Comment on The New York Times Just Published Some Bizarre Race Science About Asian Women
orclev@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoWell 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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
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.