Apple Begins Assembling iPhone 11 In India (techcrunch.com) 104
Apple has begun assembling the current generation of iPhones in its plant near Chennai, India. TechCrunch reports: A small batch of locally manufactured iPhone 11 units has already shipped to retail stores, but the production yield is currently limited. Apple, in general, has ambitions to scale up its local production efforts in India. The local production of current iPhone 11 models illustrates Apple's further commitment to India, the world's second largest smartphone market, as it explores ways to cut its reliance on China, which produces the vast majority of iPhone models today. Apple's contract manufacturing partner, Taiwan-based Wistron, first began assembling older iPhone models in 2017. But until now, Apple has not been able to have an assembly partner produce the current generation iPhone model in India. Assembling handsets in India enables smartphone vendors -- including Apple -- to avoid roughly 20% import duty that the Indian government levies on imported electronics products. Foxconn, the manufacturing company Apple has partnered with to assemble the iPhone 11 units, plans to invest $1 billion in its operations in India.
Robots (Score:2)
It's fucking 2020, the year 2000 was 20 years ago. Why aren't these things built entirely by robots in a lights-out factory? It's not like I'm asking for a flying car or fusion energy. Hmm ok, btw where are those?
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Someone with common sense, I guess.
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Why isn't whatever you do for work automated? Would you support that happening?
Yes, I would fully support that.
I hate work.
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Dear AC, is your name Ned Ludd? Your arguments sound very familiar.
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Because people need jobs.
Jobs exist to produce goods and services, not to "keep people busy".
If a particular job doesn't generate enough value, it should cease to exist and the worker should do something else.
Countries that automate and redeploy labor to higher productivity tasks do far better than those that don't.
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Dude, it seems you are deliberately missing the concept of Universal Basic Income, or you are an idiot. I am not gonna explain it all here. But suffice to say when a robot works, we get paid. The same way your company's owners or investors gets paid for the work YOU do. The same way your government gets paid for the work YOU do. It's as simple as that. Got it? We own or tax the robots, and get paid for its output. We'll take its paycheck.
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Society is shortly to become one of enforced slackers anyway. Your religious desire to occupy peoples time with meaningless activities will seem laughable in thirty years. Assuming society did not collapse in the civil war over access to food that is.
Re: Robots (Score:2)
So you want people to do unnecessary repetitive activities a machine can do, no matter the price to efficiency and production? Get rid of all your tools first. Hey if you want to force companies to hire people for jobs you deem necessary stop buying clothes made by machines. Only purchase hand loomed clothes. Oh, and donâ(TM)t drive a car either. Only hand made bicycles for you! Think of all the jobs that will be created!
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Grow up.
Says the child so afraid of being judged that they won't even log in. Run along, snowflake.
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I never said not to .. I am saying robots are better than forcing people into mindless manufacturing or farming jobs because you have some religious belief that humans must do labor. Virtually unskilled jobs that an Ethnic Studies major can do. As for UBI being "benefiting from the work of others" .. well we all benefit, for free, from things others have produced. For example roads and knowledge created in the past. We don't require everyone re-invent mathematics and science. UBI is just a fallback to preve
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Wrong. Jobs exist to [,,,] keep people from starving to death.
Money alone can do that fine allright by itself, no job needed.
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I note that the cold war with China has successfully moved jobs from China to India. I wish we had adults running America at the moment instead of an infantile failed Realtor con man. Most of the jobs have actually gone anyway as this thread notes, unless you are a technician trained to maintain robots that is.
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In this case it's more like Apple needs jobs. If Apple doesn't provide jobs to India then India will probably throw up some barriers for them so that domestic companies can take their market share.
Re:Robots (Score:4, Funny)
Apple sure could need Jobs. That current bozo is driving the company into the ground.
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India already throws up those barriers - if you sell over a certain quantity or value of physical goods in India, you have to produce locally, hence this move.
India is notorious for it, its their way of forcing technology transfer - if you want to successfully sell to Indians in India, you have to set up shop there, train locals and share skills. They do it with everything - want to sell the Indian air force fighter jets? Then you have to have a local partner to build most of the order, and you have to tr
Re: Robots (Score:2)
But during the period where people are out of work generates unrest. Idle hands are the work of the devil. Not that im religious, but the expression has merit. So before you automate everything it is best to make sure people have things to do. Countries without a lot of jobs, where existence is minimal, have the highest levels of just about every sort of crime.
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Yeah I would 100% support my job being automated -- in fact I am trying to do that. I rather live solely off dividend income. I rather have a robot or algorithm generate production on my behalf. Tax robotic production and provide universal minimum income for everyone. you can get more income by investing in the right companies. Forcing a company to hire me instead of a robot reduces the amount of goods that can be produced -- makes the products more expensive, and wastes my time. If a robot does my job, and
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Like it or not, but at some point we will have the choice between paying people to stay calm or them taking by force what they need. We have way more people than we need for the economy. Either find a way to kill them without them noticing it or dump some soma onto them.
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No. People need money. Just like customers are the necessary evil for corporations to get money, jobs are the necessary evil for people to get money.
Re:Robots (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fucking 2020, the year 2000 was 20 years ago. Why aren't these things built entirely by robots in a lights-out factory? It's not like I'm asking for a flying car or fusion energy. Hmm ok, btw where are those?
I can see you've never worked in a production facility.
The thing is, it's extremely difficult to automate things. I know, I know, the media has convinced you otherwise, but the reality is that things aren't that simple.
If you don't believe me, check out the massive problems Tesla had trying to automate the Tesla 3 factory and how even Elon Musk had to admit he was wrong about automation.
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This is 2020 slashdot. While you occasionally encounter people with actual technical understanding, it's largely chock-full-o armchair pseudo-technicians that make perfect examples of the Dunning-Krueger effect.
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Yet Sony managed it with the PS4... humans load the main boards into the line at the beginning and package the finished product and that's it.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Busine... [nikkei.com]
If apple had even a single eye towards optimizing their phones for robotic construction, I'll bet they could come pretty close to that. But as yet, they've been hooked on cheap labor.
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Is there evidence of that? Gotta believe that there's a lot of automation mixed in, humans would destroy these tiny components too often.
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Of course there's no evidence of that. This is all about his feelings about Apple and his feelings about automation. Never mind the fact that the PS4 and iPhone are radically different devices with very different materials, components, scales, finishes, sizes, etc. etc. etc.
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Because they're building it in India, where they can pay a dollar two ninety eight an hour. It doesn't pay to buy expensive machines to replace what is essentially slave labor.
Want to build it with robots? Build it in the USA, where workers expect $25 - $45 / hr. Then it pays to buy expensive machines to allow a single worker to simulate 25 of them.
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St. Jobs and St. Cook already explained why it is impossible to build iPhone in the USA. US workforce lazy, unskilled, incompetent, greedy. Case closed.
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That's Sony, sorry. Apple said, according to NYT:
The challenges in Texas illustrate problems that Apple would face if it tried to move a significant amount of manufacturing out of China. Apple has found that ... the United States ... can not match China’s combination of scale, skills, infrastructure and cost.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... [nytimes.com]
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They're just holding it wrong.
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'cuz
Really? You couldn't even be bothered to type out the word 'because' in a statement denying American laziness? Way to set an example.
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I laughed at that too.
On a similar note, what do the people who write a phone number without the dashes do with all that time they save?
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Which of course is bullshit 'cuz we have some of the hardest working folks on the planet.
Yeah, we have some of them. The thing is that China has a lot more of them.
China will be eating our lunch in practically every domain and endeavor before long and there's nothing that any of us can do to change that.
Oh we might be able to hang on to a few scraps of this and that, but in all likelihood over the next 10 to 20 years China is going to take a dominant role in most areas- financial, political, social, and probably technical as well.
We've lost our edge, partly due to this incompetent president fri
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Yeah, and that's a very dangerous ambition... for the whole world... for them to have. To achieve that ambition, they have to punch out both the US and Russia. Even under a democratic president, the US is not going to just fold up and go quietly into that sweet night. Under a republican, the chances of its fighting back go up exponentially. And do you think for a second that Putin will meekly consent to the dismantling of Russia? Yeah, China has nukes. But both the US and Russia have a lot more. Chin
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Even under a democratic president, the US is not going to just fold up and go quietly into that sweet night. Under a republican, the chances of its fighting back go up exponentially.
Riiiiiiiiight, because this current Republican president has been soooooo tough on Russia, right? lol I'd like some of whatever you're taking, but in a smaller dose.
Putin spent millions to trash Hillary and promote Trump because they knew it would be the most effective way to hurt the United States. He didn't help Trump get elected because he was afraid of him, that's for damn sure.
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Because Indians are cheaper. And if one is faulty, you just throw it away and get a new one for free, unlike robots that you have to repair or buy a new one.
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Because it's not yet the year 2090, and humans can still do things that machines can't.
Interesting to see the efficiency/accuracy levels (Score:1)
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Efficient manufacturing is not something that every country can successfully pull off.
Fortunately these phones aren't being built by a country, but rather by a company that knows what it's doing.
Unless you were suggesting that the people themselves somehow aren't cut out for the monotonous factory work that pretty much anyone could do.
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Fortunately these phones aren't being built by a country, but rather by a company that knows what it's doing.
Yep. Foxconn knows how to exploit workers like no other.
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Good point. Funny how setting tariffs can result in an increase in jobs and manufacturing in your country.
Rght right yeah because it worked so well here. Oh wait it was a fucking disaster for us.
Tariffs here in the US caused over 35,000 businesses to shut down and increased the cost of almost everything for Americans. *winning*
In other words it was a total failure for Bunker-Boy but the Chinese seem to be doing just fine- it turns out there are other people in the world who can buy stuff, who fucking knew??
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I can't think why else Apple would bother shifting manufacture to India.
It probably isn't just the tariffs, but also fear of being entirely dependent on China, which was never wise to begin with.
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I can't think why else Apple would bother shifting manufacture to India.
A few weeks ago China made a military incursion into Indian territory and killed 20 Indian soldiers.
Relations between the two countries went from bad to worse.
India is cutting way back on imports from China, including cell phones.
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India govt gave free land to Foxconn almost 7 yrs back to setup iphone assembly in India. Foxconn has been dragging their feet but finally moving this past year as US-China tensions got worse
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Yeah, Apple was planning to enter the Indian market and already had planned to have a part of their manufacturing there. The skirmish saw to it that they could no longer ship phones from China to India, so they have to ramp up production at the Chennai plant
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The deals with Australia and Japan came after the military incident and China's new security law. China was also building various things in the disputed territory. Satellite photos suggest China started before India built the road. China seem to have overplayed their hand a bit. They're facing more than a little retaliation, and their response seems to be to cry about how everyone's being unfair on them.
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Alliances with Japan and Australia has been in the works LONG before the incident. They been calling the four countries the "quad" for several years now. India doesn't just happen to have a treaty that allows US ships to base in India ports.
No, India was never a place that had US bases. After 9/11/2001, India offered that to the US, but the latter preferred Pakistan at the time, totally overlooking the double game that Islamabad was playing. Also, the Quad didn't exist until recently: it certainly was never around before Trump!
Anything that India now has is recent, following the Galwan Valley clash
Don't think India is exactly innocent either. Countries around India apparently hate India. Nepal is currently having a territory dispute and hate India for cutting gas/oil/medicine/food when they most needed it after a devastating earthquake hit it, just because India wanted to interfere with their domestic politics. Bhutan is starting to tell India to stay out of its affairs, etc.
Nepal has a Maoist government, and is doing whatever it's doing at the behest of Beijing. Everybody in that government from the Prime Minister
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The Chinese set up permanent structures in a place where none existed earlier. The border in that area is not clearly defined and hence there is a general agreement to not change the status quo. The Indian and Chinese military met and China agreed to remove the encampment. But then they just did nothing and sat on it. If the Indians let it go then new facts would have been established on the ground so unarmed Indian soldiers went in to take down the encampment by hand. The Chinese used prepared iron rods wi
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China didn't make a military incursion into Indian Territory. At least not according to Modi (https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/chidambaram-attacks-pm-modi-on-chinese-troops-entering-india-remark-1690912-2020-06-20). The fact is after India federalize both Kashmir and Jammu + Ladakh, the pro-getting into bed with the US, Indian foreign minister in a speech stated that they were going to be taking back Aksai Chin. They also have been building a road to the area where the Chinese occupied that would serve to cut off China's ability to easily support Aksai Chin. On top of that, sending representatives to Taiwan for Tsai's inauguration, making pacts with Australia, US, Japan forced China's hand in many ways. So yes, relations went to bad to worse, but it's mainly the foreign minister's fault who believes that India should ally with the US and change the LAC. The guy badly miscalculated US support and now India is in a mess.
Tsai's inauguration happened after the border skirmish, and then India's foreign representative did a virtual attendance of the event. You flipped cause and effect
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Working in what sense? It probably cost Apple money (more expensive iPhones for everyone, yay!) and didn't "create US jobs" either. So working as far as hurting China? Maybe, but then that's like snipping your own dick to spite your girlfriend. Yeah.
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Yeah, and it benefits the USA greatly because ... umm... I'll get back to you.
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I can't think why else Apple would bother shifting manufacture to India.
India has protectionist laws: manufacture products in India for Indian consumers, or risk being shut out of the entire Indian market.
It is simple, and it works.
Foxconn, not apple (Score:2)
Foxconn is assembling iPhones in India for Apple. Let's at least try to be accurate.
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Foxconn is assembling iPhones in India for Apple.
Pretty far away from Milwaukee, isn't it?
Re:Foxconn, not apple (Score:4, Interesting)
But at least it's not the damn Chinks! That's who we hate this week!
Good. F*** China. They are the epitome of evil (Score:2)
The CCP picked up where the Nazis, Stalin and Mao left off.
Any western CEO that builds stuff in China or does business there should be cancelled just like the Confederates.
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The CCP picked up where the Nazis, Stalin and Mao left off.
Any western CEO that builds stuff in China or does business there should be cancelled just like the Confederates.
Our entire economy is built upon Chinese labor. Your suggestion would make this little Trump Depression look mild by comparison.
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And instead build the stuff in ... India? Vietnam? Some country in Africa?
What exactly is the difference to you? You thought that closing down imports from China brings back jobs to the US, didn't you? Didn't you? Oh please. Before that happens, you have to play whack-a-mole with all of south east Asia, Africa and maybe the Middle East.
One thing you can be sure of... (Score:2)
They won't be shifting manufacturing to the United States. No tariffs.
Seeking fortunes abroad... (Score:2)
Re: Seeking fortunes abroad... (Score:2)
While working in shit work conditions is uncool; taking advantage of cheaper labor due to costs of living is not too egregious. Even in consulting gigs if I charge $150/hr for high level dialplan programming for call centers, and some dude in India tries to undercut me at $50/hr I have to usually explain that there are two factors in that equation. Unlike replacing an ignition coil on your car, there is no set book on time for a particular task. So if I take 15min to do something remotely, and the other guy
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While working in shit work conditions is uncool; taking advantage of cheaper labor due to costs of living is not too egregious.
It's self-defeating. If all the jobs leave, how will people be able to afford to buy stuff?
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thats inevitably the problem with global economies, but even within the US the same arguments could be made. Why in the world would someone want to locate their business in california? They over regulate, red tape out the ass which amounts to more expenses, the cost of living is the highest in the US, wages are equally as high due to the cost of living. Whereas if you take some rural town in the midwest, they usually cut you a break for having your factory there, wages are generally half of wages in CA, ho
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Re: Seeking fortunes abroad... (Score:2)
If $7/hr somewhere else gets them the exact same lifestyle that $25/hr does in the US, then its not a problem. People like you seem to bitch, but Ive never seen you say - you know what? I really should be paying $300/mo for my phone bill. My smartphone was too cheap, It really should cost $2700.
Every single thing you buy is roughly 60% less than the cost it would be if every single aspect of that business was using equipment entirely made in the US. Your networking equipment? made overseas. Your servers? O
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Re: Seeking fortunes abroad... (Score:2)
Says the guy responding on his smartphone made by slave labor. Put your money where your mouth is. Destroy your cable modem, your wifi router, your laptops. All made on the backs of teenagers being called unpaid interns in china. I dont see you telling your ISP that you wont buy from them until their CPE is made here in the US. Good luck with that. ISPs are in the biggest demand to buy the cheapest CPE they can to avoid passing the cost onto the consumer, and consumers often break their CPE. The very intern
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'made' vs assembled (Score:1)
I'm curious as to how customs draw the lines on the definition of 'made in' vs 'assembled in' for tax purposes. What keyword would that fall under?
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So Apple doesn't give a fuck about India's treatment of their Muslim citizens or the occupation of Kashmir. Fuck Apple. Fuck Apple all to Hell
They didn't care about forced sterilization of Muslims in China, or organlegging, or slave labor. Why would they give a fuck about that stuff in India?
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Sanctions don't help those situations, it makes it worse.
Africa (Score:2)
Cant we throw africa a damn bone here? Surely there are people capable of this sort of work on that continent. I am fairly sure one of the reasons there is so much unrest there is due to everyone being poor as shit with no job to work.
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Where do you think China is outsourcing its petroleum industry?
Designed by Apple in California (Score:1)
HThis will help with the population. (Score:2)
India needs to reduce it's population.
I'm sure theincreased suicide rate will help with that.