One man and a dog. The man’s job is to feed the dog, and the dog’s job is to make sure the man doesn’t touch anything. We all know where manufacturing is heading- it’s getting harder to find Chinese subsistence farmers to do repetitive, dangerous work. As labor is getting more expensive, automation is getting cheaper. Once everything is automated, it won’t matter where you put your factory. I’d be curious to know how many people work in one of those Intel chip fabs. A couple hundred maybe?
The US has less and less experienced and up to date manufacturing specialists. A huge factory would require a lot of engineering know-how.
This is a good point. The easy answer: the Taiwanese can do it. Most of the biggest and best Chinese factories are actually Taiwanese owned and run, because they were the ones who went there after costs got too high in Taiwan in the late 80s/early 90s. As China has become more expensive, a lot of them have moved on to Vietnam. Now that Vietnam is getting expensive, they are looking for the next place. I know in furniture at least, some of them are kicking around the idea of opening factories in the US.
Albeit, has this recent bad press hurt Apple yet? It doesn’t seem so.
It could go either way. The NYT and TAL stories are only a week or two old, and I think there are a lot more coming. The people who made Apple into a “cool” brand aren’t likely to shrug this off if it gets reported more and more. Now that Apple is the biggest company in the world, they aren’t the scrappy underdog going up against Microsoft. And of course Jobs is gone. It isn’t hard to imagine them being seen as evil pretty quickly.