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Only 50% of iPhone Casings Made in India Meet Apple's Quality Standards
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Because they don’t know what they’re missing, most people don’t.
They don’t know what it’s like having union protection, higher wages, decent benefits - entire generations have grown up never really knowing factory work in the United States. How can workers be missing something they’ve never had? They don’t know how much better their jobs could be…which is intentional of course.
I never heard about the series until you brought it up.
Cancellation may be related to poor marketing.
But likely not.
Look at nails. The short pointed pieces of wire that are pounded into wood. Yeah, those things.
A 'nail machine' needs two things: A spool of wire, and someone (something) to replace empty spools with full ones and feed wire into the system. I would seriously imagine that someone could literally train a chimpanzee to do that.
It's a machine, a 'box' at its basic level that converts wire at one end into nails at the other.
And it's cheaper to do that in China?
What? How? It's basically automated. Couldn't hey could ship in Chinese wire to where ever they wanted to make them. It can't be that much more than shipping the stamped nails in from China. The companies selling nails could give jobs to a multitude of high school kids to swap spools and push a button if they moved production here.
I just don't get it...
Machining iPhone chassis has to be really automated too. Is it the heat? (Anyone thinking of Disclosure at this point?) *shrug*
Aren't chip fab machines pretty much the same? Sure someone has to cut the 'pigs' into wafers, and treat them, but they are fedinto the machine and out come chip populated wafers to be diamond sawed and placed in their enclosures.
We could debate this for hours. We probably both have from time to time. I can debate using your point of view easily, it’s the standard Bschool spiel. But you’re wrong. Tariffs work, for the working class, for intelligent people who are, on the ground, and actually make things. Tariffs raise their real wages. Then they can buy real things, made well by other tariff protected workers, and $300 isn’t that much any more. Think about it for a while, from the perspective of the worker, not the corporate profit and competitiveness standpoint. Henry Ford figured this out over a hundred years ago.
I think both of you make good points, however. They two perspectives do not need to be mutually exclusive.
Another misconception would be that China only makes cheap stuff. China actually can make quality products. Problem is, Americans overwhelmingly preferred the cheap stuff, so that's what they ended up making instead.
You forget that those same tariffs raise the cost of living as well, so any wage gains are basically offset by the rise in prices for the consumer (who is also the worker). Net gain of zero isn't really helping the worker/consumer, and businesses will indeed get tired of playing the game and paying arbitrary tariffs when they can do it cheaper elsewhere and sell to consumers at lower prices, which consumers will do, because for most of the middle class price is still a major decision making factor.
Looks people posting here doesn't have a clue to manufacturing process it takes time to setup manufacturing facilities and tune them to perfection.
"Mundane", skilled work is what keeps things going, my friend. I personally like indoor plumbing, good roads, electricity, and not having to wait weeks for shipments to be offloaded from ship to shore. The attitude that we should all seek to avoid such things is why we have such a critical shortage in nearly all of the skilled trades today, and it does not bode well for quality of life in the future if we fail to remedy that shortage. Skilled trades are often good paying jobs that with a little effort and consistency become very good paying jobs (tower crane operators in the United States make just under $95k/year on *average* and up to nearly $150k/year). That's a higher starting wage than most careers requiring a 4 year degree, with much less debt and a quicker path to raises and promotions. You do the math.
Plumbers make insane amounts of money relative to what they do. No college degree needed.
Electricians
Road/runway construction and paving (my nephew made in excess of $120k last year and he's 24 years old).
Pretty much any skilled trade, you name it, and you have a lower financial barrier to entry, in general make higher wages to start, and little to no debt to contend with, unlike their 4-6 year college graduate counterparts.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should get rid of universities, either. I'm just saying we've done a disservice to ourselves as a nation and to at least 3 generations of kids by ignoring or worse intentionally guiding kids way from profitable careers simply because we've been sold the "college is the only path to success" con.
There is nothing free about living under the Chinese government. And yes, many are "assigned" to contracts, and only "willingly" sign said contracts or lose their employment entirely. China has a huge available work force, so it's no major inconvenience to industry to blackball the few who have the will to refuse what is being dictated to them, and it's been that way for a long time.
Don't believe me? In the U.S. college students are considered in economic terms an asset to be safeguarded. In China, they'll run them down and crush them with tanks if they dare protest for more freedoms.
I moved out of my parents at 16. I worked for my keep, graduated school, and left for the military and relocated across the country by 21. I never felt the need to jump off the roof, even in the military. Your argument sounds more emotional than factual.
To be fair, there are some cities right in California, Oregon, and Washington that could use such campaigns these days.That reminds me of the Poo2Loo campaign in India. How to combat open defecation. I don't know if it succeeded, though. Hopefully, it did, and they now are ready to produce iPhones instead.
This part of your comment displays a very large disconnect between your perception of high tech manufacturing and hte reality. It's more than training, you need qualified, educated people from the start. It's not all unskilled, repetitive labor like Henry Ford's assembly lines. Tech manufacturing, especially high tech manufacturing, requires a lot more just as a starting point.
Actually, nails are a good example. Tariffs raised the price of the raw materials, so. US producer can’t compete with finished nails form mexico that are not subject to tariffs.
Of course, tariffs raise the price of goods for everyone, resulting in inflation and less spending power as a result. Meanwhile, a few enjoy jobs at the price of many. Of course, they also pay more for tariffed goods - wether they are imported, made of raw materials covered by tariffs, or US made goods that cost more since the only way they are competitive due to tariffs. Tariffs do not raise real wages, as inflation due to increased prices eat into the gains.
Other countries tariff US goods in response, lessening imports and eventually resulting in lost jobs as companies cut back. From the worker perspective, it is a net loss.
Henry Ford realized paying a living wage was a good idea, but he did not rely on tariffs to be competitive.
Why does this happen? Isn't manufacturing is a set of processes that will produce the same outcome?
I assumed Apple would say get machine X, do this, do this, and the final product will always be the same!?
Unless Apple is asking for a product and the Indians try their best to mimic it but they just do not have the enough know how leading to bad production units which is an Apple fault for dealing with this specific manufacturer
I assumed Apple would say get machine X, do this, do this, and the final product will always be the same!?
Unless Apple is asking for a product and the Indians try their best to mimic it but they just do not have the enough know how leading to bad production units which is an Apple fault for dealing with this specific manufacturer
It takes months in the best of scenarios to get a high volume production line running. Replicating thousands of steps within tolerances required is an extremely complex logistics problem. This is how it is in all types of manufacturing when things are getting set up.
