Asserting that we need to be less efficient in order to give people work so they can make money to buy things is absolute insanity.
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Apple's Efforts to Automate iPhone Assembly Detailed in New Report
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HA! You'd think a company like Apple would "think different" when automating assembly...
Why are they designing robots to do human tasks like tightening screws? That seems like a backwards approach. The phone's design and assembly process should be constructed around processes that robots do best, not people.
I think machines open up a lot of opportunities in terms of internal design. They should take advantage of this, not try and shoehorn human assembly methods into its automation.
If it could be done, it would have been done already.
Tesla tried doing this with Model 3 back in 2016/2017. Robots weren't precise or agile enough to connect electrical harnesses for vehicles. The connector on a phone is about 100 times smaller.
Tesla tried doing this with Model 3 back in 2016/2017. Robots weren't precise or agile enough to connect electrical harnesses for vehicles. The connector on a phone is about 100 times smaller.
I don't think you've followed this story very closely.
Yes, Tesla jumped the gun a bit in 2016/2017, but the lesson they learned wasn't "don't use robots". The lesson they learned was "design the cars to be built by the robots - don't have steps that robots are bad at doing".
In the past 8 years, Tesla massively cut down on the wiring harness for their cars, because robots are really bad at dealing with wires. The heavy power wires that are involved with charging and the drivetrain were all replaced by solid metal pipes, because robots are much better at moving the pipes around. They cut down on the number of parts the frame consists of and moved to "gigacasting" the frame of the car, because robots aren't good at holding frame parts and joining them at just the right angle, but they can stamp out enormous parts all day long.
Apple needs to do the same. They need to focus on ease of robots manufacturing their phones. In doing so, they'll probably also make it easier to repair the phones, as a handy byproduct.
So they reduce the human labor by 50%. Then they only need to find 100,000 people in the US who want to quit their current jobs and work in an iPhone factory. This would be much easier than finding 200,000 people but still impossible.
The best way to do this is to redesign the next iPhone from scratch to be "robot friendly" and not have things like screws holding it together and parts that self-align. You have to start from scratch to make this work.
Yes, these factory workers make the minimum allowed wage of about $1,200 per month, That wage is low, even for China. Here in California McDonlad's pays about 3X that amount, if an employee where to work full time but McDonold's makes sure that NEVER happens to avoid the need to pay any benefits. In other states, US minimum wage workers are paid about the same as Chinese workers.
The bigger problem is not the pay difference but rather finding so many humans. It would be impossible to find 100,000 people in the US who would quit their current job and work in an iPhone factory. There are 1.4 billion people in China and only 0.36 billion in the US. And with the US' 4% unemployment, there are not nearly enough people
Free cash flow is definitely what get reinvested. However a company can always do a cap raise through debt (with stock collateral) or equity. The more valuable the stock the more they can raise. Consider how GME raised a lot of cash at top dollar thanks to WSB and a kitty. Bankrupt Hertz tried to cash in on their valueless stock to public during the pandemic WSB rally before the SEC put a stop to it. Sometimes the stock is used as currency directly (ie employee RSU grants and stock based acquisitions).
"Apple is a $2 trillion dollar company"
I think you missed $1T but close enough
However, a trillion here a trillion there and soon you're taking about real money.
As a kid, I recall being told of the glorious future that awaited us, where robots did manual labor, and we would have free time for scholarly or artistic pursuits. They forgot the plan relied on the company’s returning money to society. The corporations seem happy to do the former and ignore the latter.
The iPhone chassis is already a unibody enclosure. Robots can handle large modular pieces like pipes. The problem, Apple doesn’t want to build an ugly modular iPhone the size of a table.
Apple needs to ”focus on the ease of robots manufacturing their phones?” 😆 I think you’ve confused Apple with Asus or Acer. Apple is all about design. They’re not about to design a product with a ruler just so a robot can grab it.
100% agree.
The sad thing is even some really interesting and thoughtful YouTubers are starting to do this.
Really is a sad race to the bottom…
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They came to the same conclusion as last time. The technology to install small screws into the device doesn’t exist yet.
I think it would be more accurate to say "very few" rather than "no." For example, I believe the Purism Liberty lineup of phones are made in America. I believe Seura and SunBrite televisions are made in America.
You don't know that. They can easily open shop where the machines are in Mexico or Vietnam or India.
I mean history doesn't ALWAYS repeat itself, but history has shown that automating someone's job doesn't reduce the number of overall jobs in a market. Time is the only thing that will solve this mystery, so we will have to "wait and see" but there certainly isn't much data to back up that assumption compared to the opposite stance.
It seems like you might be intentionally confused or obtuse about the context of his statement. A larger company would be in a better position to make large scale investments than a smaller company. While it is true that many factors aside from a company's equities paints the picture of their ability to make investments, my local coffee shop can't entertain owning their own building, let alone developing and building production automation workflows. Therefore at a simple level, at an easy conversational level, the statement about their market valuation was standing in as a symbol for their position to be able to allow this level of development to occur. I believe you knew that.
If you would prefer people to not use simple symbols and instead want them to use details at a level that makes you happy, then you can always ask. Likely many people won't change, just like I don't expect you to
However, maybe being clearer in a statement about the financial position Apple is in....I guess it could have been stated that since Apple has 40% of their annual operating costs sitting in cash, they are not in a position to worry about the development cost of something they find beneficial, especially something that wouldn't even by 1% of that cash reserve. They do not have, nor have they for a VERY long time, had cash flow contrasts of any kind. They have talked about this in executive interviews. Apple has worked to be in a financial position to allow for research, development, innovation and just trying new things, and not feel like those actions would be threatening the business. Likely this stemmed all the way back to when Steve Jobs nearly ran the business into the ground chasing dreams before he left the first time. They want to chase dreams AND have a stable business. But they have been at this place for well over two decades.
I guess the poetic way for capitalism to end is to watch it devouring itself greedily to the very last bite. I never thought I'd see so many intelligent people chasing fool's gold.
Call me insane, but I'm not sure I'll be boasting about how much more efficient my business is when I have next to no customers to buy what is being produced.
Universal Basic Income would give people the bare minimum they need to survive. It's paid for by taxing what's left of the productive parts of society at something like 97%-99% of all the money they make. That money is then given to people to theoretically give back to you by buying whatever you produce.
So the masses do nothing but wait for you to produce the product that you then give them the money to buy. Forgive me, because I'm not overly optimistic for the prospects for humanity in this new system of commerce.
Excellent post. Really enjoyed reading that
The whole "our workers are not our primary demographic" thing is precisely what I believe is happening, too. It's an invisible cancer that spreads slowly and silently while everyone is busy laying off all the customers of other businesses. Initially they'll be like.... sure we may have lost some customers, but everything we sell now has much bigger margins so we're making more profit than ever before. What's not to love about this brave new world? But then the lumps start appearing from beneath the surface and quite soon they'll be on the receiving end of some terrifying realisation.
I didn't say I knew it. I said they could. They'd want some sort of incentives to do it, though.
When you have that much money, you can afford to eat some mistakes. Mistakes that would get other companies shut down for good