electronics assembly is, for the most part, a pretty low-value part of the supply chain.
It's not nothing, but it pales in comparison to the scientific and technological sophistication and financial value of wafer fabs and IC test and packaging facilities. (I worked at Intel's flagship fabs in Oregon, and have worked as a consultant with other semi fabs around the world.)
> Apple is very tied to Chinese manufacturing
Apple (and all the other multinationals) are tied to manufacturing in nations with cheap labor.
China is far from the only nation with cheap labor.
> India now accounts for approximately 25 percent of global iPhone production, up from single digits just a few years ago.
https://manufacturing-today.com/news/apple-moves-quarter-of-...
I doubt the MacMini is a high margin product for Apple. I'd agree it's probably one of the more simpler items to build in their product line.
Yeah not high margin but rather low volume.
I think this could stick. The supply chain competence needs to get built in the USA.
Didn't work out well when Malco tried to keep Vice Grip production here in the States:
https://toolguyd.com/malco-eagle-grip-locking-pliers-final-u...
Good point about the supply chain; and it seems like most responses mistakenly disagree with you.
Thomas Friedman talks about this after his most recent visit to China. Where China excels is through rapid supply chain development by fierce regional competition among several (state-supported/sponsored/seeded?) competitors.
Jobs said so to Obama as well.
https://archive.ph/vGBjd
Link to Friedman's piece on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion/trump-tariffs-chi...
Also he talks about this on The Ezra Klein Show.
I get fatigue when everyone claims that all these Chinese businesses are state sponsored.
Do we not recognize that western governments do this too? Do we not recognize that western banks and VC firms are quasi-state institutions? Do we not see western countries continually subsidize businesses by lowering corporate tax rates and giving out cheap loans?
The US government was giving out $7500 per car to buy EVs and the US carmakers still got demolished by better Chinese products.
It’s like the western zeitgeist can’t accept that China is simply out-competing them on pure merit.
It’s not possible for China to have every business be state-subsidized and running a loss. At some point the truth is that China is getting wealthy by selling the most competitive goods. It doesn’t matter that the state “subsidizes” it because the money for the subsidy comes from selling the best and most competitive products.
China is not state-subsidized / running at a loss on materials so much (although they probably get cheaper rare earth minerals) - they're running at a loss on wages. There's no "loss" there - the state doesn't have to buy labor and sell it to the companies to put into the product at a loss - the companies simply pay less overall in terms of labor, because that's the prevailing rate.
Even if you paid 5% more for materials for an iphone but could pay 50% less for labor than China, you could probably beat China.
How does the state sponsoring come in? The state represses the people and the wages and prevents them from leaving for greener pastures in many cases, which benefits the corporations.
Sorry to cause fatigue.
The US government absolutely does not do what China does in this case. But the reason for my paranthesis and question mark was that I was not sure what call it.
> It’s like the western zeitgeist can’t accept that China is simply out-competing them on pure merit.
With a 400m head start in a 1600m race. It's a whole lot easier to out-compete somebody when you know the government will backstop you even if you misstep.
Solar and battery technology were two of those areas. China absolutely dumped cheap, mostly inferior solar cells on everybody else to wipe out competing manufacturers until they caught up. And China absolutely subsidized local battery consumption until their manufacturers had critical mass and market share. Even now, the RISC-V ecosystem mostly relies on China funding students to do the grunt work of porting everything over.
This is a smart thing. We used to do stuff like this in the US. (See: VHSIC, VLSI project, Sematech, etc.)
And now, BYD appears to be, at this point, simply a superior manufacturer and it doesn't appear to be close. It absolutely grinds my gears that I have to root for BYD to come into the US and bankrupt the automotive companies to finally move their asses, but we have been here before--back in the 1970s with Japan producing better cars.
The press release says they’ve been making their own servers there successfully so it doesn’t seem like there is a reason they would stop Mini manufacturing quickly.
They did the exact same thing with Mac Pro in 2019. I notice they don't say they'll stop manufacturing the Mac Mini anywhere else. This is a political thing and will change with the political winds.
Two different things. They do not have margin to preserve on the servers.
If I was interested in "performative local manufacturing" I'd also build my own servers, it has the least economic impact.
They are also very tied to Chinese demand with about 1/5 of their total business coming from China.
You could prototype assembly in China, then have everything ready to go, and do mass assembly elsewhere.
> They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government
They'll also hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony with maximum fanfare, at which they'll be sure to fawn over Donald Trump, let him ramble at length, and maybe give him some sort of shiny award.
Let's call it The Steve Jobs American Technology Greatness Prize. It'll be a blindingly flashy PVD-gold-plated 12" silicon wafer with a Mount Rushmore-style portrait of Jobs and Trump etched into it.
Mac mini is a relatively low volume product for Apple, the margin hit would not be consequential to their bottom line. I'll believe it when they start making iPhone in the US.
Jebus. “It’s hard to manufacture in the US.”
Yes.
That’s what rebuilding capability looks like.
China built dense supply chains over decades. Of course iteration was faster.
Hard isn’t a reason not to do it.
It’s what happens when you’ve optimized for margin and optics and performance instead of resilience.
No, it's local manufacturing theater.
The US does a lot of manufacturing, second only to China, but not low margin stuff that isn't economic.
Trying to "bring back" that sort of thing is idiotic and is entirely performative and induced by the current incompetent administration.
China is a genuine threat but the right solution is to move it to other friendlier countries instead of losing money trying to do it in the US.
Stupid is a reason not to do it.
This is the part that blows my mind. People seem to think the US is incapable of and does no manufacturing. It is the second largest manufacturer[1], and has a capacity about 65% of what China does. Which is 350% of the next largest manufacturing country.
What they stopped manufacturing was menial and low-end product; because it's not price-effective to have 100 Americans sit on an assembly line and solder SMT components for $7-18/hr. Instead, those potential workers pivoted into service jobs and office work.
1 - https://www.safeguardglobal.com/resources/blog/top-10-manufa...
> What they stopped manufacturing was menial and low-end product
This statement is as inaccurate as the comment you’re trying to debunk. The fact is that China leveraged it’s low-end manufacturing work to work its way up the chain and now is the leader in many areas: https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outper.... E.g. China has been investing heavily in radar technology and as a result has air to air missiles with comparable range to the U.S. https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/why_the_us_is_alar...
There are synergies to having the high end stuff and the low end stuff in the same place. The story of IBM developing System 360 mentions the benefit from the ladies who wound the wire core memory and the guys who designed the computer on the same campus in New York. We gave that up when we outsourced the “menial” stuff abroad.
Fair, but there is tons of HIGH END manufacturing we could do that we just don't, even though there is every incentive to do so.
That’s just not the reason though.
The reason we can’t do manufacturing is because Wall Street demands capital light business models.
That, in turn, is an outcome of being the global reserve currency.
The reason we can’t do manufacturing is because Wall Street demands capital light business models.
Not at the (AI) moment.
Yes/no.
China at this point is hard in automation, beyond anything the US has. China is well past the peak of sweatshops.
As someone in the manufacturing space in the US, the biggest issue we have in the US is that manufacturing continues to die. Any manufacturing we have left is the old guard dying off. It comes from a range of issues from companies refusing to invest in younger employees, to the cost of real estate (both buy or rent) for commercial properties being absurd..
The US manufacturing situation is much worse than you suggest, and is top heavy with low margin boring industrial stuff. Largest sector for US manufacturing is Chemicals, which includes fertilizer, petrochemicals, pesticides, and some pharma. The second largest sector is Tobacco, Food, and Beverages.
I think some more "low margin" computer and chip manufacturing would be healthy.
It is apparently economic to do so in China and apparently any other place you want to outsource it to. Does smaller and one-off productions have as high of margins as high speed automated stamping machines running 24/7? No. But that doesn't mean it isn't profitable at all.
And quite frankly, who gives a fuck if top owners and investors get maximum returns, boo hoo they got 4% return instead of 8%, that is still far better than the average working class's deal. Our entire problem is a suffering middle and lower classes that need decent work, they will still be happy even if the product they make is a bit lower margin because they are paid hourly, not paid by dividends and stock options which is where all the higher margins profits go. Average citizens pay has not correlated with increased company profits, and increased company profits isn't what makes society stable, so the investor class is going to have to suck it up and take the hit unless they want their entire house of cards to collapse.
Yes you’ve hit on the reason. Very few people understand this.
The reason we don’t invest in manufacturing is because of requirements for return on capital.
Ask yourself why GM is doing massive stock buybacks in the era of global transition to electric cars. Why aren’t they using these huge sums of cash to invest in the next generation of products and instead literally just sending the money out the door?
Helene survivor here. What's wild to me is that, regardless of the small scale of this facility, it's only a few hundred meters from a 1% flood zone: https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search
The address I found for the facility is 9101 Windmill Park Lane Hudson, TX 77064
This seems ill advised given recent events like Hurricane Harvey
Industrial buildings are typically built at dock height. Even if they don't do any grading, that would put the building well above any plausible flooding in that area.
It also turns out that for insurance purposes you are allowed to use infill to get the corner of a property that's below the high water mark above it. At least in some states.
Some of the calculus is not about if it will flood it's about if you'll lose your investment if it floods. If an underwriter is willing to cover it, you might go for it anyway.
When it floods, they can hold their hands up and say "well we tried".. then get back to business as usual in China
Ask any AI, they say Apple has the best marketing of any company in history.
All this tracks. Anyone else getting bombarded with WSJ youtube videos about Apple manufacturing?
They will build to a much higher standard than normal US residential construction, as they do with most commercial buildings. Many people do not understand the vast difference between residential construction quality and the quality that mega corps get. I personally watched Apple build their new campus in Austin (I have daily progress pictures of the construction site, I work there), everything is solid concrete. These buildings can withstand any type of hurricane.
Flooding is also something which can be mitigated: build foundations to be taller, work with the topography to avoid the path of water, and build drainage solutions. You should see the drainage field that Apple built for their campus in Austin, it's absolutely massive and can divert an incredible amount of water.
> Many people do not understand the vast difference between residential construction quality and the quality that mega corps get.
It’s not limited to mega corps. Commercial construction is built to a higher standard. Some times you can buy commercial grade hardware and materials for your house if you want.
Larger buildings are also more robust at the foundation because it needs to be so much stronger. That thick concrete is necessary, not a luxury.
Weirdly the first thing I thought was "Why Texas"?
Likely a combination of business-friendly policies (low tax, no employer payroll tax, etc.) and proximity to ports. Houston is the 6th [1] largest port in the USA.
[1] https://pangea-network.com/busiest-and-biggest-ports-in-the-...
Apple also managed to build a Houston factory quickly there, it was announced in Feb 2025 and was starting production by August which is pretty impressive.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/economy/article/ap...
I agree with you on all of these except: low tax
I grew up in DFW.
My house in WI is assessed at a significantly higher value than my siblings house in Ft Worth.
My 2025 property tax bill ~$5k, my 2025 state income tax - not gonna publish it here but not all that significant.
Sibling in Texas property tax bill: ~$14k. Significantly higher than my state income tax + property tax.
Also, I don't have to live in Texas.
I moved from TX to west coast a few years back. Property taxes down, all other taxes and expenses up; total cost of living much higher now. It's also business friendly enough to make deals on taxes as needed, I can't imagine that will be a problem. I get the hate on TX but tbh outside of the heat, it can be a pretty great place to live across many dimensions.
Isn't this something where there is clear and easy to obtain aggregate data. What is the average tax burden for someone in Wi vs Tx instead of comparing a single data point from each? I have a feeling it's going to contradict you
Given that this is being done in large part to appease Trump the fact that it's a red state surely has something to do with it too.
That's a good sign it's not a serious long-term effort. Onshoring cosplay?
The American flag hung on a wall they didn't even bother to paint is a good sign it's not a serious long-term effort.
Steve Jobs would have fired someone over that obvious broken window situation, and he'd have been (mostly) right to do so.
The woman in the pink smock-like clothing:
In the video there are Chinese characters on the clothing above the front pocket area. In a picture of her later on in the news article the Chinese writing is gone.
Has it been photoshopped out for the press release images?
It says 富士康科技, Foxconn Tech
I noticed the same thing. I'm assuming they forgot to photoshop out the chinese characters.
Is no one else interested in the "assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S." in the pictures? Are they using nvidia GPUS? Their own silicon? Is there any data out there on what these servers are like? I don't think we've ever seen a picture of them before.
WSJ published a video yesterday with the first pictures of those servers: https://twitter.com/yiningkarlli/status/2026176857541075274
It looks like they're cramming 32 Apple Silicon SOCs into each server - they're on upright daughterboards attached to both sides of the heatsinks. That's a lotta chips.
man what I would give for one of those servers
I believe it is the nodes for their private compute cloud for inference. They have described these in the past. It's all Apple chips.
Gotta love PR embracing the many definitions of "made in"
Surely, someone high up asked, "What is the least amount of work we have to do in order to not pay tariffs?"
and everythign ended in "this is the way!"
Why does the video show them assembling rackmount servers and not the Mac Mini?
Is that assembly really in the US? Asking because the woman in the first shot appeared to have Chinese letters on the left side of her uniform.
> Why does the video show them assembling rackmount servers and not the Mac Mini?
Because the video is of the workers in that specific factory, and they’ll only start producing the Mac mini there later in the year. It’s in the title. You can’t show real video of something which hasn’t happened yet.
> You can’t show real video of something which hasn’t happened yet.
I have seen exactly that, thanks to AI...
You have not. If it was generated by AI, it was not real video. AI was the reason I added the word in there.
They're assembling linux boxes that run their cloud.
> You can’t show real video of something which hasn’t happened yet.
We're going to have to teach our children this concept about discerning the AI slop their grandparents flood Facebook with :')
I assume Foxconn, etc., have a lot of Chinese and Taiwanese workers on site to help bootup the facilities. But Apple's Houston facility is a real place: https://www.google.com/maps/place/8702+Fairbanks+North+Houst...
Foxconn bought it last year: https://communityimpact.com/houston/cy-fair-jersey-village/d...
It's the same situation as the Hyundai battery plant in Georgia last year. The foreign experts come to the US to teach us modern manufacturing. It's more accurate to describe it as Foxconn outsourcing to the US (for tax reasons), not Apple bringing manufacturing back home.
That's... amusing.
Interestingly, these exact letters appear to have been removed in the photo after the first two paragraphs: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2026/02/apple-accelera...
EDIT: a screenshot from the video: https://imgur.com/a/X3t4crC
Apple PR did what they could with the art they had available and the need to pander to a gov't administration, but weren't inspired to do it more genuinely?
"Think Different" -> "Think Indifferent"
Well, they’re dealing with an administration indifferent to thinking. Everything is emotional.
Crazy propaganda!
It's in the post: "In Houston, workers assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S."
I'm curious what "logic board production" really means. My suspicion is it means "soldered a thing onto a motherboard" where all the individual pieces were shipped from Asia and the soldering is done by robots.
How would you take a video of something that has yet to happen?
Ask AI.
They only have Siri.
Same difference?
Oh, if only that were true...and that's the joke.
Are you suggesting Apple is engaged in a massive subterfuge where they imported Black and Hispanic actors and hung a US and Texas flag on the wall in a Chinese factory as a staged photo op? Maybe the factory is really a sound stage.
My guess would be that they're building Apple internal hardware as a precursor? So that Apple can be the test customer?
> “We began shipping advanced AI servers from Houston ahead of schedule, and we’re excited to accelerate that work even further.”
Mac Mini's have had a following for a long time.
Increasing for sure with different uses and possibilities.
In the second paragraph it says they’re producing advanced AI servers.
For anyone who liked Apple's Xserve lineup, it's very cool to get a peek at these rackmount Apple "advanced AI servers"
I'm excited for these to fall into collectors hands in a decade or two.
My first job was for a startup created by Henk Rogers (Tetris). He was an avid photographer (our company set out to make photo management easier) and so he had a lot of photos. In the center of the office we had a server closet and it was the first time I ever saw xserve and xserve-raid racked up in person. I believe they were 100% dedicated to storing Henk's photo collection. Really really gorgeous hardware.
Mac minis are sold out in NYC these days because everyone gets them to try out openclaw. Even if this move by Apple is unrelated to the recent demand, it certainly was timed right for the policy and market makers.
It's so funny to me that HN seems convinced that artists have a sudden renewed interest in desktop computers, when LLMs have been driving mac mini sales for more than a year
why were mac minis so popular for this compared to any other machine, cloud VPS or local VM?
Macs have "unified memory" meaning the GPU uses the same memory as the CPU and minis can have up to 64 gigs. So its a lot faster than running on a CPU and a lot cheaper than any other GPU based rig with similar memory.
Most openclaw users are not running the models locally.
This is what I thought. The iMessage integration makes sense I guess though.
It allows your Claw to access all your iCloud data easily like reminders and iMessage for example
Mac’s are still pretty terrible at running LLMs. They will be there someday, but that isn’t today
Unified Memory and Integrated GPU.
Apple is amazing at marketing to make 1990s technology sound cutting edge. I'm sure they change something for plausible deniability, as a nominalist, not even 2 of the same computers are the same.
Because these people have Apple IDs, and they need a machine that can access their various accounts.
The Mac mini has a very good value for money if you need raw performance in a small silent package. Frequently available for between $399 - $499 discounted.
A VPS that can perform like a Mac mini will likely cost the same as a Mac mini in 12 months time.
Openclaw is running via api. The reason people are bying separate machines is for security isolation and 24/7 power — performance is irrelevant.
so you can use the full operating system
More importantly iMessage
And get hacked via prompt injection
That’s why people buy separate machines / use VPS.
In classic Apple fashion, they fooled people into thinking an integrated GPU is the same as Nvidia.
Gosh I wish I could hire their marketing company.
Where did they say this?
The wild part is that these are awful and not usable.
Both my fortune 20 company and my buddy got these for LLMs... and the champion/my buddy had the look of shame when it wasnt usable.
To all critics . This is something good going on in the country. It’s national interest protection .
Together with robotics push , it has a chance , and even they do small things . Today they make body , tomorrow cpu , etc it’s a good thing going on regardless of politics
US manufacturing will not take off without fully autonomous robots because Americans don't want to work 18 hour days for pay that is competitive with Asia, and labor laws make it difficult anyway.
It doesn't say the Mini will be exclusively produced at this US facility. I wonder in say 2 years what % will be "produced" in the US? 1%? 0.1%?
> It doesn't say the Mini will be exclusively produced at this US facility.
What's likely to happen is Mac minis for North America will be made in Houston. Otherwise, the ones for the rest of the world will be made at the same facilities they are now.
Just like iPhones for the US are made in India; iPhones for the rest of the world are made in China.
I imagine iPhones for India are also made in India. India has a lot of programs to promote production within the country, and IIRC, Apple moved production there to take advantage of that. Given they have production in India, it makes sense to use that production for shipments to the US given better tariff rates for things produced in India vs China.
They’ll make a gold one there every year as tribute to Trump
Really looking forward to seeing how this ends up, especially over the next few years. I knew about their recent Arizona TSMC chips in iPhones, but this is nice to see.
Next, are European made Apple devices?
Right when it gets off the boat from India, they will have contractors and H-1B visa workers snap the pieces together and now its Made in America.
Others need to follow. It's strange that we don't view the manufacturing of advanced electronics as a matter of national security.
The government is slowly waking up to how important chips are and how far behind domestic sources have fallen from foreign (mostly Chinese and Taiwanese) sources. That's what the 2022 CHIPS act was about.
These things just take a lot of time, there are tremendous headwinds to fight, and the US government + US media increasingly seems unable to see through projects past the next election cycle.
What folks don't talk about, is that the reason for all the offshoring, is good old-fashioned American Greed™.
Lots of billionaires in the US, got that way, by exporting all their production to China. Because they did it, lots of lower-tier people had to do the same, or go out of business.
Since we worship billionaires, that little bit never seems to get mentioned, as it makes them look bad.
The only cure is to cost some of those billionaires money.
Ain't gonna happen.
> The only cure is to cost some of those billionaires money.
But that was the entire point of the Trump tariffs? Or am I missing something here?
This feels like tariff evasion tactics, I am not against it tho, I think apple is handling it well.
Has anyone seen this documentary? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Factory
Very interesting documentary. It really highlights the clash of cultures.
Very happy to see this!
Didn’t know they were also pushing education so heavily, I mean it makes sense, but still great to see that they don’t expect skills and knowledge to appear out of thin air and is putting money to improving it.
I understand apple's push for US manufacturing in general but what do they mean by AI servers? I thought apple's current AI strategy is using other AI models?
Private Cloud Compute uses their own hardware: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
Thanks! I wonder how they enforce retention of personal data if a user adds identifying data and they use a model from anthropic or wtv like others said. maybe that is the wrong question at all if they are using their own models but i thought they didn't. Apple's AI strategy on the whole sounds coherent to me but the specifics are super confusing.
I believe they're choosing to run Google models on their hardware.
They are using M workstation class chips for inference on their own blades since Google's models are meant run on TPU's it would not have been difficult to port it.
They also use Anthropic internally (code/marketing/sales) which runs their models on Cerebras so they also seem to be agnostic so runs on the same Apple hardware.
Wasn't going to buy one before, not going to buy one now.
In addition to Mac Mini, hoping more Mac Studios are able to be built including more regular updates.
Either of these devices (per watt of computing power) could become a home appliance pretty easily.
They've been teasing domestic production for over a decade. I'll believe it when I see it.
"made" == "assembled"
Love my Mac Minis..great computers to connect to a TV for a full Internet experience on your TV.
Now with OpenClaw pre-installed!
What's the over-under for Trump mentioning this in the State Of The Union speech tonight? The timing of this release can't be a coincidence.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/02/24/apples-us-mac-min...
> Apple's work on a new Mac mini factory in Houston wasn't a quickly-conceived plan to appease President Donald Trump. The reality is that Apple had a plan ready to do this long before the demands started.
[flagged]
Those sound like good things. I'm not sure why your second paragraph sounds like the opposite.
They're cursory gestures at best, and stark condemnations of US manufacturing capacity at worst. The Mac Mini and Mac Pro are not complex or dense electronics in the slightest. They're carrier enclosures for TSMC technology, you could probably make them in Siberia if you wanted to.
The hard part is manufacturing Apple's high-volume hardware, namely the iPhone. That is not anywhere close to being onshored, and Apple seemingly has no interest in even attempting it if Indian labor is still an option.
As Tim Cook put it: "In the US, 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..."
So Tim said it's not yet practical so they aren't doing it? And instead of moving what they can?
The article mentions they are opening a manufacturing academy to train a future generation of Americans to build manufacturing capability.
You have to ask yourself, why does America beg Apple to onshore in the first place? Why is Apple offshoring things that can be done in the US?
It doesn't matter how many manufacturing experts America trains anymore. We lost this race; China has globally-competitive manufacturing, and the US doesn't. Apple doesn't want to willingly pay for American labor today, and a decade of manufacturing graduates will probably only ease the blow when big corps are forced to onshore again.
Currying favor with fascists is NOT good. What has meaningfully changed for onshoring to make sense economically? Nothing. All that's happened is an executive came into power who threatens tariffs and other retaliatory action via the DOJ / DHS / FCC if you don't do what Trump says. It's embarrassing and frankly insane that our business leaders continue to stay silent, have dinners at the Whitehouse, and put out puff pieces like this.
Mark Zuckerberg made up pledged "investment" numbers on the spot at one of their dinners and was caught on hot mic admitting it. This is hilariously corrupt and will not result in a US manufacturing boom.
Calling people fascists for any reason has completely removed the real meaning of the word. Putin did the same to incentivise the war in Ukraine, and in the US, if you're not the media companies benefitting from endlessly stirring people up to a frenzy with that word, you're the LLM trained on their very narrow input texts.
> Calling people fascists for any reason
Luckily it's not just "for any reason" then! There are plenty of examples, where do you want to start? I'll start with a few: Steven Miller saying they have plenary authority, Bovino claiming a city was "theirs" after rolling up with CBP/ICE goons, JD Vance saying federal officers have "absolute immunity", CBP officers showing up in force at Gavin Newsom's rally, and the pardon of Jan 6th insurrectionists.
Also you didn't answer how the economics of onshoring have changed, I guess the fascist thing really struck a nerve... I wonder why.
Your point being?
It's all ass-kissing and not meaningful. Trump's famous line is always "in two weeks we'll do it" so tech leaders have caught on. Just promise a bunch and say "soon"
You are full of hatred. Try to see the world without the political glasses. Sun glasses at night are douchy.
Please enlighten us about your hatred and political (sun) glasses free vision
Yes I hate fascists, thanks for noticing. Perhaps you need to take off the blinders.
Let’s say you’re right and Apple is only doing this because of Trump.
Then Trump did a good thing. You’re inadvertently praising Trump in your attempt to slander Tim Cook.
Better than nothing- assemble things made in asian countries in usa, just a step above boxing
Why is that better?
Because it’s important to have the domestic capacity to build the most sophisticated products. Political power is downstream of manufacturing capacity. The countries that have sophisticated enough centrifuges that they can refine weapons grade plutonium derive an incredible amount of political power from that fact.
Remember that, after World War I, the U.S. had most demobilized its military. The Japanese had more aircraft carriers than the U.S. in 1941. That’s why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor—it thought it could win!
But while the U.S. was weak militarily, it had been the largest industrial producer since the late 19th century. Within a couple of years of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had built a bigger air force and navy than the rest of the world combined.
That’s why it’s better to be able to make Mac Minis in Houston. Because you can repurpose those facilities to produce electronics for warships instead of having to buy parts from countries you might be at war with.
My wild guess is that Cook cut a deal with the IRS so that they build in the US, but get tax benefits other companies don't get, so that it looks good on the administration - like the tariffs are working - and still benefits Apple.
I don't think Apple wouldn't find a cheaper place to manufacture Macs than the US. The US is literally the most expensive place to build.
That, or the Mac Minis are 100% asembled by robots, which is also a possibility.
Can one "cut a deal" with the IRS without it ending up in legislation (i.e. tax law)?
Not without a big beautiful bribe [1] I assume
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
Yeah, not denying the bribing. But that doesn't change tax law. It still needsto be passed by congress. Does it affect enforcement, though? maybe
So much of what this admin has done "needed" to be approved by congress. They're complicit in the overreach of power
Legally no, but in practice the president has been trying to assert the power to unilaterally levy taxes, even in spite of the supreme court ruling that you need the legislature to pass a tax. People still paid the tariffs. I would be extremely suprised if that's the only place this admin is trying to tax by fiat, and tax policy enforcemetn is far less visible than consumer tariffs.
We already know exactly what the deal is, no need to speculate. Apple got large tariff exemptions in exchange for supporting Trump's "Made in America" agenda:
> https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-invest-american-manufacturing...
> https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/08/06/apple-exempt-from...
Isn't that the whole point of the tariff? To incentivize US investment?
Non political genuine question, is building in the USA more expensive than let’s say Germany?
No. But you have to understand that American political rhetoric only allows for things to be made either in the US or China (and occasionally Mexico). In that framework, yes the US is the most expensive place to make things.
by IRS you mean Mar a Largo?
Good but they should be named 'Mac Donald' or Trump Mini or something and it should be engraved with gold letters. And they are too small, they should be huge
i_dont_believe_you.gif
They have been saying this since almost a decade.
Apple will spend more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years — https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more...
Apple Manufacturing Academy opens in Detroit on August 19 — https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/07/apple-manufacturing-a...
Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud — https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
They’re literally opening a new 20,000 square foot facility I Houston. So I’m not sure what your comment implies, but it takes time to build things like that.
i guess he's wondering if they finally managed to secure a domestic screw producer or they're if importing them from China?
Houston is a net exporter of screw [0]. But in seriousness, Houston has domestic production of fasteners etc for oil and gas as well as NASA.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Screw
Sure, they pledged 100B under Biden and 200 under trump..to produce a bunch of Mac minis.
Did you read the Press Release?
They have made some machines in the us, like the Mac Pro
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/09/apples-new-mac-pro-to...
Apple ramping up Mac mini production in Houston to meet demand for Clawbots is wild. When were Mac minis a hot commodity before three weeks ago?
> to meet demand for Clawbots is wild
This is not in response to OpenClaw. It takes a long time to plan a new manufacturing facility.
The Mac Mini is a natural place to start training at a new facility because it's their simplest product.
Mac Minis are also around 1% of Apple's device sales. Even with an OpenClaw-inspired burst of sales, it's still a small part of their volume.
> Mac Minis are also around 1% of Apple's device sales.
Apple doesn't break out the Mac sales by product, but the latest estimates is it's 5% [1] of total Mac sales.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/23/mac-mini-us-manufacturi...
> Apple doesn't break out the Mac sales by product, but the latest estimates is it's 5% [1] of total Mac sales
Right, but it's closer to 1% of total device sales like I said in my comment.
Macs are only part of their device lineup, of course.
This is to appease pumpkin potus and his merry band of idiots
Update: For the record I do hate the POTUS. He’s ruined our reputation around the world. Allowed things like USAID to die removing aid from millions leading to many deaths. He’s incompetent and very stupid which will likely get us killed either in some war or in the next pandemic. Tarrifs are a tax. Congress raises taxes. If you support his right to tax without congress then go live under a king. I’m an American. We don’t want kings. Need I go on?
And hating POTUS for what he’s doing to the country is my right as an American. We weren’t perfect. But we were at least respected. Now the world laughs at us.
He works for me. And you. And he’s doing a garbage job at his job. Why continue to give him a free pass. Would you give someone like this in your team a pass?
Here’s hoping his managers (congress) fires him (impeaches) him.
The same thing could be said after polishing with AI and it will be a fact
As stated, it is offensive
You need to do appeasement as needed. Business is business.
Your ability to rationalize would make you a king in a true failed state where might makes right and appeasement actually works. Stand for something or you’ll fall for anything like justifying the moron in chief.
So what? Even if you hate who the president is, it is in the best interest of everyone that the president does a good job. Wanting the president to fail and millions to suffer is scorched earth hatred, not strategy.
This President isn't doing a good job on really any level. Its not that I want anyone to fail, it's that the President today is currently in a state of failure, and those failures like enriching himself can have long term devastating effects on our society.
He’s done a great job on immigration. Migrant border crossings are at the lowest level in 50 years: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/02/02/migrant-e.... And we had the first year of net negative outmigration in decades.
Now, you might disagree on whether blocking immigration from unsuccessful countries is a good thing or not. Maybe you disagree that those immigrants will bring the problems of their home countries to the U.S. But many prior Presidents have promised to do this and until Trump they have all failed.
How many American Citizens have to be murdered and how many human rights have to be violated before it is a bad job?
At least as many as the war on terror, which Obama prosecuted vigorously.
Obama managed to deport many without the vitriol or the killing of American citizens. Are you a one issue voter? Just showing a blind eye to everything so long as no brown folks cross into this country?
According to the LA Times, that statistic is misleading: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-deportations-2014... (“A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data… On the other side of the ledger, the number of people deported at or near the border has gone up — primarily as a result of changing who gets counted in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s deportation statistics.”).
I believe that the premise of the immigration laws is correct—that exceeding certain levels of immigration harms society for various reasons that have nothing to do with protecting sunscreen sales—just as Clinton and Obama claimed to do.
Again, you can disagree with the premise. But my entire life I saw presidential candidates promise to fix this particular problem, and Trump succeeded.
Even if you hate the orange guy, there's something to be said for his approach of using threats to achieve results instead of carrots like tax breaks.
Haha very telling that this is what you find laudable. Onshoring manufacturing … it’s a low margin low skill (relative) industry compared to the services and things of the modern economy. We import goods made cheaper in other countries and benefit from it in consumer surplus… that the educated here on HN can invert a tree or whatever the latest leet code garbage is being asked in interviews but never took and economics class or basic ethics is beyond me.
If you were correct, it would be trivial for Apple to reshore the manufacturing. But it’s not. Because what China has proven is that, when you outsource the “low margin low skill” stuff, everything going up the chain will follow. China used its low-margin low skill work to bootstrap the rest of the stack, and now they can make air to air missiles with range exceeding US missiles: https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/china-first-close-...
Margin is the wrong way to look at it. Law and finance are high margin work. But lawyers won’t help you win a war.
Business will continue to business. POTUS is a failed businessman many times over who only increased his wealth by whoring himself to our enemies be extorting our allies.
I’m on the right side of history. Are you?
They're definitely more popular right now, but they've been a winner since M1.
Great performance, quiet, efficient.
It would be tough to get a windows machine at that price that gets anywhere close on performance, especially if you consider the cost of electricity.
Great parent/grandparent machines, home servers.
> It would be tough to get a windows machine at that price that gets anywhere close on performance
Not that tough. I paid $299 for a Ryzen 5800h mini PC last year, which roughly lands in the same performance bracket.
Would have considered the Mac Mini, but the AMD box has much better Linux support.
> a Ryzen 5800h mini PC last year, which roughly lands in the same performance bracket [as a Mac mini].
Not really. And this is before the M5 Mac mini which ships later this year.
Putting it together in desktop‑mini form factors:
- Raw CPU: M4 is much faster single‑core, generally faster multi‑core at lower power.
- GPU: M4’s iGPU is roughly 2×+ Vega 8 and more modern.
- Memory subsystem: M4 has far higher bandwidth and unified memory, ideal for integrated GPU and many modern workloads.
- Efficiency/noise: M4 wins by a large margin; much higher perf per watt.
- Compatibility: 5800H wins if you need bare‑metal x86 OSes like FreeBSD or specific x86‑only software stacks.
- 5800H: 35–54 W configurable TDP in laptops; mini‑PC implementations often run it fairly hot to maintain clocks.
- M4 in Mac mini: ~24 W base TDP, ~40 W boost, but getting clearly higher performance per watt.
Let's assume the 5800H consumed 50W and the mini consumed 0W and both ran 100% utilization all year at $0.20/kWh.
The mini would save $87/year. That's a 3.5y breakeven assuming no reinvestment.
The M4 is from 2024, the 5800h is from 2021. You should be comparing against the M1 or M2, which was Apple's actual competitor at that performance bracket and time period.
Even if the mini is more power efficient at $600 base, saving $300 upfront pushes out the breakeven point.
This is not for Clawdbot, this is a re-run of the 2019 strategy where Apple promises to manufacture a low volume of high-margin PC enclosures on US soil.
They mention Mac mini! They have like 3 other desktop lines going, and they mentioned the mini!
Also: "In Houston, workers assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S."
Advanced AI servers!
> They mention Mac mini! They have like 3 other desktop lines going, and they mentioned the mini!
Mac Mini is their simplest product. It's the natural place to start training at a new facility.
> Advanced AI servers!
Yes, they have their own AI servers.
Do they now? I assume they use them internally for something like Private Cloud Compute?
> Mac Mini is their simplest product.
How can it be simpler than the Apple TV?
Everyone else (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc) has boring plain AI servers.
Apple invented Advanced AI Servers! So much more advanced!
Just like in the 2000s when the G4 Mac was a "supercomputer".
>With its next-level AI capabilities, it has become an essential tool for everyone from students and aspiring creatives to small business owners.
Seems to me this part of the PR release is a reference to claudbot/openclaw. What else could it be referring to?
Apple has been taking about Apple Silicon's AI capabilities for the past few years, particularly around Apple Intelligence.
How about Apple Intelligence having been in almost every press release from the last year?
If you genuinely can't find out what they are referring to, you've been on HN too long.
I think there was a rush during the early Intel transition because they were dirt cheap computers you can upgrade yourself and even dual boot Windows. I feel like there was another big bump for them as a set top boxes to run XBMC or something. Might be wrong though. M1 release also saw the Mini's be a cheap entry point to seeing what Apple Silicon could do.
The first Intel Mac minis came out in the era of Front Row, Apple's attempt to turn every Mac into a media center computer. They had IR sensors and remotes. I had one hooked up to my TV, which was a big step up from the first gen AppleTV.
Plex started as a Mac-only XBMC fork during this era. There were also apps like Remote Buddy which let you control pretty much everything with the simple remote that came with the Mac. Apparently Remote Buddy still exists and works with the current gen Siri Remote.
Even to this day there aren't really a ton of options for a non-devkit, non-router arm64 machine that you can use as a desktop workstation.
Was it such a sin that our electronics were made in the East? Was the west truly deprived and the east really abused? It’s nearly the end of of our lifetime (+-100 years is a margin of error), so the fact for our lifetimes is that our electronics got made there.
What is the final judgement about this?
"Sin" is the wrong framing, but outsourcing most of your capability to actually make stuff can definitely cause problems for a country.
For example, on a military level, the US is concerned about how rapidly China is catching up in naval capacity, China is building new warships far faster than the US can. And it's hard not to notice that China's overall shipbuilding capacity is more than 200x higher than America's.
The US has a lot of pride over having been "the arsenal of democracy" in WW2, and it's well known that a huge part of why the US was effective in that war was sheer mass: the US simply made much more war 'stuff' than any other combatant. But if the US was to get in a shooting war with China today, it would likely be China that would enjoy an advantage in production scale, with the US trying to make do with fewer vehicles and munitions.
Tactical error then. I suppose I was hoping someone would make the human plea that the barter was mostly a net good for our lifetimes. Our neighbors made our clothes. You suggest tactically this a problem, but I’m wondering if we managed to live peacefully and goodly this way?
The same reason Europeans are moving away from US tech right now. You can't bury your head in the sand and pretend geopolitics is imaginary.
While shopping I look where items are produced and by whom company. When I see an item is manufactured in Texas I put it back on the shelf and keep walking. That State is too politically corrupt for me to financially support, same with Florida.
Also US manufacturing is synonymous with shitty quality and has been for at least 5 decades.
Don't most big tech companies have an office in Dallas or Austin? I remember that the MS campus was huge when I lived in Dallas.
If "can't have been made in any capacity in Texas" is your criteria that might be pretty difficult.