All things related to technology hardware, with a focus on computing hardware.
Rules (Click to Expand):
Follow the Lemmy.world Rules - https://mastodon.world/about
Be kind. No bullying, harassment, racism, sexism etc. against other users.
No Spam, illegal content, or NSFW content.
Please stay on topic, adjacent topics (e.g. software) are fine if they are strongly relevant to technology hardware. Another example would be business news for hardware-focused companies.
Please try and post original sources when possible (as opposed to summaries).
If posting an archived version of the article, please include a URL link to the original article in the body of the post.
Some other hardware communities across Lemmy:
Icon by "icon lauk" under CC BY 3.0
It's a common myth, that some people believe that the US can already make everything it needs but is not doing it because China is cheaper. So now that China is more expensive thanks to tariffs, all these US factories are going to boom and create millions of jobs.
Except a lot of these factories don't exist in the US, at all. For reference, the whole US has only 1(!) rare earth refinery. Meanwhile China has 90% of the global refining capabilities.
What America lacks isnt only factories and raw material refining capacity. China's central planning and industrial clusters are important, and they are also backed by a skilled workforce. Those things dont just magically appear. They are built up over time through both market incentives and government support.
While having every single component of the iPhone being manufactured in the US (something along the lines of RCA pre-1970) is indeed pure fantasy. You could hypothetically assemble the iPhone in the US, with many of the components being locally produced.
But for that, you would need a competitive smartphone market (i.e. no 35% margin for Apple, they would have to deal with 2%-3% profit margin, 5% tops) and Americans consumers would have to be exposed to the true cost of the device. No annual upgrades through your carrier. You pay $1,500+ for a baseline iPhone and you expect it to last for ~5 years with occasional repair.
Sounds like a more healthy situation.
"occasional repair", that shit would be locked down harder to force consoomers to buy a new device as often as possible. Less sales = less money. Only the EU version would be repairable.
Even with all their flaws... EU ❤
I am talking about hypotheticals. Just like saying Apple will tolerate 2% profit margin vs their current ~35%.
It's a thought experiment.
And then we'd have to raze our landscape and destroy a lot of stuff for mining
I doubt that "many" of the components are already being produced locally.
I meant that in theory a certain % of the components could be produced in the US. Say the CPU could be manufactured at a TSMC plant in Arizona and the semiconductor validation/packaging done in one of the recently opened plants for these sort of services (the previous US administration did award some grants specifically around validation/packaging).
Of course, many of the components cannot realistically be produced in the US. I am just going through a "what if" scenario.
Oh boy, it's russian-putana's regime 2.0 all over again. Even recall same news like "russian-made iphone" Yep, been there. Good luck folks, next on the agenda are censored internet\media and beaten to death protesters.
And not only iPhones, the orange cunt is about to find out how much of the stuff the US buy is made outside and can't be done inside.
The tariffs benefit a handful of political donors who own private businesses.
Yeah that's because it doesn't contain any eggs.