Yeah, that’s weird.
The reason iPhones are impractical to make in the US has nothing to do with anatomy or genetics, it’s purely labor costs. You can hire someone to work for very little and for very long in China, you can’t do that in the US. That’s it. That’s the only reason.
hire
They’ve been known to literally lock people in their factories, and even put up suicide nets to prevent slaves from killing themselves.
That’s it. That’s the only reason.
Manufacturing labour costs are far cheaper outside of China but the skills aren’t available. While labour costs are always a factor, the US just doesn’t have enough skilled manufacturing engineers or the supply chain you get somewhere like Shenzen.
The US had and has plenty, which is why manufacturing started in the US and migrated out once processes standardized enough to bring in less competent labor. Then labor became more competent, so more companies moved their operations there. A lot of US manufacturing engineers work with Chinese manufacturing facilities, because that’s where the labor is.
If the US wants to bring manufacturing back, it needs to be cheaper to do it domestically. That means automation, better materials transportation, and cheap raw materials.
I don’t see the point. Instead of bringing back manufacturing, improve education and focus on higher value work.
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What’s important to note is all the pieces that get screwed together are still made over there…
We can pay tariffs on all the pieces and screw them together here, but that’s going to essentially have the same tariff costs as a completed iPhone.
Having someone screw the pieces together here would also raise costs due to labor costs. But they’re two completely different things.
Quick edit:
Times author is legitimately named “Trip” and started out as a sports writer before pivoting to “apple, bourbon, and beer”.
These days it might just be AI, but if it’s a human it’s almost certainly a nepo hire…
They could even waive the tariffs and it would still be impractical to assemble in the US. The only way it’s practical here is with near full automation, and even then it’s probably still cheaper in China.
Labor and land are just so much cheaper there.
Apple spent literal decades training workers over there, and the Chinese government busted up Apple and all their workers went to competitors…
Like, sure, someone has to assemble the screws but it didn’t take Apple 20 years of investment to just teach them to use a screwdriver. It’s skilled labor.
Jon Stewart had some guy that wrote a book on it a week or two ago.
There’s some skilled labor, sure, but most of it is processes, and those can be replicated elsewhere. Apple brought the processes and refined them with local labor. But none of it is so special that it can’t be replicated elsewhere in a couple years (assuming facilities exist).
Look at phone repair, you can go to any mall and a teenager can disassemble and reassemble your phone with only a month or so of training. Making that process efficient is the hard part, and that only requires a few skilled jobs in a factory of thousands. The vast majority of jobs in assembly are pretty unskilled.
and those can be replicated elsewhere
Apple isn’t in the process of spending billions over decades to train people just to install screws…
Like, fuck Apple, I’ve never owned a single Apple product. But they wouldn’t have spent that much for so long to train people for unskilled labor.
Quick edit:
Apple in China[1] is a 2025 book by Patrick McGee[2][3][4] (Financial Times reporter[5] from 2013 to 2023[6]), about how Apple Inc. invested in China in order to build iPhones and other technology, and by doing so helped China become more competitive. In the book, McGee says that under Tim Cook Apple invested $275 billion over five years from 2016. McGee compares this to the Marshall Plan as this is in excess of other corporate spending. McGee says the Marshall Plan was about half Apple’s investment, in real terms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China
275,000,000,000 over five years…
That’s 55 billion a year, for five years straight.
It doesn’t cost that much to train someone to put a screw in
Sure, but it does cost that much to build a suite of factories complete w/ automation and whatnot. Buildings are expensive, especially high tech ones, but that doesn’t mean the labor involved is particularly high skill. Components, processes, software, etc are still largely designed by highly skilled workers in western countries.
Yes, there are some skilled jobs there, but the ratio is much lower for the employees in China than domestically.
Yes, there are some skilled jobs there, but the ratio is much lower for the employees in China than domestically.
You can just keep repeating the same thing over and over again despite it being wrong…
Doesn’t make it true tho, just makes other people eventually stop responding
Well it’s also about supply chains. All the components are also made in China so you’d end up ordering the parts and then having to wait a month or more for them to be shipped to the US. If you want to avoid delays that means maintaining a significant stockpile of parts in the US that you may or may not ever actually use.
Sure, but I don’t think supply chains are the critical factor here. You don’t necessarily need local supply if you can break up delivery into small enough chunks, so whether it takes a day or a month to get a part isn’t important once the flow is going smoothly. You only need local supply if there’s a significant risk of disruption/delays.
Yes, it’s probably a bit cheaper to assemble things closer to where they’re produced, but I still think labor costs are the determining factor. US workers expect higher pay, more PTO, less hours worked per week, and more benefits, so even if all the parts were shipped in perfectly consistently, it would still be significantly more expensive to assemble iPhones in the US vs in China.
Chinese wages are not actually that low. In Beijing minimum wage is ¥26.4 which is $3.66
US federal minimum wage is $7.25
Yet for these types of jobs, nobody gets paid minimum wage, even $15/hr is probably low. What is the typical Chinese employee making for this type of work?
Also several times the minimum wage. The minimum wage jobs are the do nothing jobs like door man.
The fact is, the difference is in concentration. You have millions of workers in Shenzhen all in the same area doing similar jobs. It makes it easy to ask one factory to manufacture a thing and the one next door to assemble it.
I guess the NYT no longer has an editor on staff? Who the fuck let that go to print, also who writes something like that into an article - that little paragraph where the NYT claims that “industry experts” said Chinese girls are better at assembling phones reads like cringe AI slop.
I feel like literally one person proofreading that should have been enough for them to go, “maybe don’t print the stupid racist thing about small fingers.”
Authors name is “Tripp” and if he’s a real person he 100% used AI to write it.
I’m guessing his grandfather was/is loaded and connected. I’ve never met a man in my life who goes by “Tripp” and isn’t an insufferable douche coasting off generational wealth.
The crazy part is he just “wrote” a book about Apple, and there’s a good chance Apple execs he talked to really said that stupid racist thing.
He goes by tripp because, according to his personal image consultant, “Leopold reitbarth the third” didn’t test well with under 30s in their focus groups
If it’s children doing it then it’s not racist anymore. – NYT, probably
capitalist mutual masturbation and manufactured cognitive dissonance / distraction so they don’t have to actually change anything and effect profit potential. while they wait for daddy dictator trump to open their proposals in the form of a cotton sack with a dollar sign on the side.
Wait a second:
it’s hard for apple to manufacture devices in a country with robust labor rights.
Robust labor rights? The US?
We have child labor making a comeback here. It’s not that far fetched to imagine children working in hypothetical US factories if things keep going the way they’re going.
After China and India, yeah, the US has very robust labor laws
Gigaset produces in Germany.
Terrible journalism. The author entirely neglects the fact that lemurs possess fingers even smaller than those of Chinese women. Why not have lemurs manufacture iPhones, given the particular daintiness of their digits? A true investigative journalist wouldn’t leave such crucial avenues of inquiry unexplored.
Hahahhhaahahha
yall seriously need some media literacy classes. or basic reading comprehension classes.
NYT paraphrased some industry people who posited that Chinese manufacturing benefits from small lady hands. that’s literally just covering a story. they didn’t say “us can’t make stuff because we don’t have little china-fingers and only tiny-china-fingers can make the pocket computers.” they just reported that some unnamed assholes said that.
Follow your own advice then, you’ll learn that it’s the role of the journalist to qualify wrong and offensive statements reported, or it is implied that the journalist approves of the position.
Wait, wait, I’ve seen this one!
applies Netherlands flag sticker to 8 ft. ceiling by extending arm and making small hop
TLDR
“Young Chinese women have small fingers,” the article reads, “and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said.” […]
there doesn’t seem to be a lick of evidence […] that small hands are preferable for manufacturing small devices. The closest thing we could find was a paper that found that surgeons with smaller hands actually had a harder time manipulating dextrous operating tools, which would seem to contradict the NYT’s claim that small hands are an advantage for small specialized movements.
(…so should they be hiring big white men instead? Not clear to me how this article thinks that’s a rebuttal of the ‘race science’)
I don’t really know what I’m talking about nor do I have a horse in this race, but could it be that small handed surgeons struggle with tools because the tools themselves are designed for big hands?
A valid hypothesis
that does seem plausible.
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So, NYT, do the Swiss all have micro hands? How do you explain Swiss watchmaking? For that matter, how about American watchmaking? America used to make all kinds of tiny wristwatches, including movements. There is also a few current American watchmakers, with a few building intricate movements.
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I agree with the outrage, but I don’t know that using race science to combat race science is the way to attack this horseshit. Futurism essentially says “the NYT says Asians have small hands, but what the race science actually says is that hand size is yada yada etc. etc.”
Like, is race science silly or is it not? 🤷 If science said that, yes, Asian women have unusually small and “nimble” fingers, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference; the entire concept is stupid and racist, not just the inaccuracy of the hand measurements. Needling over the microdifferences in index finger girth between Asians and Americans (who may well be of Asian descent themselves) is missing the whole-ass point.
As with most news source, I take them with a grain of salt. Especially when the news sources are owned by billionaires who have financial incentive to twist public media
Nyt is compromised
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Wiping your ass with horse shit is not quite something to be proud of.
I guess they can’t comprehend tweezers?
People are just now waking up to realize a pro genocide & pro wealth disparity publication isn’t moral?
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With all non-due respect, you’re being dishonest & disingenuous.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/world/middleeast/gaza-medic-israel-shooting.html
Your first link is from 2018 titled, “A Day, a Life: When a Medic Was Killed in Gaza, Was It an Accident?” I’ll quote from the article:
“An investigation by The New York Times found that Ms. Najjar, and what happened on the evening of June 1, were far more complicated than either narrative allowed… The Palestinians trying to tear down the fence are risking their lives to make a point, knowing that the protests amount to little more than a public relations stunt…”
Now let’s see if they question Israel’s narratives the same way?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/israel-hamas-information-war.html
Titled “In a Worldwide War of Words, Russia, China and Iran Back Hamas” and I quote:
“Iran, Russia and, to a lesser degree, China have used state media and the world’s major social networking platforms to support Hamas and undercut Israel, while denigrating Israel’s principal ally, the United States… Cyabra has documented at least 40,000 bots or inauthentic accounts online since Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7. The content — visceral, emotionally charged, politically slanted and often false — has stoked anger and even violence far beyond Gaza, raising fears that it could inflame a wider conflict.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-doctor-interviews.html
This is an opinion piece, right up there alongside:
The Genocide Charge Against Israel Is a Moral Obscenity: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/opinion/israel-hamas-war-genocide.html
The Reason for an Israeli Curfew: Palestinian Terrorism: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/opinion/letters/israel-palestinians.html
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/100000010140613/israel-gaza-medics-attack-idf.html
Where is the investigation? This is a video that wasn’t even taken by NYT. Regardless, for every 10 Israeli propaganda article, maybe one or two being slightly critical doesn’t mean jack shit.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/new-york-times-ignored-doubts-hamas-iran-october-7-documents
https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide-palestine-coverage/
Let’s look at this recent story:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/us/pro-palestinian-movement-embassy-attack.html
“The slaying of two Israeli Embassy workers cast a harsh spotlight on pro-Palestinian groups in the United States…”
