flaneur

seankill said:

GeorgeBMac said:

greenmeenie said:

why invest all this money in china? Why not build these r&d facilities here in the USA? And recruit talent from US universities? 

Because the talent is over there....   Why fight H1-B's when you can just move the whole operation to where the talent and the infrastructure is?
... The days of "cheap Japanese transistor radios" are gone....

The east is, in every way, competitive with the U.S.  And, in many ways more than competitive.

Competitive at stealing IP, that's for sure.

This isn't the context to raise that sore-loser claim.

When it comes to advanced production technology in display manufacturing, or even quick turnover in processor prototyping and fabrication, for just two examples, the US has nothing to steal. All that production expertise is in Korea, Japan and China. Get over it. The US gave up the race fifty years ago, and the current mindset reflected by your comment, and the mindset of the current "administration," is going to make the situation worse.

Fortunately, at least Tim Cook and a few other supply-chain people at Apple and in silicon valley know how to work with Asia to get their ideas made into hardware. 

volcan said:

Just useless junk. I have no idea why people get sentimental over this stuff.

Yah, history, who needs it . . . 

/s

asdasd said:

Take an iPhone for instance. Let's say that an assembly line in China has 60 people earning $2 an hour. Let's say the line produces 60 iPhones an hour (deliberately low balling here to simply the maths). 

So the labour cost of assembly of an iPhone is $2. 

Moving to the US and paying $12 an hour increases the labour cost per iPhone by $10. However this is likely a huge over estimate because 60 phones per hour is ludicrously small. If it were 600 an hour the cost increase would be from $.2 to $1.2 or $1. 

And you could invest in machinery to reduce that further. 

For low end items these figures matter. Apple could absorb it. 

The real issue is the supply chain. It's mostly in Asia. 

And that supply chain has been building since the 1960s, with the famous "Japanese transistor radio." I bought my first reel-to-reel tape recorder, a Sony, in 1966. There was literally nothing made in the US to compare to it. Sony, Toshiba and Yamaha destroyed the US stereo receiver business by the end of the decade.

Somewhere in there, American color TV manufacturing, which was always a joke because of the need to make the sets look like furniture, started to die in the face of Trinitrons, Sharps, Panasonics, etc.

The Asian supply chain is now more than two human generations old,, and it representa an enormous reservoir of engineering and mass production expertise. 

America threw it away 50 years ago, mostly out of sloth, distraction and stupidity. The time to act was when the country was eating itself up over an immoral war against anticolonialism in Southeast Asia, while Japan's government was actively supporting R&D in electronics. Then Taiwan and Korea joined in. The same thing happened in the auto industry.

Afterthought: not all is lost, obviously. Silicon Valley represents —especially Apple — a new post-industrial direction of some kind where the stock in trade is knowledge, both human and artificial. I take it that this developed firstmost in the US because of its tradition of free and liberal thought, along with the cultural ferment provided by lots of immigration and general loose cultural movement. Hopefully we can keep that up.

wonkothesane said:

wood1208 said:

Title should be "Why the OLED may see Apple finally adopts it into it's iPhone" Because it came long way improving to the strict quality/reliability/image/color reproduction standards of Apple. So, OLED adopted Apple, not other-way around.

You may have forgotten to add "price" to the list of requirements. 

And production capacity, most of all.

thewhitefalcon said:

Can't wait to see the 40,000 word screed from Dilger about how this is evidence Google and Microsoft are doomed. 

Speaking of twisting things around to suit your views, look how far off topic you went to make this point against Dilger.