Apple wants to continue building Mac Pro in US, Cook says
Apple CEO Tim Cook has responded to questions about moving production away from China by saying that he expects the company's global production to continue on its current trajectory, but also that it is investing to increase U.S. manufacturing.
Apple's forthcoming Mac Pro 2019
Asked by analysts in its financial earnings call to comment on President Trump's refusal to grant Apple an exclusion from tariffs in its manufacturing, Cook spoke about the company's view of the U.S./China relationship and his opinion about whether Apple will move production to new countries. Specifically, the chief executive said Apple is looking for ways to continue building -- more accurately assembling -- its Mac Pro desktop domestically.
"In terms of the exclusions, we've been making the Mac Pro in the U.S. and we want to continue to do that," he said, "so we're working and investing currently in capacity to do so, because we want to continue to be here."
The current Mac Pro is assembled in a factory in Austin, Tex., with parts sourced from around the world. For the incoming 2019 Mac Pro, however, Apple has handed off manufacturing duties to Quanta in China.
Cook's comments shed new light on Apple's tariff exclusion request, which involved parts associated with the new pro-level computer. It can be speculated that Apple was, and still is, seeking economical alternatives to assemble the Mac Pro in America, with those efforts stymied by the ongoing trade war.
On a broader level, Cook said to disregard rumors of a major shift in Apple's outsourcing strategy.
"There's been a lot of speculation around the topic of different moves," he said, "but I wouldn't put a lot of stock in that if I were you. The way that I view this is that the vast majority of our products are kind of made everywhere. There's a significant level of content from the United States, and a lot from Japan to Korea to China, and the European Union also contributes a fair amount. That's the nature of a global business and I think that largely that will carry the day, and in the future as well."
Cook's comments follow recent reports of Apple looking to move some proportion of manufacturing assembly out of mainland China, and that such a move would take several years.
Apple's forthcoming Mac Pro 2019
Asked by analysts in its financial earnings call to comment on President Trump's refusal to grant Apple an exclusion from tariffs in its manufacturing, Cook spoke about the company's view of the U.S./China relationship and his opinion about whether Apple will move production to new countries. Specifically, the chief executive said Apple is looking for ways to continue building -- more accurately assembling -- its Mac Pro desktop domestically.
"In terms of the exclusions, we've been making the Mac Pro in the U.S. and we want to continue to do that," he said, "so we're working and investing currently in capacity to do so, because we want to continue to be here."
The current Mac Pro is assembled in a factory in Austin, Tex., with parts sourced from around the world. For the incoming 2019 Mac Pro, however, Apple has handed off manufacturing duties to Quanta in China.
Cook's comments shed new light on Apple's tariff exclusion request, which involved parts associated with the new pro-level computer. It can be speculated that Apple was, and still is, seeking economical alternatives to assemble the Mac Pro in America, with those efforts stymied by the ongoing trade war.
On a broader level, Cook said to disregard rumors of a major shift in Apple's outsourcing strategy.
"There's been a lot of speculation around the topic of different moves," he said, "but I wouldn't put a lot of stock in that if I were you. The way that I view this is that the vast majority of our products are kind of made everywhere. There's a significant level of content from the United States, and a lot from Japan to Korea to China, and the European Union also contributes a fair amount. That's the nature of a global business and I think that largely that will carry the day, and in the future as well."
Cook's comments follow recent reports of Apple looking to move some proportion of manufacturing assembly out of mainland China, and that such a move would take several years.
Comments
I'd bet a lot of the Mac Pro consumers are in the US, who will appreciate faster shipping times for custom configurations.
And the assembly labor of the Mac Pro is tiny compared to Apple's total cost structure.
Truckers to bring materials in and out
Automation engineers to build, maintain and upgrade the equipment
Facility managers and workers to keep the plants running
Logistic specialists
Local businesses, restaurants, hotels, etc...
These are all well paid blue and white collar workers that probably would make more than all the assembly workers in china combined.
Who manufactures the CPU?
Who manufactures the RAM?
Who manufactures the SSD?
Who manufactures the GPU?
Where is the aluminum for the case smelted?
Where are all the individual resistors, capacitors and even the circuit board connectors manufactured?
Every one of these have labor costs as well as the potential for tariffs. If anyone can fill in this information it might help everyone understand just how complex and global Apple's supply chain is and how it is affected by tariffs as well as the change in the value of the dollar.
SSD - Probably Samsung, South Korea
GPU - AMD - depends, but most likely China
Aluminum - Zenica Aluminum, China
https://macrofab.com/blog/decoding-tariff-impacts-us-electronics-manufacturing/
The latter half of that article should be of particular interest to you.
in building any product, the assembly of the component sub assemblies have to be dealt with on an individual basis. What I mean is that some of them can be robot assembled, and some can’t. For example. Robots can work very well on flat surfaces in inserting parts as I’ve said. But if an assembly is three dimensional, and needs to be rotated several times to be assembled, it’s very difficult to have that done robotically.
we see tens of thousand of people on lines assembling iPhones. That’s because robots can’t do it, even though the boards were done by them. They can’t put the board in the case, because that involves maneuvering the case and boards in what to a robot would be very complex gyrations. Then bending and threading those small cables, and plugging and gluing them in can’t be done either.
I'm not saying that never in the future will this be done. But present technology can’t. So it’s pretty much pie in the sky when people just offhand state that we can use robots instead of large numbers of people.