Massive government incentives are likely to keep iPhone production in China

[wiyosaya]

IMO, thinking that any presidential candidate is going to come through on all their promises is unrealistic. The reality is that few presidential candidates that have been elected have ever been able to put their money where their mouth is for one reason or another. Being a successful candidate has historically been about telling the electorate what they want to hear.

Time will tell whether our president elect is capable of doing all the things he said he was going to do.

 

[Evernessince]

Agreed. With the reality that most people are incapable of highly technical jobs, the US still has a large percentage of its population that are incapable of working in those highly technical jobs. Those people still need jobs and do play an important role. I cannot imagine a world without garbage disposal workers or others that are frequently dissed because of their occupation.

The types of manufacturing jobs that are on the table, here, do not require a great deal of skill. Most of the components on the boards for I-Crap are placed by robots because of the precision required. They are then sent to wave or flow soldering machines. There is not a lot of technical skill required to run these machines, and when something goes wrong, people with much more knowledge than the average factory worker are called in to remedy the problem. I would not be surprised if many people with low-paying jobs would jump at the chance to work in a manufacturing position.

The only problem is that most companies that do have manufacturing jobs in the US are replacing them with more and more Robots and automation. If you ask a company to come back to america that is one thing, what's stopping them from doing largely automated factories? In my opinion there is no point to going back to the old days. What we lose in factory jobs we gain in other fields. The medical and entertainment fields have seen large growth. Instead of working in factories I'm sure it's possible for people to do YouTube, HowTo videos, ect. The medical field is growing quickly and more and more specialization is happening, meaning more jobs. It's a different kind of smarts than IT and can range from Physical Therapist to Thyroid doctor.

 

[Verencius]

Not to mention how a lot of Chinese manufacturing it done.
Most live in a "dorm" type setting, multiple people to a cramped room.
You can bet the food they buy or are given, is taken out of their pay, which
isn't much to start with. Just think of all of the suicides in the stories over
the years.
If production were to come back, I just do not understand, how, given the wages
in the USA, ESPECIALLY if it were to settle in California, they could sell even the least
expensive iPhone, for less than 1,000.00 and still maintain their profit level.

The answer is automation. Production would come back, but not the jobs (at least not in this amount). Even Foxconn is planning to replace 1.2 M employees with automated production lines. There would be, of course, need for the maintenance people, but those guys are there today.