brian green

jbdragon said:

sog35 said:

Why is Apple even doing this?

Just gives more fuel to the fire that making iPhones in the USA is a good idea.

More then $200 more on the base price iPhone is just crazy. To get a Plus version with 256 gig's will be like $1500. Who's going to pay these kind of prices? I'm not going to pay $880 for a lowest end iPhone. I'd have to go to the crap Android Platform.

You don't seem to understand the gravity of this situation.  The Android phones are all made outside of the US.  That means that they, too, will have a tariff placed upon them.  While they may be seen as less expensive, the days of a "free phone" from any provider would be over.  

That said, I'm all for bringing manufacturing back to the US.  Will that provide jobs in assembly?  Probably not.  But it'll sure as hell provide jobs working on all of the robotics and other equipment.  Any job created in this sector is a good thing if it happens here in the US.  That's a few more robotics engineers hired.  That's logistics people hired.  That's janitorial staff hired.  That's more solar added to the grid (because we all know Apple would have panels on top).  That's jobs here in this country rather than somewhere else.  As for everyone complaining that products would be too expensive, that's the Walmart mentality and I'm not at all interested in going "cheap".  My 256GB iPhone 7 Plus cost me $969 before taxes.  I paid it without worry.  If it goes up to $1500, I'll pay that too.  If all of the individual electronic components end up with tariffs on them, manufacturing of those components will spin up here in the US as well, considering the consumer base of those components are used in would reach beyond Apple into all of the electronics that people purchase that would also be impacted by the tariffs.  That means that the components won't be shipped here and just assembled in the US to skirt the tariffs.  The individual components would also have tariffs placed upon them raising the cost of them to match what it would cost to manufacture them here (that's what tariffs are for after all - leveling the playing field so that products produced outside the country end up costing the same as products produced within the country).  Bring that manufacturing to the US.  As for the Chinese doing their own cost-benefit analysis, I'm not at all surprised that they would find moving manufacturing outside of China to be a bad thing.  It's precisely the same stance we have.  

The L.A. Times did a story on tariffs that you all might find particularly enlightening.  You can read it here:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-navarro-trump-trade-china-tariffs-20160721-snap-story.html

I see this as nothing but a good thing for the US and the people whom live here.  It's a whole lot of jobs created here.  I'll let the Chinese worry about themselves.

I ordered the first day and still haven't received mine, so I'm all in favor of Apple ramping up production.

emoeller said:

It's all about the processors.   The sooner Apple moves to its own chips the better....

We have their M chips for the iPhones, A chips for the mobile devices, S chips for the watches, and now the W chip for the wireless Air Pods.  We're seeing Apple design their own chips rather than taking things off the shelf more and more.  It would seem to me that creating an entirely new chip (non x386 architecture) would be something they are contemplating considering the slowdown with Kaby Lake, and all.  It's been a good long while since we've had a shakeup in the processor world, and x386 has been great for us all, but the time might be right for Apple to create their own chips and have Intel manufacture them.

whatthewha said:

I'm sure Apple is working on their own mic tech and not just witing for manufacturers to come up with something better. 

I certainly hope so. Given the extremely small size of the microphone, one would think that advances would need to be made in order to really gets some good range out of them. On a similar note, I certainly hope that the speaker used in the ear piece slot for the iPhone gets better and louder. I have the thing turned up all the way and it's still difficult to hear in everyday city environments. I guess this is the price we pay for Apple shrinking the thickness of the phone year after year.

I'd hope with more competition Apple will push out some serious improvements with Siri.  I admit to getting frustrated with Siri on multiple occasions and just using Safari to search for what I wanted in the first place.  I understand that Siri isn't simple, and there's a lot to the backend, but there's got to be some serious improvements to Siri before it's something I can't live without.  There are plenty of us out here whom aren't interested in sports scores, or the weather.  For instance, when I ask, "What's the freedom of assembly article in the Washington State Constitution (It's Article 1, Section 4, by the way), not only didn't she know what I meant, but when I get a response, I'd like to be told the Article number, and for her to read it to me.  There's nothing more frustrating for me than to ask a question, expecting a verbal answer, only to be told, "Here's what I found." I don't care to click on what you found and go to some webpage.  If that's what I wanted, I'd have used Safari to begin with.  I want Siri to actually TELL me what she found and read it to me.  Don't give me a link.  If I ask Siri, "What's the largest lake in Washington State?", she'll say, "Here's the information." and put the search results on the screen (Lake Chelan), rather than telling me the answer.  It's frustrating, and results in me not wanting to use Siri.  It's kind of like having an assistant that doesn't do much, and rather than telling you the answer you want, hands you a post it note with the answer on it, or something completely misinterpreted.  Siri needs some serious improvements.