- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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Why? All those kids are going to need something to do after they tear down the education system.
Something I’ve been thinking about is how schools are affected by population decline. Schools take a lot of infrastructure, labor and money. It seems like hardly anyone in my generation is having kids. So what happens to this expensive school system when there’s too few students to justify the costs?
Will it simply disintegrate into private schooling like olden times?
Well if it’s funded by taxes they can scale down. That’s the nice thing about everyone chipping in. If less is needed just take less. It’s not like a business that needs to turn a profit.
But their tubby little fingers aren’t nimble enough nor can they hold their attention span nor take basic instructions, so they can’t be employed for production unlike their healthier and more dutiful same aged Asian counterparts
They won’t be tubby for long. Food about to get expensive. Timmy about to be on a fucking diet.
They won’t be making iphones, they will be mining the minerals for them.
Sure, we can tell them it is the new version of Minecraft. /s
“I…am Steve (Jobs).”
Well that I can’t believe.
They’ll have their hands full extracting the lithium from the dead Tesla batteries.
They already tried “made in America” Apple products and they did not sell! Americans don’t want to pay $5K for an iPhone when they can pay 80% less for one made in China.
Ok but what if they cannot pay 80% less for one made in China?
What? They do. Apple sells tens of millions of iPhones each year in the US.
They did past tense. How about with a 140%+ tariff?
They’ll make iPhones in India. Which is actually what they are doing right now. Or in Vietnam. Or Ethiopia. You can’t tariff everyone 140% if you want your economy to work.
What if you dont want your economy to work?
Haha as if that will stop Trump
Well that sucks but they sure as hell won’t be able to buy one “made in America” either. The raw materials for batteries alone would have tariffs on them as well. Unless we have massive amounts of cobalt, lithium, copper, silicon, cadmium, etc, to be able to produce these items domestically, working class and middle class Americans will not be able to afford them.
Chinese phones are vastly superior to this ridiculous brand.
Sure, believe some China bad YT channel.
Ah yes. Everything i disagree with is fake news.
Ah yes, every garbage YT ‘news’ that fits my Sinophobic narrative is true.
When is China’s economy going to crash? Any day now I hear.Keep gobbling that Global Times 🥱
How good are the foldable iPhones? Oh, that’s right…
They don’t exist, but even motorolla has decent foldable tech
My phone came from Samsung, who doesn’t use Chinese slave child labor. So this whole idea is pretty insane to me. You iPhone people don’t give a shit. Stop pretending.
A post this dumb is almost certainly trolling, but in case you’re actually serious about bragging your phone was made in a Vietnamese sweatshop instead of a Chinese one, maybe you should read the news more: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/was-your-smartphone-built-in-a-sweatshop/
Where do you think Samsung phones are made and by whom?
Mostly by Indian and Vietnamese slave labor: https://www.androidauthority.com/where-are-samsung-phones-made-3251712/
Trump “saving” America from anything is pure fantasy true, and yet he got elected - TWICE. The fantasy of idiocracy is reality. Make people desperate enough for work by gutting minimum wage, Medicare, and everything else MAGA plans to do to create a feudal system, and the US becomes a cheap labor source to sell US-made iPhones and all kinds of other shit abroad. Either get used to that reality or figure out what to do about it.
Just because you can make phones with an army of cheap Chinese labour doesn’t mean that’s the only or best way. With suitable “design for manufacture”, pick and place robots like those used in PCB design could relatively easily be adopted to screw screws in where needed. Use plugs instead of those flat cable things, then the whole lot could be easily automated. Remove any aspect of the design that needs fingers and the whole process can be automated.
Wow what a great idea, I wonder why nobody else has ever thought about it.
If that were possible they would have already done that, since it’s cheaper to fully automate everything in the long run than to have humans involved in any part of the manufacturing process. No matter how cheap you get the labor automation will still beat it out, unless they are literal slaves, and even then the quality of work probably won’t be as good as an automated system, so it still might not be economically sensible.
TBH most of the cost is from the individual components. The core chip fab, the memory fab, the oled screen fab, the battery, power regulation, cameras, all massive operations and very automated. Not to speak of the software stack. Or the chip R&D and tape out costs.
The child labor is awful, but it’s not the most expensive part of a $1k+ iPhone.
The most expensive part of an iPhone is the >50% profit margin
An old chart:
Just ask AI to do it for you
They’ll slash wages and say it’s because of AI, and it is. But not because AI actually makes the process any more efficient, but just that it’s a good excuse to slash wages.
Toyota is able to build Camrys, Highlanders, Tundras, etc. in the US. So I don’t see why we can’t have a factory in the US to build the iPhone?
Does building an iPhone require more manual labor than building a car? Maybe it requires more precision than cars, but I don’t see why we can’t train and equip people to do it here.
There are microchips being made in the US today. See Intel. Maybe not the latest process node but it is not an outdated node either.
It requires people who eventually jump off the roof of the building…
The problem is, while you and I have a problem with that, billionaires don’t.
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They will when the choice is work or starve.
I 100% agree, and hope that remains to be an option. But also… things can change, and they can change fast. We are all only a few days of missed meals or missed mortgage payments from having very different standards.
Step 1 - Create a depression unlike we have ever seen and make people desperate for any job they can get.
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You absolutely can, but the price of the workers for these kinds of things are way higher in the US as opposed to China. Also, if Apple could automate away manual labour to the point it would be economically viable they sure as heck would’ve done so already. Price increases using US-based manual labour are inevitable - its one of the major reasons why the global market is as it is today, cheap labour in developing countries.
It would require Apple to accept a dollar less in profit.
US can’t manufacture iPhones, but it can manufacture other things. That you can’t build Versaille overnight doesn’t mean you can’t plant a few flowers and lay one square stone.
I think SPARC CPUs were manufactured in the USA even in 00s.
The whole re-industrialization idea is good, people making something know it’s not magical and wonderful. That an ARM CPU in an iPhone is a relative of an MC in a toy, and that said MC’s internal structure can be grasped in an evening.
Worker jobs in manufacture affect societies very well. Just believing that this is going to happen means believing yet another US administration promising something until its term ends.
Which is what subsidies are for. Encourage companies to do the things you want, don’t destroy the economy by making everything else impractical lmao. I see what the end goal is, supposedly, it’s just an extremely stupid, naive, or outright malicious way of accomplishing it.
The taxes will continue until manufacturing improves.
This guy just spews his bullshit, Would it be nice if they could be made in United States? Yeah sure but the thing is an iPhone would cost like $3500. And I know damn straight I’m not paying that much for a phone. And I’m pretty sure you guys wouldn’t either and that’s coming from someone that sometimes makes some stupid financial decisions and that is not one I would make
If Apple didn’t try to make 400% markup on their underpowered trash, it would probably just cost what it costs now. Except the child slave labor part would go away.
Except the child slave labor part would go away.
That’s the neat part, the republicans are trying to repeal child labor laws.
underpowered trash
I hate to say it, but it’s actually quite powerful trash that they produce.
Yeah, I’m in the process of shifting all of my workflows over to Linux/Android from all-Apple, but my Macs are a huge sticking point. My main computer is an M2 Macbook Air, which is ridiculously quick. I’m basically just waiting for Asahi to gain display port over USB, at which point I’ll ditch macOS. But until then…
8GB of RAM on a laptop today is f-ing ridiculous.
Lol I agree. The value is horrendous when you spec one of their products to have decent storage/ram, but nevertheless can’t fault the speed of their ARM chips.
That’s how much more efficient MacOS and the M series silicon is.
My Linux system uses about 1 GB idle and yet I’m glad to have 16 GB - not because I wouldn’t mostly be fine with 8, but because it just keeps more doors open. Can run more demanding programs, more programs simultaneously, can host something in the background, …
The OS itself is more efficient than Windows, yes. But that’s not a hard task, and it’s less efficient than many Linux distros. No matter how efficient you are, 8 GB non-expandable RAM is not enough nowadays.
Way more than you need for Facebook and pornhub. 8GB is fine for a low spec laptop.
My almost five year old piece of under powered apple trash cost me less than 45 US cents a day, still has regular OS updates and works between eight to ten hours most days running my entire life. I might even splurge out and buy a new one if they ever release an overpowered non trash handset…
I mean I would pay a premium for a made in America phone. Probably about 2 times as much. Iphones just suck ass so I’d never pay for one at all
Ameristan will be lucky to produce calculators if they keep up this crap.
And they’ll cost $600 each
Texas Instruments has entered the chat
Even that’s gonna take some work.
Don’t be so negative. By 2035, a 2500 dollar us made iPhone might be possible.
Because of the child laborers making 85 cents an hour?
Inflation
That would make building a $2500 iPhone in the US even more difficult.
Yeah but by 2035 the US dollar will be worth about 8 pence. If they’re lucky.
I’m hoping for 1USD = 1 yen, then were really going to be #winning by stealing all of the Japanese manufacturing industry!
We already have foldables in that price range.
I don’t doubt that it’s possible, but it would cost $7,000 or some shit.
As a global company, Apple could just re-establish itself in europe, e.g. Ireland, and continue trading with China, they can just put the US on hold for a couple of years.
Meanwhile for those who really addicted to istuff, coyotes can smuggle iphones across the border, so maybe this solves the fentanyl ‘issue’.coyotes can smuggle iphones across the border
Aaaaand the US is the new North Korea…
Indeed it seems Trump picked up some ideas about “Juche” (national self-reliance?) from his best buddy “rocket-man”.
In that case the EU will have to tax them proper.
But it’s a bitch to strap them on a coyote and get it go where you want it to go. Oh coyote as in a smuggler not the 4 legged canine type
Yeah, but you just gave me an idea too, how about AI-directed canines? “apple-intelligence” applied to follow-your-nose. My dog loves to chase small spots of light, which might be a trick to steer them.
Lmao the image of a coyote with a belt of iPhones around its belly and a laser mounted on a rotating turret on its back chasing the dot across the border is quite something.
The people addicted to apple products will just buy it even with a 100%+ tariff. To them it’s a status thing.
The Galaxy S series and the Pixel devices cost about the same tbh, with some of the foldable models being particularly expensive. Buying way too much phone isn’t exclusive to Apple users. Apple is just clever by not really providing an entry-level priced phone. It’s both a scumbag move to make more money, but also a way to make sure that inferior devices providing an inferior experience don’t ruin their rep.
The Galaxy S series and the Pixel devices cost about the same tbh
So? That’s not what the person you replied was even saying. You completely missed the point of their comment.
I was pointing out that it’s not only Apple users who pay out the ass for their phones. It transcends brand loyalty. Everyone is spending too much on phones and will continue to do so even if prices rise.
While I don’t doubt this, I’m also sure that tarrifs will also affect the pricing/availability of utility (non-status symbol) mobile devices.
We are going to have to deal with this for 4 years (unless some Rs will vote the remove in 2) and recovery won’t be immediate. I hope my current mobile lasts that long, but I usually only get about 3 years out of a battery. Replacement parts will be hit by tarrifs, too.
Apple already has an entity in Ireland which is the one that has most of the money. Google as well. When I pay my Google cloud bills, I don’t pay the us business, but a separate EU incorporated business. So I think, if apple sells to Europe, none of the iPhones or iPhone parts have to go through the US or pay any tarrifs.
And if chinese buy iphones, do they now have to pay 84% tariff? - maybe HQ in europe solves that too?
Most Apple products are assembled in China — some in India and Vietnam — from parts made in the region so there’s no new tariffs involved. Only Americans will have to pay more. It’s sort of like how Toyota and Honda having plants in Alabama won’t pay import tariffs.
Cars might be a bad example because their supply chains are so complex. They’ll still be more expensive because the components are often made overseas and Trump, idiotically, has tariffs on those parts (and steel and aluminum to boot). But a “foreign” car that rolls off the assembly line in the U.S. won’t have tariffs while an “American” car assembled in Mexico will.
But other businesses only have distributions centers in the US. So they import to US, pay tarrifs, and then I can buy from them in Europe, so indirectly I also paid the tarrifs. Even though product was made in China and I live in Europe.
If anything good comes from this, it’ll be reforming that. Even if tariffs were still a couple percentage points instead of based on a formula zero economists endorsed, you shouldn’t be forced to pay (or the companies able to avoid) tariffs by using a distribution center in a third country. It should all be based on country of origin and final destination.
A Chinese (or American) company setting up a factory in Vietnam is an entirely different thing. I’m not talking about that. The product was made in Vietnam and real foreign direct investment happened that’s beneficial to everyone. I just mean logistics hubs should be irrelevant when calculating tariffs.
The “ideal” solution if we must use tariffs would be to take into account where it’s all made but that’s way too complicated to implement and easy to game1, unfortunately. An iPhone is assembled in China but using parts from all over Southeast Asia (and elsewhere) and with a substantial portion of the actual value coming from California and the UK. Where is an iPhone really made if a Taiwan Semiconductor fab makes a bespoke processor based on ARM but designed in California? “Made in China” is what’s stamped on the box (actually they put “Made in China, Designed in California).
And that’s just the processor and a few other advanced chips. I think Samsung makes the screens in South Korea based on technology developed in the U.S. by Corning. If Apple wanted to skirt tariffs under that sort of regime, they could plausibly argue that the assembly is worth $10, manufacturing is worth $90, and the design and software are worth $900. I mean, smartphones are commodities now. People use iPhones because they like the software.
Tariffs based on the final step of assembly don’t make sense for complicated products made by multinational companies in the 21st century. The world makes an iPhone. Accounting for it all would be impossible.
This is actually one of the best solutions to this problem I’ve seen this whole time. Expand it to include all affected US companies. What’s she point of being a global company, if you can’t leverage your globalized nature for your advantage?
Also shows how much they actually can’t or won’t leave based just on just a (much needed) tax increase.
Let me check if my silicon dealer can hook you up…
Hehe that is funny, sadly I think the US is Apples biggest market, so they probably wouldn’t want to let go and give up any marketshare.
US usually is the most important market for most (international) companies I believe.
US has only 4% of the world’s population, there are now plenty of super-rich in China, India, etc. who like to flaunt i-stuff.
I have no source, but I remember seeing a graph of where iPhones sell and places like China/India were 80% android phones (mostly Samsung I think).
I don’t think the asian marketplace puts Apple products in such high regard as the US.
Samsung phones are still premium, I think they appeal more in other countries.
I see what you mean though with 20% of just China being almost the US population, but they are still losing 300m customers.
Of course it is. They want 1500 bucks for something with a few hundred dollars of overhead. R and d not withstanding they’ll want the same amount of profit for the phone if it’s made in America and profits have to increase year after year! They can’t make a little less profit they have to make more than before!
it’s not just acost the issue, there’s not enough skilled people to actually build them.
Industrial engineers, people that would be willing to assemble devices would be in short supply
If you offer good pay and good benefits at a decent working environment people will flock to assembly lines in the US. Christ they were basically invented here.
However unemployment figures suggest that would be impossible to do in practice.
No. No it doesn’t.
There are 7.1 million people unemployed in the US officially. Realistically that number is probably much, much higher.
You’re saying apple can’t hire a few hundred people to work on an assembly line?
That’s ~4% that is typically considered low but even if it wasn’t.
It’s not one assembly line, and one product only… it’s every component from the chips to the glass, screen, circuit board and then the final one on.
You would need also experienced people in every part you would need to manufacture including engineers that are in short supply, an nevermind building the factories etc…
If Apple were forced by law to manufacture iPhones exclusively in the U.S., they wouldn’t go under they’d adapt. They have the money (~$54B in liquidity), the brand loyalty, and the organizational muscle to pull it off.
There are ~7 million unemployed people in the U.S. plenty of potential labor, especially if Apple funds large-scale training and leans hard into automation. Would it be expensive? Absolutely. Costs would skyrocket. You’re probably looking at a $1,800–$2,000 iPhone. But guess what? People would still buy it.
They’d need 5–10 years to fully build out fabs, assembly plants, and domestic supply chains, but it’s feasible. TSMC is already building fabs in Arizona. Apple would just have to scale that approach to the rest of the production ecosystem.
Forced U.S. iPhone manufacturing wouldn’t kill Apple. It’d just make them the biggest American manufacturer since WWII.
The issue is like for every other major corporation in this country is that they’re just cheap bastards.
I work in the repair industry and what I tell all my clients when I do warranty work for them if it’s the difference between repairing their item or the CEO of the warranty company getting a new yacht it’s always going to be the yacht first.
China uses little kids to build them. If we did the same in the US, America s would want to have MORE CHILDREN because they would literally pay for themselves!
Just imagine if all middle schools in the US required 2 hours of iPhone assembly per day. It would be excellent industrial training for the future generation!
Meh, once they grow up their things aren’t nimble enough to assemble stuff any more. Waste of energy training them.
As someone who has done a bunch of phone repairs with the help of YouTube, assembly isn’t that hard. If they don’t want to assemble them here, it’s completely about profit margins. We should be taking steps to reduce that profit margin. Tax the rich and all that.
