From the article at the link below:
"Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher of the New York Times have written an excellent article about why Apple makes iPhones and iPads in China instead of the United States.

One of the key points is this: Chinese factories are far more nimble than American factories.

The story Duhigg and Bradsher used to illustrate this will only add to the iPhone lore.

Just over a month before the first iPhone was to be released in 2007, the authors report, a frustrated Steve Jobs summoned his senior team.

Steve had been using a prototype iPhone for a few weeks, carrying it around in his pocket. When his lieutenants were assembled, he pulled the prototype out of his pocket and pointed angrily to dozens of scratches on its plastic screen.

People would carry their phones in their pockets, Steve said. They would also carry other things in their pockets--like keys. And those things would scratch the screen.

And then, with Apple just about to ramp up iPhone production, Steve demanded that the iPhone's screen be replaced with unscratchable glass.

“I want a glass screen," Steve is quoted as saying. "And I want it perfect in six weeks.”

The glass itself would come from Corning, an American company. But the only way for Apple to meet Steve's deadline would be to find an empty glass-cutting factory, a huge amount of glass to experiment on, and a team of mid-level engineers to figure out how to cut the glass into millions of screens.

An executive at the meeting knew that the only place Apple might be able to find these things would be in China. So he flew to Shenzhen, where a bid for the work quickly arrived from a Chinese company.

Before they even won Apple's business, the Chinese company started building a new factory building in which to cut the glass. (The Chinese government was providing subsidies, and the company took advantage of them--"just in case.") The company provided Apple with a team of cheap engineers, as well as spare glass for Apple to experiment with, the latter for free. The company's engineers were housed in dormitories, so they were available to Apple 24 hours a day.

Apple hired the company to cut the hardened glass for the screens, and after a month of experimentation, the engineers figured out how to do it. They quickly sent the first shipment of screens to Foxconn's assembly plant in Shenzhen, where they arrived in the middle of the night. Foxconn's managers woke up thousands of workers and immediately began assembling iPhones.

Three months later, Apple had sold 1 million iPhones. Four years later, Apple has sold ~200 million of them.

As the Apple executives who spoke to Duhigg and Bradsher for their article make clear, there is no way American manufacturing companies could have met this timetable.

The end-to-end process of building the iPhones, Duhigg and Bradsher report, required 8,700 mid-level engineers. In the United States, Apple estimated, it would have taken 9 months to hire this many engineers. In China, it took 15 days."

http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-...

Trumps plan to add import fees to products of American companies who manufacture outside of America will only hurt consumers. It's not like these companies will just "absorb" the fees and not pass them on. It won't change anything for these companies. He needs to "entice" them back, not penalize them.

I may have said this elsewhere on this board, but while I was working and living in China (2006) I found a Harley costing $16.5k USD in Upstate NY cost $40k USD in Beijing. So much for "free trade" and you can't tell me it cost $23.5k to ship it over there (unless there's some boondoggle in the space time continuum that makes it possible to move mass from Asia to North America easier than the other way around). No doubt fixing this is part of what Trump has in mind.

Back in the mid '70s I sent a note to my congress critter that a single trade law that simply reflects another country's own rules back on them is all we needed. That is, whatever restrictions or tarrifs that country placed on any US goods would be placed on all theirs.

In Atlas Shrugged, in the chapter "The Morator-
ium on Brains", just before Directive 10-289 is
issued, Dr. Floyd Ferris says something must be
done about the big industrialists' vanishing. He
even mentions that he proposed introducing the
death penalty for those people, but Mouch re-
fused. What is Trump trying to do here? Who
does he imagine he is?

The only way to do that and do it right would to make the USA a good country to do business in again - by making the US Business Friendly. I think his plan is more of a "get rid of the government hinderances, intervention, and taxation" than a Mr. Thompson/Wesley Mouch/Cuffy Meigs Stalinist approach.

Harmon's example (above) is an excellent example of this, and why China is beating the tar out of us in Manufacturing... Not only does our Government have it's pork-grabbing hands out at every (and I mean EVERY) juncture, it has busness so tightly regulated, threatened, fined and taxed, that even IF we could hire someone for a fair wage, and have them, like the Chinese workers above, on call to do what needs to be done RIGHT NOW, they would prohibit it as the "nanny for the worker's protective and collective bargaining rights". We have gone from the nation that can do to the nation that must get permission from our masters in Government... and grovel at their feet for permission to barely scrape our businesses by.

And if this reminds you of how things ran in the USSR - or China - and you're surprised about that, then you haven't been paying attention for some few decades.

IF - this is the big if - Trump can get Government's big, fat, obtrusive nose out of Businesses behind, and let them GET TO WORK (like we did decades ago) without forcing on them all kinds of moralistic and socialistic programs, rules, laws, and regs they HAVE to follow, then he will succeed, and yes, to quote him, "Make America Great Again".

Trump cannot force Apple or Ford to do anything unless he plans a takeover. As a businessman, he should know that lowering their taxes and a welcoming environment will do more to encourage local manufacturing than all the coercive talk. Make it easy for business to make money and the nation will prosper. As to Mrs. Clinton, she doesn't seem to understand most of economics and Sanders obviously understands nothing about hardly anything.

This fellow trump is demonstrating his lack of business knowledge which I find amazing, but then again he is probably just a spokesman for trump enterprises while others actually have run and built his company. that gives him the qualification to be pres. since he will be the spokesman for who ever really runs the country. He will tell us if pres why we are going down hill versus making us great again. As for dictating to apple; trump can dream on.

Remove the highest overall corporate tax rates in the developed world if you want more corporations to stay here. Apple is still based in the US. Try to inflict more force on them if you want that to no longer be the case.

No. Agreeing he is not and it is not possible.

"...a lot of worker going to China..." Eh, whatever. First off, I doubt it. And, second of all, it would probably get him votes.

I don't expect any of the candidates to think anything near Objectivism anymore...

The only way to get these companies back is to lower the tax rate. Currently I think 10% would do the trick but we also have to restructure the corporate paradigm into something that would resemble what the Chinese factory's were able to do. The will to succeed, competent management and perhaps instead of division of labor, replace it with division of profit making units with the people in those units being in complete control as if it were their very own business and taking a percentage of the profits instead of a salary. It's a variation on the incentive idea that many in sales are used to.

Comments like that from Trump just remind me that he's not a 'natural' at business economics and that when it comes to subjects like outsourcing or offshoring, he needs better advisers... like us, for example...
But with his Ego, he ain't gonna search for any other opinions.
And that's a real shame!

Actually...I believe the correct usage is "HRH" Donald Trump. Of course...it has been about 240 years since we've needed to care.

Trump has had great success saying things others won't, even if they are outrageous. He will eventually stop the bellicosity, but not now.

I think our robots would do as well as chinese robots. Apple devotees would gladly pay the few bucks extra US inspectors and packers would add to the cost. They already pay for handlers and packer at fulfillment centers. Maybe Apple would consolidate inspect/packing/fulfillment in the same facility.

They will move production of USA-bound product to the USA when the employee restrictions and regulations are reduced here, AND they can complete automation and robotization of their production lines.

There is no way to "bring back the jobs that went to china"- unless americans get off their entitled asses and work for the wages the Chinese get- OR figure out how to automate and robotize to get the efficiency up.

We have worldwide labor competition now, and to keep jobs here, our people have to be competitive, period.

So I just spent the weekend doing the end of the year paperwork (under threat of fines and probably jail time) for our employees, so the government can tax them (and our company). A month ago, I spend time successfully defending a labor board issue brought up by of all people- an illegal alien employee. A few months ago, I had to defend our company against the unemployment agency who wanted to charge our UI account for an employee who quit last year and then got laid off by THAT employer after a couple of months and is sitting home collecting $326 a week for half a year.

No wonder I want to outsource from China. None of these problems!!

"we gotta bring back the jobs from China, we gotta bring back the jobs from Japan and all these countries that are ripping us off"
Yet another politician talking as if jobs were some scarce commodity in short supply. Jobs are just people helping one another for money. Trump has it completely wrong. There is no limit to the ways creative motivated people can find to help one another in mutually agreed trades.

The 'story' is that labor costs are moving the jobs to China -- but Chinese plants are more and more automated. It's really regulatory costs and delay.

Lord knows how long it would take to build a new plant in the U.S. with all the regulatory delay.

Apple will thumb its nose at such as it should.

Not a problem. Price has never been an obstacle to those buying Apple products. How much Samsung stock does HRM Donnie hold, I wonder?