This article is just more Apple sensationalism to prop up a slumping stock price.

CarolinaCougar, do you realize that Lenovo is the Chinese company that bought the PC business from IBM? Ironic that an American company whose invention revolutionized the world eventually felt compelled to sell that business to a Chinese company, who saved money for awhile by building products in China, and now is going to start building them in the U.S. -- just like IBM used to do.

Our education system sucks because of two reasons. We aren't teaching subjects anymore, we are teaching kids how to take tests.

It also sucks, because too many parents take a back seat, averting themselves of responsibility of their children, and their well being when it comes to their education. Don't get me wrong, I know there is a lot of parents out there doing the right thing, but there's a whole hell of a lot that aren't!!

... said the retard.

that was a design flaw, not a manufacturing flaw, and the exec responsible for it was either let go, or flat out fired.

According to the article, the executive was thrown out a window. The author really needs to learn what defenestration means.

You dems are a fical bunch. The only jobs Apple is talking about bringing to the US are low wage assembly jobs. And it's just enough to appease knuckleheads like you.

If you had any understanding of exchange rates, and costs of living in different countries, and how governments purposely manipulate these things, then you'd understand why so many jobs went to China and India to begin with.

Oh Please.

What is happening is that the cost of labor in other countries is rising making our cost of labor is more competitive when shipping costs, etc are factored in.

OBAMA has had nothing to do with it! ( other than get in the way with bigger central government)

I don't think that's the whole thing Dana, but I think it plays into it.

People in growing economies will only accept those wages for a while, then they'll want to do exactly what we've been doing here, want more. The trend will continue this way, and whatever country offers the best options, will be where the jobs will go. It's called a global economy.

Right on, only when foreign workers begin to establish labor unions will we see a mad rush of manufacturing return to our shores. I doubt very seriously that oppressive govts like China's will ever allow that to happen.

They have too many people in China, eventually people will get what they want, if they want it.

But I wouldn't be so sure that the jobs will come back to America. You may see another "developing" country do the same China, and India have done. I would assume the next location will be somewhere in Africa.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid you are probably 100% correct.

Those are just the facts of a global economy. It has it's positives, and it's negatives.

We as a nation need to learn to cope with them, instead of bitch about them, because it's not going to change.

We used to be a country of innovation, and I think we can be again, and I think that's the area where the US will separate themselves, but as long as we handcuff ourselves, we will be starting from behind everytime.

TheDougler960608......you said:

Quote......If you had any understanding of exchange rates, and costs of living in different countries, and how governments purposely manipulate these things, then you'd understand why so many jobs went to China and India to begin with......EndQuote

If we (democrats) are so stupid, and you (republicans) are so smart, how is it we just won POTUS (again) plus picked up seats in the Senate and HOR?

Folks: Workers in Germany and Switzerland are some of the highest paid in the world. Their governments haven't been complicit with their corporations in sending jobs to foreign lands. Ours (esp. the Bush administrations) has. Exporting jobs to the lowest wage nation is NOT inevitable. Stop being such pessimists.

Now, the Obama administration is using various mechanisms to turn that (jobs export) tide. You should be proud and glad. But, mostly you just hope for the worst. You will be disappointed. President Obama will continue his winning ways and history will record his as one of the most successful presidencies since FDR.

Winners shine and losers whine.

Actually it's usually the other way around. The components are designed & developed in the U.S., sometimes manufactured here too (Intel, Texas Instruments, Micron, Freescale, Microchip, and others), then shipped overseas for final assembly.

The high-paying engineering & technical jobs are here. The low-paying low-skill assembly jobs are where China and other Asian countries excel. Trained monkeys could do that job too.

Give companies a reason to be here, and they will.

Between the over reach of greedy labor unions taking their tactics way too far along with the total and absolute all consuming greed of this government regulating and taxing them into oblivion, it's no wonder why they left here to begin with. But not only did they eliminate that by leaving, they also eliminated a fair wage and working conditions right along with employee bennies. For them it was a win win win.

They think we are all stupid man. They are simply dodging the bullet every which way they can to try and keep from admitting the true reason why they all left from here. PURE PHUCKING GREED!

Kenny, you're going back half a century or more there. Yes, the TV was an American invention. So was the transistor and the integrated circuit and the Personal Computer. In the good old days we not only designed those things here, but also manufactured them here.

But long ago, the Japanese became very adept at manufacturing electronics more efficiently, at lower cost, than we could. As they moved up the value chain, they also became very adept at imagining and designing those products rather than simply manufacturing them. Then after the Japanese, it was the South Koreans, who essentially copied the Japanese model and starting eating Japan's lunch. Now it's China & South Korea competing for dominance of consumer electronics, and even Japan is being left behind.

Tim Cook only slightly mis-stated things. Yes, we once had a consumer electronics industry here. It was very small compared to today, and was characterized by expensive products that didn't particularly get cheaper every year or with every new generation. If you're old enough, you might remember when not everyone owned a TV set, and it was a big thrill to visit your rich friend's house because they actually had a TV set! Then later, it was a big deal to have a color TV set. Wow, that set the family budget back quite a lot. I remember buying my first IBM PC in early 1983, for $2,000. That was a huge amount of money back then, and I was the only one among my friends & co-workers who owned one.

So yes, we once had a fledgling consumer electronics industry characterized by relatively low volumes and high prices, but that's not the modern consumer electronics industry, which is characterized by exactly the opposite -- huge volumes, low prices, and the assurance that next year's product will cost even less and do a lot more.

Exactly, but you left out the part about Wa, Or, and Ca state governments being so rabidly hostile towards business owners. They are just as damn greedy, if not greedier, than the corporations themselves. Small businesses especially, in these three bastions of liberalism, do not stand the chance of a snowball in hell!!!

wait a minute midnighridr....you mean to tell me that the government is greedy?

Say it ain't so midnight.....say it ain't so lol

Sarcasm aside, if you really want to experience a sobering, eye opening scenario, try starting up a small bus. in one of these three hell holes. You will literally work your a$$ to death 80 hrs a wk to pay the gov until you get sick enough of it to throw in the towel. It's totally impossible man.

You really don't have a clue do you? Typical sheeple that you are!

You are correct. 10 times more China engineers that US. Pay is a max of $2 per hour for manufacture. Engineering pay is about $35K, vs $108 for US. You mentioned $5 per hour...thats too high still, nevermind the added benefits cost. Apple does not sit on a billion dollars, are you kidding (respectfully). Please check the internet and you wilol see Apple sits on $72B IN CASH. Think for a seond....why cannot the government operate this efficiently......talk about a laugh...putting the gov't in charge. I could not imagine how long it would take for the cash to dissappear, and the number of employees to double

It was a poor choice of words on Tim Cook's part, but he wasn't completely wrong. The Chinese workers at Foxconn are not completely uneducated, but they don't have college degrees either. They are mostly, like you said, trained on the job.

But after they receive that training and have 6 months' experience working at the world's most advanced state-of-the-art electronics assembly facility in Shenzhen, China, then they really do have skills & experience that no American worker has, because there are not facilities like Foxconn's anywhere else in the world.

It's not just about the cheap Chinese labor, it's also about the frighteningly advanced hi-tech factory complex in which they work. Sure, that could be duplicated here or elsewhere, all it takes is money -- tens of billions of dollars. And then Americans could be trained on the job just like the Chinese are now -- trained to babysit the robots that do most of the actual work.

PROFIT is king

You understand that this is the sole purpose that commerce and economies even exist right?

This has nothing to do with giving in to Asia. In fact, who ever was giving in to Asia? They were taking advantage of Asia!

All of the parts will continue to be made in Asia, as will most of their products.

Yes, the China labior rate has changed. It has accelerated and skyrocked to an amazing maximum value of up to $2 now. We really can compete with that. You mentuioned about China engineers...I have had them work for me, there are 10 times more engineers in China than the US...nuff said

I worked for GE. The issue is that this is all done by the numbers...thermal pumps technology....nothing to do with it. Appliances are large, expensive to ship, so the shipping cost ends up being a large part of the total product cost. Appliances are large volume and therefore, allow themselves to be efficiently produced by automation (sheet metal panels, coatings, brackets are stamped out by punch presses, PCB's are full automated, etc., etc). So, in this case it will make sense to bring some of the more automated parts to the US, and concentrate on final assembly. If there was a larger labor cost, GE would never, never do it - it is all a numbers game

Agreed. The Atlantic article made it pretty clear that this is happening for financial and market reasons, in spite of the glowing title (Behind the Insourcing Boom!) which lead to an initial impression that, by golly, we're getting manufacturing jobs back, and soon all will be well! The writer also made clear that certain low skill jobs like sewing garments will probably never come back to the US. But yes, it is all a numbers game: having refined the design of the water heater, there's nothing to prevent GE from moving the production back to China, except possibly shipping costs and duties. The article also discusses wage pressures in China and several other factors, such as being able to respond more quickly with design changes to add features which would probably apply to more high-end, higher cost appliances rather than lower cost items. It also made clear that due to automation and productivity gains, GE can produce more appliances with fewer workers, so even if Appliance Park starts cranking out products in the same numbers it used to, it will do so with far fewer workers.

Except that it's usually the other way around -- assembled in China, but with components that came from suppliers in the U.S., Japan and Europe. The electronics supply chain is global, but the bulk of the high value-added work is still done outside of China.

Apple's applications processor -- the newest one is called the A6 -- was designed & developed in California. When Apple made the decision a few years ago to make it's own processor, that ultimately led to the creation of lots of high-paying engineering jobs in Cupertino. Ah, you say, but Samsung is the one the actually manufactures that chip for Apple. True, Samsung processes the silicon wafers for Apple, but even that is not such a high value-add activity. Due to the bad blood, fierce competition in smartphones & tablets, and the lawsuits between Apple & Samsung, it is likely that Apple will eventually shift some or all of that chip manufacturing away from Samsung to one of the chip foundries (probably TSMC in Taiwan) whose entire business is to manufacture other companies' integrated circuits for them.

Look at a teardown of any of the recent Apple products -- iPhone 4/4s/5 or any of the iPods or iPads -- and you will find that most of the high-value chips come from U.S. companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments (who also manufactures them in the U.S. by the way), Cirrus Logic and Skyworks. With the exception of TI, none of those others have their own chip manufacturing capability -- not here or anywhere else in the world. They go to foundries like TSMC, because that's just the way the economics are in this business. Even Apple with all its money probably cannot afford to build & own its own chip fab. But even without owning manufacturing facilities, many of those U.S.-based fabless companies are huge companies with thousands of well-paid U.S. employees.

As for the other components in an iPhone, iPod or iPad, you will find a chip from ST Microelectronics (French/Italian), a memory chip from a Japanese supplier, an LCD screen from a different Japanese supplier, and a power management chip from a German supplier.

What you won't find are any components from a Chinese supplier.

The world changed, WWII is long over and the destroyed countries are back as very strong competition, and we cannot compete with China, we cannot pay our people $1 - $2 per hour. That is the issue. The result of that is our standard of living will suffer, and go down....it is our tough luck and we need to either figure a way around it, or accept it...as many other civilizations did, or did not(fall of the Roman Empire, Greece, 100's more). The best we can do is take advantage of it, as all corporations do. Another example...US Engineer costs a company about $108K a year, China and India Engineer about $35K. With the internet, they can do the engineering during the night while American engineers do the design during the day...this works out especially well for Software Engineeering. If we did not take advantage of the inexpensive labor resources in Mexico, China, etc, our products around the world would suffer due to higher price difference, and we would really be in trouble. Today the Chinese like the following..."designed in America, made in China". We need to concentrate on new technology to stay on top, and strengthen our patents so the Chinese do not copy a major breakthrough. We need to reduce entitlements because we are not the country of old, and are in a slow decline.....we need to live within what the US is, not what democrats imagine we are......America is NOT what it used to be. You want proof? 16T in debt, and getting biger by millions every minute..........

Well stated Bonneville

Bonneville, I agree with most of what you said, except for one major caveat -- an experienced U.S. engineer (the kind who makes a six-figure salary) is not easily replaceable with 3 Indian or Chinese engineers at 1/3 of that salary each. I have worked on many engineering projects over the last decade or so with engineers from both of those countries, and it's no surprise that engineering is being "backshored" to the U.S. more and more.

I'm not saying they suck -- they don't actually. Maybe it's more of a cultural thing like doing only what you're told -- no less and no more -- or never questioning a superior, or in the case of Chinese engineers the language barrier is certainly an issue, and there's always the concern about protecting our IP. Whatever the reasons, my company's experience with outsourcing engineering tasks has not been that great. We still have those teams there, and they are good for certain things. Once you know their capabilities and limitations, you can assign them specific (and very well-defined) tasks and they can execute those tasks. But they are not going to develop your next winning product by themselves, or even mostly develop that product.

"Designed in America, Made in China" works extremely well for contract assembly jobs -- exactly the kind of work Foxconn does for Apple, HP, Dell, Cisco, Motorola, Nokia, etc. I'll be honest, Foxconn is by far the best in the world at that, and it's probably not so much their $1.50/hour employees as it is their frighteningly advanced state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities, which are unrivaled by anything you will find in any other country.

In other areas, Chinese manufacturing is not so great. Integrated circuit fabs, for example, absolutely suck in China, but ironically some of the best & most advanced chip fabs in the world are in Taiwan, exceeded in quality and capability only by Intel's fabs here in the U.S. Taiwan yes, mainland China no. Go figure.

I agree we do need to concentrate on new technology, and encourage technology investments and education in STEM fields. But as for low-skilled and highly automated manufacturing? China has got that nailed in many areas (excepting integrated circuit fabrication) and that ship sailed a long time ago. Even if a U.S. company were highly motivated to try to duplicate here what Foxconn has in Shenzhen, it would take tens of billions of dollars and would likely be a money-losing investment.

Let's stay focused on where we Americans can best add value to these products that are and always will involve a global supply chain.