Apple announces American Manufacturing Program (opens in new tab)

https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...

They did amount to something.

Those announcements were part of Apple's initiative to build/assemble certain Mac Pros in Texas.

The idea is to do it on a high-margin, low-volume product so that any hiccups can be absorbed in the accounting and aren't as impactful to millions of customers. Hiccups like a dearth of US suppliers of subcomponents.

If a North American customer purchases a Mac Pro its final assembly occurs in Austin, Texas.

According to local media and government reports Apple has spent over a billion dollars in Austin and directly employed about 10,000 new permanent workers so far.

If you count local suppliers, the total is higher.

You can see some of the billion dollars here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/dHy52bEoWizDC5qz5

You can click on "See more dates" and select 2020 to see that in two years that site went from "empty lot" to "hundreds of thousands of square feet and thousands of workers".

The Flextronics facility about a mile-and-a-half to the south is another chunk of cash.

Additionally, many, MANY, components from audio codecs to SoC cores to sheets of glass used in Apple products are made in the US and exported for integration into products that are assembled overseas.

If you think 5 years from announcement to construction is a long time, I've been working about that long on a committee to build a tiny 4-bay fire station. It isn't about money, we have the money and infinite money wouldn't really change anything. It's about permits, contractor availability, and subsystem/subcomponent lead times. The diesel fume extraction system installers had a year-long backlog of work alone.

If you're waiting for the iPhone to be built in the US, you're going to be waiting for a long time, perhaps an infinitely long time. Other, higher-margin lower-volume, products? That's more likely.

I'm more familiar than most with how difficult it is to build things in the US, because I build satellites for a living and fire stations as a civic duty.

It's hard.

The landscape has also changed. In 2018, Apple could wait out Trump hoping to get the Bush GOP back. That party is dead. It will still be corporate friendly, but not on immigration or trade. Big Ag couldn’t even get carved out of the immigration raids. The Clinton Democratic Party is dead too. What’s the odds that either Vance 2028 or AOC 2028 are going to let Apple off the hook on commitments?

> Foxconn will reduce its planned investment to $672 million from $10 billion and cut the number of new jobs to 1,454 from 13,000

Funniest one is Masayoshi Son announcements, in 2016 - $50B for 50k jobs, and in 2024 - $100B for 100k jobs !

2016: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/06/trump-says-softbank-will-inv...

2024: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/16/softbank-ceo-to-announce-100...

Funny thing here is, that he doesn't even have that money. But who cares these days...

Any amount of returning manufacturing here, returning power to the middle class by increasing the demand for labor and stopping the exploitation of foreign workers is a good thing. I can't stand listening to him talk, but if iPhones aren't reliant on slaves mining cobalt and 13 year olds working 12 hours a days I will consider that a win.

Ironically, your comment is double-bladed.

This has likely been in the works from when China shook Apple down and the timing has a nice upside that it also pacifies His Orangeness(tm).

Of course Apple didn't do it on their own accord, there was way too much profit to be made from outsourcing to China. Everyone else was doing it, why not also the richest company on earth?

...it gifts authoritarian power to autocrats and fully guarantees more authoritarian behavior.

But if this even gives us some chance to jolt our manufacturing sector back, will we start to gain some momentum? Even if it's mostly using automation. Will it help to reduce our reliance on China?

I doubt it will in the same way that it's been extremely hard for other countries to replicate the US momentum in R&D.

But one can hope.

Why? Especially considering military systems are looking increasingly like masses of consumer electronics (e.g. FPV drones).

It's not spineless, it's his job to act in the interests of the company

They brought a 24k gold trophy for the president. That’s the tangible demonstration here.

> This is not PR fluff. > Critics may argue Apple is acting in self-interest.

This is PR fluff and, as a critic, I don’t think it’s in anyone’s best interest.

> This is a large, measurable, and multi-year commitment. It should be acknowledged as such.

How does this compare to the large measurable multi year commitments from the last few administrations that never materialized? What about the one from a few months ago the ago?

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more...

There is no grand strategy here and I assure you after he is gone nobody will even know if this pledge was followed through.

> This is a large, measurable, and multi-year commitment. It should be acknowledged as such.

We'll see. The multi-year nature can be seen as a feature or a bug. The benefits are delivered today: tariff carve outs. The promises can be scaled back at any time in the future. We're dealing with what is likely to be an incredibly anomalous economic... "policy". It is likely to not stick around once the current administration leaves, and perhaps even during the course of the current administration. If tariffs go away in the future, then the threat (and reward) disappear along with it. We'll see how incentivized Apple is to keep these commitments under those conditions if they come about.

> Of course, Apple’s global tax practices remain a fair target. But criticising every constructive move on that basis alone risks undermining the very kind of behaviour governments should encourage: strategic reinvestment, not financial engineering.

It should always go without saying that there are ways to go about this that don't involve policies that hurt both consumers and small companies alike. The CHIPS act was one example, and the benefits were arguably more evenly distributed (vs. a set of investments that probably disproportionately help the existing market leader). This administration went out of their way to dismantle that. No conversation about this should leave that out.

> Critics may argue Apple is acting in self-interest. So be it.

Neither this administration nor Apple seem to really care much about this. This matters for the reasons above: it doesn't make this deal particularly resilient. Both parties got what they wanted immediately: Apple got to avoid an unexpected roadblock (and perhaps gained an advantage over other companies), and Trump gets to look like he got this great deal. So what's to keep it around? This is why aligning actual long term incentives matters, vs. this short term nonsense. A congressional bill for example at minimum has constituents who will benefit or punish the representative at the polls. But we don't even need to get that technical, if neither party cares or believes in this at all, then it is of course set up to default fail. This is not a trivial undertaking we are talking about. It's not just a matter of getting the right parties to invest. You are asking to dramatically change a set of pipelines that have been established over the course of decades and regularly receive equivalent amounts of investment. If you actually want this to happen, you should care about how it happens, and you should realize it matters if this is made up entirely of cynical players with no real demonstrable upside in the end result.

TSMC is building factories in America, and Apple is the biggest customer so far. It's a similar situation for rare earth magnets. So, not just "assembly".

As to tariffs in general, you should learn about something called the "trade deficit". The other countries, such as China, already had tariffs on American products, America is simply reciprocating. If tariffs are so stupid, why do so many countries use them I wonder?

One beneficial side effect of tariffs is bringing strategic manufacturing onshore, such as...semiconductor manufacturing.

Like it or not, the US economy will grow explosively as a result of the current economic policies, after an adjustment period.

So India/ China can supply other markets?

Apple has been directly threatened with tariffs by Trump. Currently they are exempt from the India tariffs.

The capex commitment in the US is a transactional agreement to ensure that these exceptions are kept.