When I see a facial reaction like this on a YT thumbnail, I don't click through
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple's Efforts to Automate iPhone Assembly Detailed in New Report
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Infinite. When I was 16 I had a flat tire on my bike and being out in the country, I thumbed it & got picked up by Dick Burke, president of Intrepid Corp, which owned Trek bicycle co. I told him how impressed I was about how Trek became the biggest blah blah blah. Instead of accepting my flattery he explained how a company can get "too big", at which point the business starts to look like a big money funnel, and attracts the most unethical kind of shortsighted businesspeople who think the entire point of a company is anything for a buck, consuming everything in sight if it makes the owners one extra cent. They'll screw up your product lines and long term plans, cut costs on materials until your product QA goes to hell, replace all the human beings with machines, jack up the prices, and use all the $ to overpay the top brass, attracting the "owner class" to gamble their kids college money on your ability to do it again indefinitely. Dicks idea was that a business equally serves the customers as it does the employees. The point of a good business is to provide the most possible good for the most possible people, so the happier your customers are, the more people you can hire and pay well, and the better that company is doing. I can't imagine anyone having the guts to say the words "shareholder profits" to him while he was alive.
I went on to work for him for a few years before he had to retire and finally passed away. I got a detailed look at how dysfunctional corporate culture can get before the company became unrecognizable. Today, about 5min across from where I teach product design is the business school, preaching the heirarchical, unlimited power/wealth, infinite growth model to a new class of kids every 4 months with religious fervor. Enjoy it while it lasts I guess.
Last edited:
That's why some are discussing universal income programs.
The official asinine click-bait face of YouTube.
Well click to about 12 minutes in and they hand build iPhones. Got to wonder how they get the parts to build.
No smartphones are Made in America
No TVs are Made in America
No cameras are Made in America
No electronics arte Made in America
So many complaints about what apple pays people to assemble. Soon, they will all be out of jobs and once again Apple will be blamed. They will complain about everyone and everything EXCEPT the government of these countries. Apple does not owe jobs to anyone, anywhere at any time.
This has nothing to do with COVID but instead China’s laws regarding employment finally being put into enforcement.
Apple has been out of compliance with “seasonal” workers for their product ramp ups. China has laws on the books about whether a business is allowed to do the boom/bust cycle of “seasonal” hiring that Apple does before a product launch. China found the practice to be too exploitative. It’s only this year that the government is cracking down on it, to the protest of Apple.
This is a story, when not deliberately misinterpreted through the western press where Apple is the bad guy here trying to skirt around China’s oh so oppressive…workers rights laws?
Apple has been out of compliance with “seasonal” workers for their product ramp ups. China has laws on the books about whether a business is allowed to do the boom/bust cycle of “seasonal” hiring that Apple does before a product launch. China found the practice to be too exploitative. It’s only this year that the government is cracking down on it, to the protest of Apple.
This is a story, when not deliberately misinterpreted through the western press where Apple is the bad guy here trying to skirt around China’s oh so oppressive…workers rights laws?
I think the problem is the supply chain is over there. They would have to ship all of the components to the US for assembly.
They'll just tax businesses with an Automation Fee to fund UBI.
Yep and they are already super proud of 'made in cailfornia'. It'll all be automated in the USA within 10 years.
That's why the US has 2 carrier groups off the coast of Asia.
"The U.S. Pacific Fleet usually keeps two of its seven carriers in the Philippine Sea or China Seas, just south of Okinawa and north or east of Taiwan. These carriers occasionally sail close to the Taiwan Strait—100,000-ton, $14-billion reminders that the United States intends to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack."
The U.S. Fleet Could Lose Four Aircraft Carriers Defending Taiwan
Even when the United States and Japan successfully defended Taiwan—as they did in most of one think-tank’s 24 simulations—the U.S. Navy lost at least two carriers ... and sometimes as many as four.
www.forbes.com
As much as they can possibly squeeze.
But they absolutely depend on exploitative hiring practices to make those goods. None of the future sweatshops of the electronics world (India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, etc) are anywhere near ready from an infrastructure standpoint to take over the sheer quantity of the assembly China does for the rest of the world.
We need China far and away more than China needs the West and western countries. Hell, our oligarchs are going to start a war over it soon too!
Steve Jobs said in an interview before he died that iPhone production would never move to the US but the cost of assembly labor was not the main issue. Apple, at the time of the interview, needed about 50,000 associate-level industrial engineers to solve manufacturing issues. China is very good at churning out armies of associate degree level engineers in a way that the US just doesn’t. That was what Jobs cited as the biggest barrier to US manufacturing.
Intel is the biggest beneficiary by dollar amount because they're building more foundries.
Intel got $8.5 billion to build 4 foundries. Meanwhile, Taiwan Semiconductor got $6.6 billion, Samsung got $6.4 biliion, and Micron got $6.14 billion for one foundry each.
I'm honestly surprised that we're hearing about this in 2024.
Did you know that the first Macs from 1984 were built on assembly lines powered by Macs?
Apple, you've done some incredible robotics works with your *disassembly* processes. Let's see you get the assembly lines automated to have construction closer to your sales markets. That might speed up product releases?
Did you know that the first Macs from 1984 were built on assembly lines powered by Macs?
Apple, you've done some incredible robotics works with your *disassembly* processes. Let's see you get the assembly lines automated to have construction closer to your sales markets. That might speed up product releases?
Nah. We can just print more money. Everything is fine.
Incredible!
Are those all authentic? An entire mall dedicated to selling refurbished Apple devices.
It’ll be incredibly expensive to automate everything since each new model would require a different setup. Also, most component suppliers are in Asia. A factory in North America would have to deal with additional logistical challenges because of that.
They’re probably looking more for a production engineer than an assembly line worker.
Been saying this for years, and it's only getting worse. A lot of these companies don't care though, because the thinking is "Well, our workers are not our primary demographic." And when every company thinks that way, there is nobody left with money to buy anything.
That is why I've been throwing every bit of money I can at investing, in hope of accumulating enough wealth that I can pay off my house before the AI takes my job. With my house paid off, at least I will have a roof over my head, though I'm not sure it will matter much if I can't afford food. However, my wife's job is very interpersonal involving helping people achieve healthy relationships, so I'm hopeful that won't be replaced as quickly. But I'm not sure who is going to be able to pay her? But assuming she can keep being paid, she would make enough for our family of four if our house was paid off and I lost my job. My fallback plan is to continue getting more skilled at making furniture in my workshop, in the hopes that I can sell it to higher end clientele who perhaps haven't lost their jobs yet because they are managers or have a lot of money in reserves.
But all of that even relies on a lot of things still working properly with the economy, and I just can't shake the feeling that it's not going to work out. A lot of people keep comparing AI to things like the Industrial Revolution and how people were worried about losing their jobs, and various factory line upgrades over the decades and advances in internet usage and e-commerce supplanting more workers. But I don't think most people seem to get it: AI is coming for all of our jobs in a very short time frame. Once you have AI working to help you make better AI, things will escalate very quickly. We've already started to see that in the past couple years. In past revolutions people had many years to adapt and find something similar that they can adapt their skills to and learn. That's just not really going to be possible with this.
Even scarier is that the AI doesn’t even have to *work* right for it to be slotted into businesses and local governmental functions.
People think Skynet as AI ending the world, I think more of “the minicipal water treatment system doesn’t work and nobody knows why because this control software was contracted out to AI a decade or two back” as how AI has the potential to ruin everything.
Idiots in charge who already don’t understand technology can easily be fooled into believing the magic trick they’re being sold is real. That’s the real danger.