I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.

I worked at a dev company, and we got bought by an IT company. Much pain and friction, all around. Is that a reductive representative of the company differences? Yeah, but it's still a useful mental model that helps one understand the differences. And I think the lawyer vs engineer trope is useful. Yeah we have both. Both my companies had both IT and developera, but the stakes & priorities were different enough that that lense became extremely helpful.

Think of it as engineers vs non-engineers (lawyers/mba types/etc). We complain about that on here all the time (ex. boeing). It's where the priorities are: is it on making things better or making more money? In an ideal world, it would be both. Unfortunately here, it is not otherwise enshittification would not be a thing.

Indeed. “Used to” is the key observation. In the wake of WW2, the U.S. had both dynamism and the ability and will to act collectively. This combination led to rising standards of living, the space program, Silicon Valley, the internet, etc.

The U.S. economy is still relatively dynamic, but the will to collective action has completely failed.

Europe can act collectively but lacks dynamism.

Which country, today, demonstrates both traits?

It's a popular trope that confirms the audiences bias's and when you do that the monkey brain gets rewarded by seeing the number in the top right go up.

If anyone’s analysis is subpar it’s yours.

It's easier when your government is proposing "hey, let's build all the factories the best way we can" and not "hey, let's impose illogical and continually-changing tariffs on everything and let Howard Lutnick's kids steal all the proceeds". You're right as an American to be skeptical of the government - it's not operating in your best interests unless you're one of the elite insiders. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.

I would say that for long-term engineering projects (building bridges etc) authoritarian central planning is a required trait.

You have areas with lots of Oil Refineries, Houston and Baton Rouge for example. You have areas with lots of steel mills, like in North West Indiana. These are examples I personally know of. Obviously a lot of big tech factories exist close to each other in Silicon Valley and in Austin Texas too.

There are "industrial clusters" in America too, simply put. It is natural for large chemical plants or industrial sites to build up near where their source is. Hence all the oil refineries around the gulf. This is not a uniquely China thing at all. Lots of major US cities are known for specific types of industries.

The point is that transportation within China isn't a dominant factor in industrial cost or efficiency. So the idea that major manufacturing cities are laid out like giant assembly lines isn't nearly as important as OP suggests.

China still has many advantages over the US in manufacturing. I just don't think this is a major one, even if there's a grain of truth to it.

https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-doesnt-have-zoning...

Died a long time ago and went to hell in handbasket :(

>If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete

Houston had always been less expensive than Detroit, LA, Chicago, New England and just about anywhere else in the US for this kind of thing, but it was really the cheapness of the foreign labor that made it irresistible to Wall Street. It had always been that way but didn't really matter until after the value of the dollar had been dropped so low that they had to pay workers what amounted to exorbitant sums while the labor still ended up with less discretionary cash, and that was at the lower-value dollar.

You should have seen Houston in 1979 when the Nixon Recession was raging worse than ever, long after he had sailed into the sunset. It was no Pittsburgh[0] but there were still two steel mills and of course one of them was US Steel where they had expanded to the industrial suburb of Baytown Texas specifically because the labor was cheaper than up north.

Wall Street took that differential to the bank and lit their cigars with $100 bills :\

Eventually led to champagne and caviar with each round of layoffs.

Nixon "opened up" China, but Reagan was not yet here to put the nail in the coffin.

I agree it would take a whole lot more unfair advantages just to get closer to a level playing field.

The way to real manufacturing growth is to build much higher-value-added products per worker.

The difficult problem to overcome is that most of the low-cost raw materials have been coming from China for so long, and the ideal thing would have been coming from more than one place the whole time.

But no, the absolute cheapest must be sought.

Mexico could have been ready by now but they would have had to do it on their own in an organized way like China and India so it pales by comparison, especially high tech in spite of all the brilliant Mexican engineers and innovators.

Lower-cost labor in India might be abundant enough but it'll take a while before the supply chain can compare to what China has built with all the dollars they have had in their hands for so long.

[0] Made up for it with oil, as heavy industry goes.

China also needs to change something drastic to avoid brain drain. The migration of competent people is still one-way. There no path to become a Chinese citizen. China has come a long way, but Europe is still ahead on building liveable communities and wok/life balance, while the US is still attractive to those seeking freedom and prosperity. China has avoided issues due to a huge population and that demographic dividend. But eventually it’ll become an issue

maybe time to check your priors

There are other places, as the comment above mentioned, that can produce for cheaper.

There’s a giant cultural shift that needs to happen in the U.S. to get that back—not sacrificing labor laws, like China does, but the same idea that X or Y CAN be done, and actually jumping at the chance to build stuff instead of feeling entitled to it.

We do have agency, but the agency actually starts in the U.S., in education and culture, and not with a company like Apple.

In contrast you have provided no arguments for why Apple’s leadership bears responsibility rather than Congress.

Hmm, I don’t like the sound of that.

And this is becasue huge international investors still own sites like malls and retail centers and still remember the massive rents they used to command for those units.

The bubble will burst when enough sites are written off, and IMO rents will come back down to a reasonable level in a decade or 2.

This is an American quality where a person who works in a factory that makes extension cords and needs their job to survive would buy the cheaper lamp even though it's made in China.

Most people aren't willing to make financial sacrifices to help people they don't know EVEN if they might be affected by another person having the same belief.

If the US changes their environmental regulations to match China, lowered their tax-to-GDP ratio to match China, changed their worker regulations to match China, and then opened up free immigration from Mexico for cheap factory labor then the "free" market would likely take care of opening up quite a bit more manufacturing.

Extorting CEOs to announce investments (like the Zuckerberg hot mic incident) is not worth anything to me. Meanwhile the US has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for the last year.

Now it's the CPTPP and doesn't include the US.

Canada is looking to the Pacific and EU for trade now (and China as well), so is Mexico.

It's likely that the EU/UK trade bloc will connect with the CPTPP via both the UK and Canada, which connects them to the APAC/ASEAN nations.

Everyone is aware of the power of the Chinese economy and the idea of the CPTPP is precisely to build up a trade economy that can compete and co-operate with China on an equal basis.

In the meantime, China is using its Belt & Road Initiative as a sort of "Marshall Plan" to extend its influence by building infrastructure like ports and rail.

These trade initiatives are at least focused on increasing trade, as opposed to the US "trade policy" which is to use tariffs as a crude form of protectionism and extortion to "bring manufacturing back".

If the US wants to take on China, and actually needs Canada's help to do it -- I can assure you they just set themselves back 10-20 years from achieving that. We no longer have any interest.

The labour forces of Mexico and Canada are not at the US's disposal for these kind of games anymore. For several decades we have been exploited by the US for low wages and cheap resources -- and now there's a regime that's making cheap political points by accusing us of the opposite while trying to emmiserate our populace. So, yeah, no thanks.

If we end up in a place where AI and automation take over then yeah I think we start looking at alternative income sources and economic system. Just like star trek predicted we would do after WW3.

> Apple here is the first step.

Pretty sure the much-touted Foxconn plant in Wisconsin was the first step, and just like this one it will be scaled down to a few hundred jobs as soon as possible.

I don't buy this argument.

Sure, labor protections in China are weak, but let's use our mirrors: the US has no guaranteed paid time off of any kind, it has unions on paper only, 1 in 10 Americans have no health insurance, and it's nearly the only country where medical bankruptcy exists as a concept. The largest employer in the US runs a scheme where their workers are intentionally kept part-time with low enough wages to need SNAP assistance and other social safety net programs, as well as avoiding any obligation to provide health insurance, effectively subsidizing their corporate profits with tax dollars. America's middle class has been shrinking via housing, healthcare, and education cost inflation while China's middle class has been growing as its industries have continually moved further up the value chain.

"China is just cheap labor" is a last-Millennium viewpoint. China is a manufacturing ecosystem where you can walk into a physical marketplace and find rows of vendors with skilled technicians who all know how to work on electronic or machinery or other manufacturing skills, where they offer services like chip-level NAND upgrades where they solder on storage upgrades to your iPhone while you wait.

China is now a country where you would pay a price premium to buy their products over competitors.

You mean like how the US government constantly bails out and props up the American car companies?

You can't compare different products across different brands, the whole point is to compare the exact same product made in two different locations.

> and it meant something - like, better parts availability, repairability, documentation, support, etc.

But remember, this bit isn't related to the country that assembled the product, it has much more to do with the company and brand doing the post-sales support, marketing, and the rest of the customer-facing stuff. The Mac mini isn't getting a better post-sale experience just because it's going to be assembled in Houston. The product and company are identical.

Finally, I think it may be worth recognizing that there's a growing perception that Chinese products are the best ones, just like how people felt about many American products built in the post-WW2 era. I would subscribe to this perception that Chinese products are more likely to be good than products made in many other countries. They just have the ecosystem and the most expansive, skilled high volume manufacturing on the planet.

This statement is as inaccurate as the comment you’re trying to debunk. The fact is that China leveraged it’s low-end manufacturing work to work its way up the chain and now is the leader in many areas: https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outper.... E.g. China has been investing heavily in radar technology and as a result has air to air missiles with comparable range to the U.S. https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/why_the_us_is_alar...

There are synergies to having the high end stuff and the low end stuff in the same place. The story of IBM developing System 360 mentions the benefit from the ladies who wound the wire core memory and the guys who designed the computer on the same campus in New York. We gave that up when we outsourced the “menial” stuff abroad.

China at this point is hard in automation, beyond anything the US has. China is well past the peak of sweatshops.

As someone in the manufacturing space in the US, the biggest issue we have in the US is that manufacturing continues to die. Any manufacturing we have left is the old guard dying off. It comes from a range of issues from companies refusing to invest in younger employees, to the cost of real estate (both buy or rent) for commercial properties being absurd..

The reason we can’t do manufacturing is because Wall Street demands capital light business models.

That, in turn, is an outcome of being the global reserve currency.

The reason we don’t invest in manufacturing is because of requirements for return on capital.

Ask yourself why GM is doing massive stock buybacks in the era of global transition to electric cars. Why aren’t they using these huge sums of cash to invest in the next generation of products and instead literally just sending the money out the door?

https://www.propertytax101.org/propertytaxbystate

As someone living in Fort Worth and making good money as a Staff SWE, I got a tax refund this year. It was due to paying interest on my house, but still.

I'd recommend asking your sibling see if they qualify for the homestead exemption, it's significant. You or they can check if they're using it and see their exact property taxes here:

https://www.tax.tarrantcountytx.gov/search

However, this issue is complicated by the fact that Trump toured the factory in 2019 and claimed it was new, something the press picked up an and therefore the media stories of the time are pretty warped.

In reality, Apple had many issues ramping up production in the US for various reason, one example being supply chain.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/now-know-why-apple-had-142145...

If they started in 2012 and it all went rosy, why did they have another press release in 2019 announcing it again, and why are they making a big song and dance about it again 14 years later? If everything with manufacturing in the US was going fine, I would have expected them to start making a lot more products in the US over those 14 years. Instaead we have a couple of troubled product lines, and some big shiny press releases trying to show off its importance.

The only thing it says is "custom Apple silicon", which honestly could mean a high-binned chip from the same production line.

You gotta admit that the M4 price is kind of a magic trick. Also, with zero carbon emissions.

Look at their environmental report:

https://images.apple.com/co/environment/pdf/products/desktop...

> To address emissions generated by using primary materials, we’re increasing the recycled content in our products, maximizing material and manufacturing efficiencies, and improving yields.

This wording is very specific. It's not "recycled materials", it's "recycled content" to address the emissions of using primary materials. I find it to be very sneaky.

I'm not saying they're refurbishing used servers, but there's definitely something going on here.

Look at their overall environment report from 2024 (not product specific):

https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Pr...

There is a section about "Material recovery". Here is a quote:

> Even after a product reaches the end of its life, the materials within it can serve the next generation of products.

> Each time that we effectively recover materials from end-of-life products, we enable circular supply chains.

> Disassembly and recovery advancement: Continuing to develop better, more efficient means of disassembling products that maximize material recovery while minimizing waste.

It seems to me that what they're describing here, publicly, is almost exactly what I said. I just made an extra leap implying that the disassembled EOL'd products were servers that never got used and were turned into M4 Minis (which is speculation, but highly informed by these reports).

Why do this? Well, it means they can invest on servers and if they lose some race, they can pivot. It's a unique advantage. I would take advantage of that if I were Tim.

It doesn't matter how many manufacturing experts America trains anymore. We lost this race; China has globally-competitive manufacturing, and the US doesn't. Apple doesn't want to willingly pay for American labor today, and a decade of manufacturing graduates will probably only ease the blow when big corps are forced to onshore again.

Luckily it's not just "for any reason" then! There are plenty of examples, where do you want to start? I'll start with a few: Steven Miller saying they have plenary authority, Bovino claiming a city was "theirs" after rolling up with CBP/ICE goons, JD Vance saying federal officers have "absolute immunity", CBP officers showing up in force at Gavin Newsom's rally, and the pardon of Jan 6th insurrectionists.

Also you didn't answer how the economics of onshoring have changed, I guess the fascist thing really struck a nerve... I wonder why.

https://mashable.com/article/apple-mac-pro-screw

That’s correct.

I’m on the right side of history. Are you?

The mini would save $87/year. That's a 3.5y breakeven assuming no reinvestment.

How can it be simpler than the Apple TV?

Are you thinking of plugging in actual consumer expansion cards, or are you wanting the lanes broken out on some kind of riser where they can go to hardwired stuff on a carrier board?