Imagine if Apple spent a paltry 5-10% of their gigantic cash horde on building a completely automated factory in the US. Intel spends about $4 billion on a chip factory, and a decent sized car factory is less than a billion. For $10 billion, you could build something epic.
Imagine what an advantage that would give them in terms of brand image, unique manufacturing capabilities that their competitors couldn’t access, time to market, secrecy, and everything else. For even less money, they could try it as a pilot project with a smaller, less critical product like the iPod or AppleTV. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. Even building a couple million iPod Shuffles in the US would give them a huge PR boost.
What the hell else are they going to do with all that money? For how much “vision” they are credited with having, they sure seem very shortsighted sometimes.