[HN Gopher] Apple says it will add 20k jobs, spend $500B, produc...
___________________________________________________________________
Apple says it will add 20k jobs, spend $500B, produce AI servers in
US
Author : helsinkiandrew
Score : 479 points
Date : 2025-02-24 11:05 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| https://archive.ph/EfwDl
| showmexyz wrote:
| Something buried in this, Apple are starting their own server
| manufacturing.
| reaperducer wrote:
| And in the United States, too. (Houston)
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| I would assume it is for their own use, not for people wanting
| the XServe to come back with M4 Ultra (i.e. me...).
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Such a shame. I'd be interested in a personal server.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Why would Apple want you to have one though?
| btucker wrote:
| Agreed, but I wonder--given investors demands for continued
| growth--if they're considering going up against NVIDIA.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Nah, surely 80% margins for matrix multiplication on the
| latest TSMC node will last forever.
| sampton wrote:
| Nvidia has proven the space is incredibly lucrative and Apple
| is best equipped for high end chip designs. Remember 10 years
| ago it was unthinkable for an ARM chip to compete with x86.
| nobankai wrote:
| First Apple has to prove they have competitive designs.
| Apple Silicon GPUs simply do not compete with the
| efficiency of Nvidia's GPU compute architecture:
| https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
|
| Apple's obsessive focus with raster efficiency really shot
| their GPU designs in the foot. It will be interesting to
| see if they adopt Nvidia-style designs or spend more time
| trying to force NPU hardware to work.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| I think performance per watt is way in Apple's favor, but
| raw performance is not.
|
| That said, an M4 Ultra (extrapolating from Max and Pro)
| would likely compete with my 3090, and with 192GB of
| memory (for 10x the amount it should cost) will out
| perform my 3x3090 AI server. And honestly, cost less than
| my 3 3090s + rest of the computer + electricity.
|
| It won't outperform a bunch of A/H 100s (or even a single
| one, or any other cards in the enterprise realm) though,
| but it will cost an order of magnitude less than a single
| card.
| jdsully wrote:
| Careful when comparing performance and efficiency. As a
| rough factor power increases quadratically as you
| increase clocks on a design, so you can quite easily make
| a high performance design low power by under-clocking it.
| The same is not true for the reverse.
| m463 wrote:
| I think you are comparing apples and oranges.
|
| inference is not the same as training.
| barkerja wrote:
| That's not necessarily news, unless I am missing something.
| Craig made an indirect mention of this during last year's WWDC
| regarding the private cloud compute.
|
| https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
| layer8 wrote:
| That's not completely news:
| https://www.macrumors.com/2024/05/06/apple-building-m2-ultra...
| dang wrote:
| (This comment was originally posted to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158187, so "this" was a
| different article. We merged that thread hither.)
| 7thpower wrote:
| Doing gods work, thank you.
| dang wrote:
| I detached this comment from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158188 so we could pin
| the latter to the top. What you posted was fine! I just don't
| want to take up extra real estate at the top of the thread.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Going to be watching closely - but cynically, a promise of
| investment (for avoidance of tariffs) only needs to last one news
| cycle until tariffs are no longer top of mind. Then it can be
| walked back without tariffs being imposed.
|
| Maybe instead of saying the t-word tariff, US gov can charge
| Apple a special fee on each iPhone. They can call it something
| catchy, like say, a Core Technology Fee.
| matwood wrote:
| Sounds like a throwback lol
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/23/tech/apple-mac-pro-united...
| le-mark wrote:
| This should be the top comment. Apple are doing business the
| way business is done, just like last time. Results don't
| matter, it's economic policy via press release. Form over
| substance.
| tesch1 wrote:
| Results matter, it's not hard to imagine that Apple
| considers the real risk of its promise and market position
| of being the privacy option being undermined by their
| supply chain risks, and leverage being used against them by
| privacy unfriendly actors.
| jajko wrote:
| Results don't matter as much as PR, this is time when
| this is unfortunately valid. Just look at US elections.
|
| Measurable results affect rational aspects of our minds,
| PR attempts to attacks directly emotions bypassing the
| former, ie to induce impulsive shopping.
|
| Also, what actual security? Apple is as vulnerable as
| cheap chinese phones against state actors using 0days.
| Apple devices are still being stolen for spare parts,
| Apple doesnt secure each component AFAIK and thieves know
| this (very recent case with friend of a friend, they even
| knew how to bypass that built in airtag tracking). I
| haven't seen anything but very well crafted PR statements
| on this topic. All money-accessing apps on absolutely any
| phone are a security risk.
|
| But folks love convenience above all.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| What's the added risk here? It's fine to "risk" almost
| the entire iPhone itself to be manufactured in China but
| the servers for some random AI features need to be pure?
|
| Sounds more like technical marketing and the company will
| treat any decisions around it as a marketing exercise.
| roughly wrote:
| Apple's commented previously on why they build in China,
| and it's beyond just the pricing - the supply chain for
| every single part they use is in China and mostly in the
| same geographic region, so there's a level of flexibility
| there they couldn't get in the US. It wouldn't surprise
| me if it was genuinely a goal for Apple to manufacture
| more in the US - they're a notoriously privacy-focused
| (corporate, not end-user) company, and China's known for
| IP wandering its way off campus. They're not going to
| sacrifice the iPhone economics until the US option is
| actually viable, but I'm not surprised they keep kicking
| the tires on US manufacturing.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" the supply chain for every single part they use is
| in China"_
|
| Not entirely true. Some of the highest value components
| in an iPhone, including the CPU/SoC, baseband, and the
| majority of OLED displays, are sourced from countries
| that are not mainland China.
| tooltalk wrote:
| It's mostly about cost and market access to China.
|
| Most smartphone supply-chain for Samsung and Apple exist
| outside China -- primarily in Japan (camera, sensors),
| South Korea (DRAM/NAND, OLED), and the US (various ICs
| fabbed at TSMC in Taiwan). There are quite a few reliable
| estimates/teardowns showing that these three countries
| account for close to about 90% of iPhone BOM (bill of
| materials). That's one reason why Samsung's smartphone
| unit was able to pull out of China without much
| disruption back in 2019 -- ie, low dependence on China.
|
| I feel that Apple has pushed this misleading narrative a
| bit too long to defend their massive China outsourcing.
| nimish wrote:
| > They're not going to sacrifice the iPhone economics
| until the US option is actually viable, but I'm not
| surprised they keep kicking the tires on US
| manufacturing.
|
| Apple could, with its immense cash hoard and cash flow,
| _make_ the US viable, but it chooses not to because it'd
| rather take the easy way out and have China or India or
| $COUNTRY fund it and return money to shareholders.
| They've returned money to shareholders rather than invest
| it in US operations, by design.
|
| This is a classic feint to protect Tim Cook's entire
| raison detre. He built his career on super high
| efficiency operations by outsourcing to cheap labor
| countries. It relies on the low-to-no tariff access to US
| consumer money.
|
| And I don't care that it's better for their stock price;
| that's Apple's problem not mine as a US citizen. And even
| as an Apple investor I would rather the money be spent on
| US on-shore operations.
| Reason077 wrote:
| They've actually been diversifying iPhone manufacturing
| away from China for a few years already. As of April
| 2024, 14% of all iPhones were already manufactured in
| India. That's around 30 million phones per year. And
| Apple plans to double their India manufacturing again by
| 2028.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| So they shouldn't reduce risk anywhere, if they're
| currently unable to do it on the iPhone?
| palmotea wrote:
| > This should be the top comment. Apple are doing business
| the way business is done, just like last time. Results
| don't matter, it's economic policy via press release. Form
| over substance.
|
| If the Trump administration has any competence, they will
| rub those old promises in Apple's face until Cook actually
| does something meaningful.
| kergonath wrote:
| The whole Trump administration is all about form over
| substance, though. I would not expect Trump to do
| anything actually productive about it, as long as Tim
| Cook sings his praise (and pays his dues).
| rayiner wrote:
| Maybe the next administration should keep up the tariffs (as
| Biden did to a degree). Cheap trade with China distorts the
| tech sector too. Jobs and Wozniak were the products of a system
| in which americans had to build products at home. Tim Cook is
| the product of a system where you can become a trillion company
| by hyper-optimizing foreign supply chains. Which is better?
| ipaddr wrote:
| Apple went bankrupt under Jobs and Wozniak and was saved by
| hyper optimizing foreign supply chain company Microsoft only
| to rise 10 years later by focusing on hyper optimizing
| foreign supply.
| relistan wrote:
| There was a lot more than that going on and I think you've
| pretty generally mischaracterized the main problem with the
| mid-80's era Apple--which had nothing to do with domestic
| manufacturing and everything to do with not delivering new
| products that people wanted, at a reasonable price. You can
| claim overseas manufacturing solved the pricing component
| of that, but that's not at all clear: other companies were
| manufacturing in the US at the time and still out-competing
| Apple.
| bluedino wrote:
| All of the big PC companies had factories in Texas in the
| 80's and early 90's, didn't they?
|
| And Dell became a case study of outsourcing everything (and
| sending your stock and profits soaring the whole time),
| until you have nothing.
| coliveira wrote:
| I don't know about Microsoft, but I'm very clear that the
| "miracle" operated by Apple was exactly to perfect foreign
| supply chain at a time when Intel/Dell/HP and others were
| still heavily focused on the US. The quality of Apple
| products was already there since the beginning, but they
| had no way to compete with the PC market until they figured
| out Asian supply chains.
| hypeatei wrote:
| When did isolationism become cool? Isn't this why we declared
| independence in the first place? To get away from the British
| restricting free trade?
| margorczynski wrote:
| > When did isolationism become cool?
|
| Ask maybe China.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| China's economic power is certainly not rooted in their
| isolationist social policies. They're just as bullish
| about foreign investment as the US was at the height of
| the free trade era.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| When the people with the money decided it was better spent
| in places that weren't their own country.
| bootsmann wrote:
| Having access to cheap oversea steel allows Americans to
| focus on building companies with significantly higher
| value-add. Onshoring low-value industries is a massive
| human capital waste and an easy way to depress wages.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It allows _a very small portion_ of Americans to build
| companies with significantly higher value-add.
|
| It destroyed the futures of a larger number of Americans.
|
| Then again, why do we make the distinction "American"? If
| you have people who became unfathomably wealthy by
| shipping off strategic industries to the lowest bidder
| regardless of geopolitical implications, does nationality
| matter anymore?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Here's another idea: tax those people appropriately and
| pump that money back into the economy...
|
| Way easier and more globally optimal than just saying
| we're going to do absolutely everything (even the shitty
| jobs) here in the US.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| If there's one thing those people hate more than paying
| Americans to do labor, it's paying taxes.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| And...? Everyone hates paying taxes. Normal Americans pay
| them anyway.
| cmdrk wrote:
| Indeed, but the hallowed Job Creators have the means to
| influence the people in power to make the taxes go away.
| t-3 wrote:
| Do "normal Americans" pay taxes? From the numbers I've
| seen, ~1/3 - ~1/2 of tax filers receive more money from
| the government than they pay. To them, "refund season" is
| a cause for celebration rather than a stressful event.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'm a normal American and owe 6000 this year to the Feds,
| so yes.
|
| W-2 get refunds because the Feds took out too much from
| their paycheck beforehand.
| t-3 wrote:
| I'm a normal American and have only once paid more than
| I've received for federal taxes. Withholding has nothing
| to do with it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| And congress is trying to kowtow to it as we speak
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/nearly-all-republicans-vote-
| against...
|
| If we don't put pressure, those people will get their
| way.
| airstrike wrote:
| The problem with taxes is that it's a prisoner's dilemma.
| You need global cooperation at some base level of taxes,
| otherwise companies move to more favorable tax
| jurisdictions in the long term and offshore from there,
| which would hurt the US even more. It doesn't have to be
| all-or-nothing, but any marginal dollar of increased
| taxes in one place will have some non-zero effect of
| encouraging the next investment dollar to be spent
| elsewhere.
|
| To be clear, I do think capital gains taxes are
| criminally low in the US relative to income tax, so I'm
| not arguing in _favor_ of lower taxes. I'm just saying
| why raising taxes isn't a panacea.
| Jolter wrote:
| You can raise US company taxes and capital gains tax a
| lot before the US stops being a low-tax country.
|
| You're not wrong, of course, about how every tax
| percentage point matters. But Americans arguing that
| their taxes are too high is never not hilarious.
| typon wrote:
| Creating an underclass that relies on economic elites
| paying taxes rather than being economically independent
| because you want to optimize for "high value add
| industries" is a terrible long term strategy.
| robocat wrote:
| > tax those people appropriately and pump that money back
| into the economy
|
| So make the US to be like a far less successful country?
| Kill your economy by increasing taxes? The US economy is
| singularly successful because it has incentives to build
| businesses - see YC.
|
| Have you tried living in a country that doesn't encourage
| businesses? They are often great tourist destinations.
| I'm in New Zealand and too many ambitious young people
| leave here: we have an emigration problem because our
| economy sucks. The government fixes the economy with 30%
| immigrants (disclaimer: I love immigrants). I have many
| friends that are never coming back here except for
| holidays. I hate the New Zealand government incentives
| for businesses (taxation and regulation) and I can see no
| way to fix them. Even our "business" political party ACT
| is completely fucked (latest story - they will be selling
| everything profitable to overseas "investors" -
| destroying the economy).
|
| Taxation incentives matter to businesses. Be careful what
| you ask for because the majority have little
| understanding and vote for the wrong incentives.
|
| Even business owners don't seem to understand incentive
| systems that well. Perhaps game designers do?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Do income taxes on the 60th percentile earner completely
| kill their incentive to earn an income?
|
| Then why would ensuring the same effective tax rate on
| the 99th percentile kill _their_ incentive?
| robocat wrote:
| The ultra-wealthy appear as toxic to me too.
|
| However I believe that incentives need to be _marginal_.
| If you already have a lot perhaps you need a big carrot
| as your incentive? I don 't know any billionaires that I
| can ask how they feel about taxation incentives: I reckon
| you are making assumptions about what you think they
| should feel.
|
| What makes Tim Cook make the US more money?
|
| Taxation cliffs are shit. In New Zealand our Green party
| decided that 1 million was enough. Why would you bother
| growing a business after you reached 1 million?
| Retirement? A business is defined as being about making
| money (albeit some people do run "businesses" for other
| outcomes - why is Warren Buffett still working?).
|
| High marginal taxation is also shit IMHO.
|
| The hard part is to design the incentives so that
| productive people build your economy for the benefit of
| _everybody_.
|
| If a government discourages business then the economy is
| crap and everybody suffers. See other economies.
|
| Few people understand the incentives of others, and few
| people understand how wealth is created for all: the hoi
| polloi dismiss the wealthy as vampiric money grubbers.
| Anyone who uses the word capitalist in a derogatory way
| has been brainwashed. Most everything that makes our
| economies work is invisible non-monetary rewards.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43162596
|
| I can speak for my own financial incentives. My
| perception is that I have an effective tax rate of _well_
| over 50% in New Zealand (any retirement savings are not
| safe because our demographics and governments will screw
| our economy).
|
| I do not feel the incentive to work in a business - My
| attitude means I now produce marginally less than I could
| for the New Zealand economy (I still pay taxes so they
| are advantaged but they could get a lot lot more from
| me). I now mostly selfishly concentrate on those closest
| to me. Why should I work if it isn't marginally
| beneficial enough for me? I'm no more selfish than my
| retired friends that I know (a wide variety of people
| from many walks of life).
|
| (Reedited to expand and clarify).
|
| We can't decide how much is fair. Compare yourself to a
| dead king - what is fair? We can design systemic
| incentives so that we each make the world better for
| everyone. Not that that it is easy... Trite thoughtless
| dismissals of the most productive members of society are
| not helpful.
|
| Edit 2: I guess this discussion is as close to work as it
| gets for me. Too much adulting. Should I get into
| politics? Are morals an impediment to helping others?
| There are too few politicians I admire, and too many I
| wouldn't want to shake hands with or be associated with.
| Every idiot has political opinions - how much of an idiot
| am I? Every politician is smart enough to win an election
| - they are not stupid yet they make too many horrific
| mistakes. What about the cryptically smart ones? I see
| how systems affect people that join a system. What would
| I become if I join our political system? Understanding
| our different systems is hard because they grow so
| weirdly with vestigial complexities due to history,
| complex interactions, and reflexivity.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, screw that. Capital taxes are at record lows and
| they want to make it lower at the cost of Medicare and
| Medicaid.
|
| They are parasites at this point. If they think they can
| find lower taxes than 22% they are happy to leave. As if
| they aren't already avoiding taxes.
| robocat wrote:
| I will respond by
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
| myself.
|
| Do Medicare and Medicaid exist without businesses? I'm
| from New Zealand and our society causes problems for our
| socialised healthcare.
|
| Businesses are symbionts: productive societies accept
| some costs from businesses so long as the society get
| more gains.
|
| Why do you look at money as though that is all that
| matters?
|
| Who measures the benefits we get from modern society?
|
| Finding downsides and complaining about them is too easy.
| Looking for upsides is less popular.
|
| Every poor person I've met avoids taxes.
| edgyquant wrote:
| So, like a tariff?
| twoodfin wrote:
| No, the analysis (and it's not exactly rocket science)
| says just the opposite: Way more downstream manufacturing
| jobs that rely on steel as input are lost, vs. domestic
| steel production jobs gained.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/steel-
| tari...
| tycho-newman wrote:
| I get the value add argument, but lots of people just
| need income to pay for living expenses. Without an
| income, those people become disaffected and sometimes
| violent. Then they embrace right-wing protectionism
| because, while their gadgets are cheaper, they have no
| income to buy cheap gadgets.
|
| Nor can they move to these offshore places (where the
| cost of living is lower) because immigration laws exist
| in part to control worker mobility.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Onshoring low-value industries is a massive human
| capital waste and an easy way to depress wages.
|
| Compared to now where there's just no full time jobs and
| also wage suppression?
| palmotea wrote:
| > Having access to cheap oversea steel allows Americans
| to focus on building companies with significantly higher
| value-add. Onshoring low-value industries is a massive
| human capital waste and an easy way to depress wages.
|
| That's the talking point, but it's bullshit. A lot of
| those "low-value industries" are fundamental
| capabilities, and China sure as hell isn't going to let
| the US own the "higher value-add" areas. They dominate
| those next, and the US free-trade business elites will be
| fine with it as long as they get to make some money _for
| themselves_.
| bootsmann wrote:
| Being a high value-add area is endogenous to how hard it
| is for others i.e. China to reproduce. In other words, if
| it were easy to make GPUs they wouldn't be so damn
| expensive.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Isn't this why we declared independence in the first
| place? To get away from the British restricting free trade?
|
| No. I'm not sure where you got that idea. If you look at
| something like the Boston Tea Party, it wasn't high taxes
| on tea that were being protested against, it was lowered
| taxes on tea that undercut the smuggling operations of
| people like Sam Adams and John Hancock. "No taxation
| without representation" makes better press than "No
| undercutting my smuggling operation" though.
|
| In the early years of the US, between 80 and 90 percent of
| federal revenue came from tariffs. Not exactly free trade.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > In the early years of the US, between 80 and 90 percent
| of federal revenue came from tariffs...
|
| To be fair, the Federal Budget back then was 2%-ish of
| GDP. And their political consensus gave the Federal Gov't
| _very_ few things that it had the power to tax.
| airstrike wrote:
| For readers looking for context, Google tells me it was
| ~24% of GDP as of 2024
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| That seems impractical and unsustainable.
| edgyquant wrote:
| So that means the government is taking more than 1/5 of
| all the money generated by the US. That's crazy and no
| wonder the nation is going bankrupt
| airstrike wrote:
| It reminds me of the Portuguese court taking 1/5 of all
| the gold mined from colonial Brazil:
|
| https://pt-m-wikipedia-
| org.translate.goog/wiki/Quinto_do_our...
| smileson2 wrote:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
|
| Is a better graph
| rayiner wrote:
| You're incorrect about history. Mercantilism not only
| restricted foreign trade, but restricted domestic
| industrial development by requiring the colonies to sell
| raw materials to Britain and buy finished goods from the
| Britain. Tariffs were a core pillar of the Lincoln
| Republican Party.
|
| There's been an isolationist wing in tech as long as I've
| been in it (early 2000s). I remember chatting with someone
| at Cisco/Juniper in the late aughts about Huawei ripping
| off their router designs down to the silk screening. Of
| course today Huawei makes their own state of the art
| routers with their own silicon, and some lower-end
| Cisco/Juniper gear is white boxed foreign equipment. And of
| course tech folks were complaining about immigration and
| outsourcing back in the early 2000s when Republicans were
| enthusiastically supporting both.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I want to say "that's not what isolationism means", but I
| realize it starts to feel vague just like the word
| "fascism", used when convenient but varies wildly in
| rhetorical meaning... to be more specific is better, I like
| what George Washington had to say about it in his farewell
| address because it shows the nuance of the topic across the
| spectrum, it's not as simple as isolation good vs bad:
|
| The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign
| nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have
| with them as little political connection as possible. So
| far as we have already formed engagements let them be
| fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.
|
| Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none
| or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in
| frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially
| foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be
| unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in
| the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary
| combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
|
| Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us
| to pursue a different course. If we remain one people,
| under an efficient government, the period is not far off
| when we may defy material injury from external annoyance;
| when we may take such an attitude as will cause the
| neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be
| scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the
| impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not
| lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may
| choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice,
| shall counsel.
|
| Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why
| quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by
| interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe,
| entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European
| ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?
|
| It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances
| with any portion of the foreign world, so far, I mean, as
| we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be
| understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing
| engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public
| than to private affairs that honesty is always the best
| policy. I repeat, therefore, let those engagements be
| observed in their genuine sense. But in my opinion it is
| unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| >when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of
| making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the
| giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war,
| as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.
|
| Ironic that as a Canadian, the US is moving from the
| nation that would be guided by Justice into the
| belligerent nation in this situation.
|
| It also serves as a lesson to us that we should have
| learned from you and George Washington, and stood on our
| own first and ensured our own security before cooperating
| with others. We have a long way to go to get back there
| now, unfortunately under the position of potentially our
| closest ally and economic partner being belligerent,
| untrustworthy and unreliable.
| edgyquant wrote:
| The newborn US imposed a ton of tariffs specifically to
| escape British control of industry
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Indeed. I think we've come very far 250 years later. But
| we lowered those 90% tarriffs 100 years ago for a reason.
| rcpt wrote:
| It's always been cool. It's why you can't buy a Kei truck
| or a BYD car
| boringg wrote:
| A bit revisionist here.
| hooverd wrote:
| If Trump is our McKinley or Hoover, I'm excited for our next
| FDR.
| Evidlo wrote:
| I don't understand. Can companies curry government favor to get
| tariff exceptions? Aren't the tariffs in place already?
| runjake wrote:
| Apparently, yes. I saw mention of discussion around the Trump
| administration potentially giving Apple a tariff waiver. And
| I believe in Trump's last term, Apple did have some sort of
| waiver.
|
| I'm on mobile but Googling for "Apple tariff waiver" and
| "Apple tariff exemption" will point you to several news
| items.
| runjake wrote:
| A couple (from a pool of many) citations:
|
| From the 45 presidency:
| https://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-escaped-tariffs-
| last...
|
| Now: https://9to5mac.com/2024/12/17/analyst-trump-will-
| waive-appl...
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| You can when the president is corrupt.
| slt2021 wrote:
| Its not corruption when the president creates US jobs
|
| It is corruption when president outsources and offshores US
| jobs, though
| stetrain wrote:
| Neither of those fit the definition of corruption.
| simonh wrote:
| There is no jobs problem in the US though. Unemployment
| is at 4% which is mostly just job churn. Long term
| unemployment is only 1%.
|
| US consumers, that's all of you, are being hammered with
| taxes on imported goods most of which can't realistically
| be produced in the US anyway, to solve a problem you
| don't have.
|
| A commitment like this takes years to plan. It can't
| possibly be a response to tariffs announced weeks ago.
| This is all optics.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Depends how you count it. I wouldn't count most gig app
| workers as employed. But the government does.
| slt2021 wrote:
| I also wouldnt count fake bullshit
| government/corp/college administration jobs (email jobs)
| with negative productivity
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I just gotta pay rent dude. I'm not judging how you do
| it.
| astrange wrote:
| The government determines the employment rate via
| surveys, i.e. they just go and ask people if they're
| employed. It's not a calculation from taxes or from
| employers or anything.
|
| So it's up to the gig workers if they think they're
| employed or not. Presumably this depends on how often
| they do it.
| slt2021 wrote:
| False, USA has a big problem with manufacturing. All US
| jobs are service jobs to prop up consumer economy, that
| have no strategic benefit.
|
| A lot of fake employment and low productivity jobs are in
| the government/NGO sector, paper pushers, DEI jobs,
| law/compliance type jobs - that should have been
| manufacturing jobs instead.
|
| USA has no shipyards and infrastructure is crumbling
| precisely because of misallocation of resources and labor
| astrange wrote:
| > USA has no shipyards and infrastructure is crumbling
| precisely because of misallocation of resources and labor
|
| That's because of the Jones Act and other poorly designed
| protectionism.
| cyberax wrote:
| DEI jobs and the _total_ NGOs employment are basically
| nothing in the overall employment. Less than 1%.
|
| Heck, the _whole_ Federal government workforce is less
| than 2% of the total workforce.
|
| > USA has no shipyards and infrastructure is crumbling
| precisely because of misallocation of resources and labor
|
| Yes, and you have tariffs to thank for this. The Jones
| Act requires US-built ships for any ship traffic within
| the US waters.
|
| So the shipbuilders were insulated from competition and
| just degraded into Defense contract moochers.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Can you tell the tech industry and my temp office that,
| please? Job market still sucks in Los Angeles.
|
| And I don't trust unemployment in this gig economy. I'm
| technically not unemployed, but I haven't had a full time
| job in nearly 2 years.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| I fully believe that the real ("main street not wall
| street") economy is in worse shape than government
| numbers on unemployment suggest and both sides are to
| blame for different aspects of this problem.
|
| But nothing Trump is doing is going to fix your
| situation.
|
| In fact he (or rather Elon/doge) is very actively making
| things worse for you with the massive government layoffs,
| flooding the market with even more people to compete with
| you for jobs making finding work more difficult and also
| eventually dropping all of our wages.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >But nothing Trump is doing is going to fix your
| situation.
|
| I'm aware. I'm sure he's responsible for at least 3 job
| freezes I ran into mid-interview this year. He's
| literally costing me job opportunities because no one can
| budget around this chaotic government.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 4% too many and probably understated. The BLS repeatedly
| underestimated unemployment during the previous
| administration. Also the labor participation rate, which
| is harder to game, still hasn't reached pre-Covid levels
| yet: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-
| situation/civilian-lab...
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-
| situation/civilian-lab..._
|
| In February 2020 it was 63.3% and in January 2025 it was
| 62.6%, for a difference of 0.7%. Also note the steady
| decline post-2008 and the multi-year plateau that jitters
| around 63%.
|
| Having the plateau change from ~63% to ~62.5% isn't an
| unreasonable scenario.
|
| * https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
| astrange wrote:
| > Also the labor participation rate, which is harder to
| game, still hasn't reached pre-Covid levels yet
|
| That's because Americans got /richer/ and retired. You
| want to look at the prime-age rate, which the boomers
| have moved out of.
| cyberax wrote:
| The labor participation rate is going to be declining for
| the foreseable future because the population is aging.
|
| If you look at the prime-age employment rate, we're
| almost up to the record high levels:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300060
| rcpt wrote:
| Right. One reason we're in this mess is that voters don't
| even notice unemployment but are extremely sensitive to
| inflation.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Yes this is one reason tariffs are so valuable to a corrupt
| POTUS. They have essentially unilateral and _very_ fine-
| grained control over them, down to exempting specific
| companies or products outright.
| duped wrote:
| Congress needs to step up on this, honestly. The entire
| idea that the President can unilaterally implement trade
| policy is as plain a violation of separation of powers I
| can think of, and SCOTUS is a fan of non-delegation
| doctrine.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| iirc as soon as anything becomes beyond the border the
| President holds the keys for various reasons including
| the ever-vague "national security" but also due to being
| prescribed as the primary negotiator
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause
| duped wrote:
| Tariffs are not treaties, they're taxes/duties - only
| Congress has the power to raise them. Article I is
| extremely clear on that. Historically, tariffs were
| always raised by acts of Congress, not by Presidential
| fiat.
|
| Trump is using _extremely_ misguided legislation from the
| 1960s /70s where Congress allowed the President to enact
| tariffs for national security and emergencies. There is a
| very strong argument (in the sense it resonates with the
| conservative SCOTUS majority) that Congress _cannot_
| delegate its fundamental powers to the executive by
| legislation alone.
|
| I think people are just too cowardly to bring a case in
| front of the courts to challenge the constitutionality of
| it all. Non-delegation doctrine is what the Federal
| Society want to use to kneecap all federal regulation.
| Trump operates on a spoils system so it's not in the
| interest of conservatives or businesses to challenge him,
| for fear of retribution.
| slt2021 wrote:
| Trump is using tariffs not to raise revenue, but rather
| use it as a stick to force companies to invest in USA.
|
| Previously they were outsourcing and offshoring as much
| as they could get away with it. Which led to transfer of
| advanced technologies outside USA and America losing its
| manufacturing and technology edge
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So how's that going? Outsourcing seems to be going
| strong, the tarriffs instead pissed off allies who are
| preparing counter-tarriffs, and the CHIPS Act is being
| dismantle as we speak (there goes our investment.
| slt2021 wrote:
| If TSMC acquires Intel (which is in the works), then
| chips act (basically a government handout to private
| corp) wont be needed anymore
| cyberax wrote:
| Yeah. Just killing the US semiconductor production is the
| cheapest option.
| duped wrote:
| Cool, still unconstitutional.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| So, for those of us who haven't studied this in depth,
| _why_ do you say it 's unconstitutional? Do tariffs
| require congressional approval? Or what?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Tariffs are a form of taxation. If I want to import say
| tea, and the government is placing a tariff on that
| imported tea, I am effectively taxed by the government.
| And only Congress can impose new taxes.
| nwienert wrote:
| The Trade Act of 1974 gives the president power to impose
| retaliatory tariffs.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Not saying you're wrong, but... I have seen claims that
| tariffs are a source of government income that Congress
| _doesn 't_ control. You're claiming they do.
|
| I haven't seen a citation from either side. Can you
| substantiate your position?
| duped wrote:
| I have already explained my thinking up this comment
| chain. I'm mostly replying to GP who misunderstands that
| the _intent_ of the tariffs is besides the point.
|
| TL;DR read Article I section 8, read up about the Trade
| Expansion act of 1962 and Trade act of 1974, and "non-
| delegation doctrine", and you can trivially find legal
| debate about the constitutionality of IEEPA. Rather than
| listen to random nerds on HN you should seek out this
| information yourself.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| You should let his Commerce Secretary know (or stop
| sanewashing)
|
| https://www.axios.com/2025/02/20/commerce-secretary-
| lutnick-...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sorry they are right now cutting Medicare/Medicaid/snap
| right now to justify billionaire tax cuts.
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/nearly-all-republicans-vote-
| against...
| paulddraper wrote:
| tl;dr the New Deal.
|
| The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act by Congress gave FDR
| sweeping authority over tariffs without direct
| congressional approval.
|
| Then later the Trade Expansion Act under Kennedy.
|
| Historically, these have served to decrease tarrifs.
| wwweston wrote:
| Legislators step up when enough of their voting
| constituencies make it clear that they value something as
| a non-negotiable (assuming votes still matter).
|
| Which means those who care about this are back to not
| only contacting legislators but also persuading a lot
| fellow voters that separation of powers is crucial and
| worth prioritizing over familiar well-handled and loved
| heuristics.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Yes a million times. For all the rhetoric about
| authoritarians, the Democrats never seem to want regin in
| Executive power when they are they majority. It is like a
| game of chicken where America winds up with a populist
| dictator from either the left or right.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Yes because populism is a reaction to government being
| generally unresponsive to people's needs.
|
| Congress has become increasingly unproductive and
| unresponsive. There are many popular policies that
| Congress essentially ignores, and many problems that go
| unsolved. So trust in government dwindles and people
| crave strongman solutions.
|
| I'm not sure there is a solution. There are so many
| interlocking problems gumming up the process that any "we
| just need to fix X" solutions (where X is gerrymandering,
| money in elections, lobbying, the two party system, first
| past the post, corruption, income inequality, the
| electoral college, the slow death of journalism,
| consolidation of industries, etc) are nearly impossible
| and also probably insufficient because they all feed back
| into one another: they are both causes and effects.
|
| So when people are mad about a downstream effect like the
| price of eggs and digging any deeper touches one of the
| topics above ("to fix egg price gouging you need to
| reinvent the political system" sounds a lot like "to make
| an omelette first you need to create the universe"), it's
| really easy to throw your hands up.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| We'll never know for sure, but I don't think Harris would
| have ended with delusions of being populist dictator.
| stock_toaster wrote:
| > Congress needs to step up on this, honestly.
|
| Congress seems pretty unwilling to do much of anything
| right now.
| cloverich wrote:
| Charitably, tariffs exist so POTUS can either lower taxes or
| increase jobs in US, but both would take time to pan out
| assuming things go well. So if a company is willing to
| onshore money or jobs, its achieving its intended purpose in
| their eyes.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I believe the stated purpose of the latest round had to do
| with fentanyl precursor manufacturing.
| hatsix wrote:
| I believe that's the Mexico/Canada Tariffs, but it's
| really hard to keep it straight, by design.
| svachalek wrote:
| No I think Mexico/Canada were largely about stopping
| immigrants and fentanyl smuggling. But China was targeted
| for not doing enough to stop manufacturing of fentanyl
| precursors.
| 3vidence wrote:
| Sorry to say but that's already been walked back on after
| Canada committed $1 billion dollars for extra northern
| border security and it made no difference in the tariffs
| discussions.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-border-patrol-
| canada-u... <- discussion of commitment from Canada
|
| https://financialpost.com/news/trump-says-tariffs-on-
| canada-... <- as of today (sorry for FT source but this
| is literally all across google you can just googla USA
| tarrifs)
| georgemcbay wrote:
| The idea that the Canadian tariffs were ever _really_
| about Fentanyl is patently absurd.
|
| 0.2% of all US border Fentanyl seizures were on the
| Canadian border. That's almost literally nothing.
| alexandre_m wrote:
| The Fentanyl numbers are nothing in comparison to Mexico,
| but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
|
| Also it's not only about drugs, but also humans smuggling
| (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fentanyl-dr-
| smuggler-1.737348...), and overall border security.
|
| - According to CIS, the number of Canadian crime groups
| producing synthetic drugs doubled between 2023 and 2024 -
| There's a lack of Canadian agents who are tasked at
| preventing this and current legislations make it very
| inefficient between federal and provincial law agents -
| There's an upward trend in Fentanyl seizures in Canada
| the last 2 years - Fentanyl is now being produced
| domestically in Canada
|
| All of that is within the control of Canada with better
| policies.
| rcpt wrote:
| That's kind of the point of tariffs
| grahamj wrote:
| My first thought was payment to avoid sanctions for being
| "woke" (read: anti-discrimination)
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I am a free trader in principle. However you have a country
| (China) with an authoritarian government that makes favored
| industries subsidized.
|
| Of course the standard economic argument is that China using
| its GDP to make goods cheaper for our own citizens to purchase
| is better for us - they are subsidizing our economy. However it
| ignores the strategic disadvantage by our country losing its
| manufacturing capabilities.
|
| The graphs may show economic advantage. It's hard to quantify
| the long term strategic and militaristic disadvantage to not
| being able to make anything yourself if a world war occurs.
| curt15 wrote:
| >However you have a country (China) with an authoritarian
| government that makes favored industries subsidized.
|
| If things keep going the way they are going, that could
| describe the US just as well in a few short years.
| dsr_ wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company
|
| "The company responded by intensively lobbying the U.S.
| government to intervene and mounting a misinformation
| campaign to portray the Guatemalan government as
| communist.[18] In 1954, the U.S. Central Intelligence
| Agency armed, funded, and trained a military force that
| deposed the democratically elected government of Guatemala
| and installed a pro-business military dictatorship.[19]"
|
| This is not a one-time aberration.
| jay-barronville wrote:
| > If things keep going the way they are going, that could
| describe the US just as well in a few short years.
|
| Why do you think so?
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| The US subsidizes a hell of a lot themselves already.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > However you have a country (China) with an authoritarian
| government that makes favored industries subsidized.
|
| This is overlooking the forest for one tree. The thing is,
| mean chinese manufacturing wages are $25k/year (purchasing
| parity adjusted! $15k unadjusted) for a 49h week.
|
| _That_ is the reason that so much manufacturing /industry
| has shifted there, not some nebulous "Chinese government
| subsidies" (not saying those are not a thing, just that they
| don't really matter all that much).
|
| > It's hard to quantify the long term strategic and
| militaristic disadvantage to not being able to make anything
| yourself if a world war occurs.
|
| Certainly. But forcing low-skill industry to stay at a
| relevant size in a high-wage country is expensive business
| (compare agriculture, which is subsidized basically for
| exactly this reason) and _not_ straightforward (see Jones
| act).
|
| Presenting tariffs as a viable alternative to taxation is
| just beyond ridicule, but that has not stopped people so far
| either...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| They could move to Bangladesh or Africa and pay $3k / year.
| They aren't. China has many advantages beyond cheap wages.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Absolutely. You do need a minimum baseline for
| infrastructure, government stability and workforce.
|
| Most of Africa is just starting to slowly get there,
| Bangladesh is _already_ very relevant for textile
| production.
|
| I would expect the same basic trend to repeat that we saw
| with electronics manufacturing in 90s Japan: First cheap
| products move (very wage sensitive), then the local
| sector expands, wages rise with the whole local industry
| moving up the value chain, then at some point local wages
| become high enough for the whole process to repeat with
| the next low-wage country...
|
| I think trying to block this trend off with tariffs is a
| futile waste of taxpayer money which american consumers
| are gonna pay for.
|
| Spending tax money to keep some degree of self-
| sufficiency in critical industries (like with
| agriculture) can be a solid idea if done sparingly and
| cleverly, but that is _not_ how the current US admin has
| approached this...
| coliveira wrote:
| Salaries are just a small part of the reason industry works
| in China.
|
| The bigger picture is that China invests in the development
| of an industrial chain. This has many aspects:
| infrastructure, education, training, housing, and of course
| tax incentives. The USA decided to stop investing in
| practically all of these. Even scientific research, the
| last area in which the US used to lead, is now in jeopardy
| from both sides: competition from China and internal cuts.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| "I am a free trader in principle. However you have a country
| (China)"
|
| just think of china as another trader with more capital than
| you and pull yowrself up by your bootstraps.
| coliveira wrote:
| Sour grapes. Most economists were just happy with this
| situation until recently. What I mean is, the current
| situation arises by the desire of Western businesses of
| getting hid of productive investments and concentrating only
| on capital investments. It has nothing to do with trading
| with an authoritarian government or not, which almost
| everyone believed was Ok until recently.
| mulmen wrote:
| > The graphs may show economic advantage. It's hard to
| quantify the long term strategic and militaristic
| disadvantage to not being able to make anything yourself if a
| world war occurs.
|
| Is the United States at risk of not being able to make
| anything ourselves? We have the second largest manufacturing
| output in the world.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing#List_of_countrie.
| ..
| 3vidence wrote:
| What about Canada? We have even higher tarrifs than China and
| in the last 100 years are the USA's closest ally.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| there's also the "national security aspect", government often
| wants certain hardware not to be made offshore at all
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Let's go with 'Genius Tax'. Your average Apple fanboi will be
| lining up around the block for the prestige to pay that twice
| :D.
| dunham wrote:
| Gruber suggests Apple already had these plans and simply
| packaged the up as a win for the current administration:
|
| https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/02/24/mission-accompl...
|
| I don't pay enough attention to Apple's plans to judge if he is
| right.
| rco8786 wrote:
| This is inline with what other entities (Canadian and Mexican
| governments) have done when threatened with tariffs.
| mrweasel wrote:
| While I have no real opinion on this, I do have questions:
|
| * What type of jobs?
|
| * Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and
| skills?
|
| * Does this mean moving to US based fabs for the M-series chips?
|
| * Is this actually profitable, or is this just a political move?
| notahacker wrote:
| And related to your last bullet point: will it actually happen
| or is floating this just a political move...
| xadhominemx wrote:
| It will actually happen because it's nothing new. The 500b is
| almost all wages for existing US-based employees. They are
| looking for a carve out from the new China tariffs (same as
| last time). Note - they made a very similar announcement 4
| years ago https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-
| commits-430-bil...
| nottorp wrote:
| And one more:
|
| * Will this raise prices for customers outside the US for no
| justifiable reason?
| Aeolun wrote:
| The required people can just be imported from China?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| * What type of jobs? - "The 20,000 additional jobs, Apple said,
| will focus on research and development, silicon engineering and
| AI."
|
| * Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and
| skills? - "The company is opening up what it calls a
| manufacturing academy in Detroit, where it will help smaller
| companies with manufacturing. It already operates an academy
| for app developers in the city. It's also doubling its
| manufacturing fund in the US to $10 billion." - Sounds like
| they are upskilling, and will count the employees of companies
| joining the academy as "jobs created"
|
| * Does this mean moving to US based fabs for the M-series
| chips? - "[M-Series] chips themselves, however, continue to be
| produced in Taiwan.
|
| * Is this actually profitable, or is this just a political
| move? - Define profitable. It is cheaper than paying tariffs.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I might be reading it wrong, but that's the 20,000 ADDITIONAL
| jobs, which is going to be R&D, engineering and "AI".
|
| Those 20,000 people won't be staffing the production lines.
| So how many manufacturing jobs, especially low skill, entry
| level with decent pay, will this create? The whole thing is
| framed in a way that makes it sound like Apple is creating
| thousands of manufacturing jobs.
| tootie wrote:
| I seriously doubt it's cheaper than tariffs.
| smileson2 wrote:
| data labeling
| apwell23 wrote:
| > Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and
| skills?
|
| doesn't matter because we have work visas
| AnAnonyCowherd wrote:
| > Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and
| skills?
|
| For 30 years, IT managers at blue chip US corporations have
| exploited the H1-B visa program by saying, "No," and then
| hiring a never-ending stream of barely-capable Java coders from
| programmer mills in India, take 5 times longer to make an app
| than it should have taken, get promoted, and leave everyone
| holding the bag with shitty web app that we all hate because
| it's too slow, too bloated, and doesn't work like it needs to.
| And the companies who can't get enough of that bullshit in-
| house just hire it out to sub-sub-contractors that do the same
| thing. Can we not invest in our native population and education
| systems this time around? I'm so tired of the fact that 90% of
| the IT staff in my Fortune 250 is Indian, and I know people who
| would be better at their jobs living in my home town. It hurts
| our community and our country, in the long run, and by the VERY
| same logic as re-homing our chip production.
| pupperino wrote:
| Well, those Indians living in the US will have families of
| their own, and over time become part of the community you
| claim to be a part of. Very much like your ancestors did,
| except they likely didn't face the arbitrary constraints on
| immigration that Indians (and any other nationality) face
| today.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I would find it hard to believe that there weren't racial
| prejudices involved at literally every point of immigration
| in American history
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| The same thing that happened in the UK will happen in
| America.
|
| People in the UK who are against immigration are often
| talking about Poles who moved to the UK after the EU and
| not Indian families who have lived in those neighborhoods
| for generations.
| dev_daftly wrote:
| The crazy thing is, it's not that long ago that Irish and
| Italian immigrants were not discriminated against. They
| didn't even consider Italian immigrants to be white.
| acdha wrote:
| It sounds like you should be directing more of your anger to
| the C-suite than the people they're hiring. If they couldn't
| get even cheaper Indian immigrants you'd be complaining about
| code boot camp hires instead - what you need is a tech union
| which would give you the ability to push back against short-
| sighted decisions which make your life worse cleaning up
| messes.
| kube-system wrote:
| > Does this mean moving to US based fabs for the M-series
| chips?
|
| This is not really a practical option. A big part of the
| M-series success is TSMC's lead in cutting edge process nodes.
| And Taiwan does not allow export of technology for the latest
| nodes. It is available only there.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Do we think Apple will once again sell servers to customers?
|
| I guess they could sell servers to customers who want to run the
| latest Apple Intelligence models on-prem, even though that
| probably wouldn't make much of a difference, since you probably
| still have to trust Apple.
| newsclues wrote:
| 1u boxes or Mac Mini "servers"?
| simondotau wrote:
| It would make sense for Apple to fork their next highest-end
| Mac Studio motherboard, make relatively minor changes to it
| (e.g. add a higher bandwidth NIC and strip out unnecessary
| I/O) then wrap multiples of those into a rack mount chassis,
| with commodity-grade cooling and power supply solutions
| appropriate for the context.
|
| Combined with a properly headless fork of their OS stack
| (think Darwin, not OS X Server) they could spin up a highly
| competitive solution using entirely "B-team" resources.
| newsclues wrote:
| Lots of interesting things Apple could do with their
| resources.
|
| A modern version of the Xserve RAID for high speed flash
| storage could be very interesting.
|
| The Mac Mini could be used as small blades.
|
| or they could do something really wild, like take the Oxide
| rack scale approach and make something big for DCs.
|
| But they might also want to get a piece of the prosumer
| homelab market that Ubiquiti is in?
| rickdeckard wrote:
| ...then it would be piped through their design-council, run
| through 5 more iterations to get a unique unibody case for
| it, accompanied by an optional proprietary Apple rack and a
| price-tag triple of the competition.
|
| That's along the lines of how it usually rolls whenever
| Apple tries to make something purely utilitarian, it's the
| most considerate and "fresh" look at a product, but
| ultimately designed to be used and then disposed when
| finished.
|
| A purely utilitarian IT-appliance without a individual end-
| user doesn't seem to be possible in their product pipeline,
| you usually end up with something "Prosumer": Impressive on
| its own, yet of degraded maintainability and scalability.
|
| It's like asking Bugatti to design a public transport bus.
| It would surely be an impressive bus, but not one you would
| want to maintain over years at a scale of hundreds.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this is for their own infra. FTA:
|
| > Apple said that it, together with Foxconn Technology Group,
| will later this year begin producing the servers that power the
| cloud component of Apple Intelligence -- a system called
| Private Cloud Compute -- in Houston. That marks a relocation,
| at least for some production, from overseas. Next year, it says
| a 250,000-square-foot facility for such manufacturing will open
| in the city.
|
| [...]
|
| > Apple will also expand data center capacity in Arizona,
| Oregon, Iowa, Nevada and North Carolina, all states with
| existing Apple capacity. The company confirmed that mass
| production of chips started at a Taiwan Semiconductor
| Manufacturing Co. facility in Arizona last month. Bloomberg
| News recently reported that plant is building chips for some
| Apple Watches and iPads.
| willtemperley wrote:
| I think they might build a cloud offering. Something like
| Cloudflare workers but AI centric, perhaps running Swift on the
| Apple equivalent of V8 isolates.
|
| Makes sense from a business perspective - there's significant
| growth potential for them as their presence in web tech is
| approximately nil.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| The Apple TV box (2021) is $129 with 3 GB RAM and 8 GB flash.
| Not hard to see where that could go.
| philistine wrote:
| They will sell servers to customers ... as an add-on to iCloud.
|
| _Apple now offers access to Apple Intelligence Pro at 9.99$ a
| month._
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Watch them lay off 5k highly paid employees in order to create
| 20k low paid jobs.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I'd be happy in the 20k bucket honestly, the job market is
| terrible
| jonplackett wrote:
| Maybe $500 billion will finally be enough to make Siri useful for
| more than just setting an alarm.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Whoa, whoa, whoa, on occasion, if the planets align just right,
| I can also get Siri to set a reminder (and at least half the
| time Siri gets it 80% right).
|
| LLM Siri cannot come fast enough.
| nottorp wrote:
| LLMs are there for generating/hallucinating text, not for
| understanding text.
|
| For natural language processing you need a different kind of
| neural network don't you?
| drodgers wrote:
| What are you talking about? We've invented the Universal
| Translator already.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I'm confident that LLM's will not have hallucination
| problems in the type of requests that I send to Siri.
|
| I don't ask Siri for facts (just like I don't ask LLM's for
| facts). As long as it can correctly, understand what and
| when I ask to be reminded about something, that would be a
| huge improvement for me.
|
| That and being able to map "Bedroom Fan"/"Bedroom Fan
| Light" to "Bedroom Fan Lights" without having to specify
| aliases (and even then it hearing me wrong).
|
| I've see Home Assistant working with LLMs and it can
| understand groupings that I never explicitly defined which
| is very nice. I can say "Turn off all overhead lights" and
| it will find all my overhead lights and turn them off.
| Siri/Alexa can't handle those tasks currently.
| zzbzq wrote:
| It's the other way around. The model is impeccable at
| "understanding text." It's a gigantic mathematical
| spreadsheet that quantifies meaning. The model probably
| "understands" better than any human ever could. Running
| that backwards into producing new text is where it gets
| hand-wavy & it becomes unclear if the generative algorithms
| are really progressing on the same track that humans are
| on, or just some parallel track that diverges or even
| terminates early.
| nottorp wrote:
| I thought it quantifies the probability that a certain
| word (their output) follows a given word sequence (their
| training corpus and the prompt)?
| ben_w wrote:
| Only if you wildly oversimply to the level of being
| misleading.
|
| The precise mechanism LLMs use for reaching their
| probability distributions is why they are able to pass
| most undergraduate level exams, whereas the Markov chain
| projects I made 15-20 years ago were not.
|
| Even as an intermediary, word2vec had to build a space in
| which the concept of "gender" exists such that "man" ->
| "woman" ~= "king" -> "queen".
| nottorp wrote:
| > Only if you wildly oversimply to the level of being
| misleading.
|
| Maybe I'm asking for an explanation :)
|
| Since you seem to understand the mechanism, can you do a
| 3 line summary please?
| ben_w wrote:
| 3 lines? That's still going to be oversimplifed to the
| point of being wrong, but OK.
|
| Make a bunch of neural nets to recognise every concept,
| the same way you would make them to recognise numbers or
| letters in handwiting recognition. Glue them together
| with more neural nets. Put another on the end to turn
| concepts back into words.
|
| For a less wrong but still introductory summary that
| still glosses over stuff, about 1.5 hours of 3blue1brown
| videos, #4-#8 in this playlist: https://youtube.com/playl
| ist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_...
| nottorp wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| ... Oh interesting. And those concepts are hand picked or
| generated automatically somehow?
|
| > For a less wrong but still introductory summary that
| still glosses over stuff, about 1.5 hours of 3blue1brown
| videos
|
| Sorry, my religion forbids me from watching talking
| heads. I'll have to live with your summary for now. Until
| I run into someone who condensed those 1.5 hours in text
| that takes at most 30 min to read...
| ben_w wrote:
| > Oh interesting. And those concepts are hand picked or
| generated automatically somehow?
|
| Fully automated.
|
| > Sorry, my religion forbids me from watching talking
| heads.
|
| What about professional maths communicators who created
| their own open sourced python library for creating video
| content and doesn't even show their face on most videos?
| nottorp wrote:
| My problem is with the time wasted compared to written
| info, not with talking heads per se.
| ben_w wrote:
| He doesn't waste time. No fluff.
|
| You're unlikely to get a better time-quality trade-off on
| any maths topic than a 3blue1brown video.
|
| He's the kind of presenter that others try to mimic
| because he's so good at what he does -- you may recognise
| the visuals from elsewhere because of the library he
| created[0] in order to visualise the topics he was
| discussing.
|
| [0] https://docs.manim.community/en/stable/faq/installati
| on.html
|
| There's also a playback speed slider in YouTube. I use it
| a lot.
| gs17 wrote:
| Simplifying to that point is more of what a Markov chain
| is. LLMs are able to generalize a lot more than that, and
| it's sufficient to "understand text" on a decent level.
| Even a relatively small model can take, e.g. even this
| poorly prompted request: "The user has
| requested 'remind me to pay my bills 8 PM tomorrow'. The
| current date is 2025-02-24. Your available commands are
| 'set_reminder' (time, description), 'set_alarm' (time),
| 'send_email' (to, subject, content). Respond with the
| command and its inputs."
|
| And the most likely response will be what the user
| wanted.
|
| A Markov chain (only using the probabilities of word
| orders from sentences in its training set) could never
| output a command that wasn't stitched together from
| existing ones (i.e. it would _always_ output a valid
| command name, but if no one had requested a reminder for
| a date in 2026 before it was trained, it would never
| output that year). No amount of documents saying "2026
| is the year after 2025" would make a Markov chain
| understand that fact, but LLMs are able to "understand"
| that.
| nessex wrote:
| If you haven't tried OpenAI's advanced voice mode, it's a
| mind blowing version of exactly what things like Siri really
| ought to become with a little more development. If that's
| what you mean by LLM Siri, I totally agree.
|
| Being able to chat casually with low latency, correct
| yourself, switch languages mid-sentence, incorporate context
| throughout a back-and-forth conversation etc. turns talking
| to these kinds of systems from a painful chore into something
| that can actually add value.
| skydhash wrote:
| But does it do actual stuff, like adding a meeting to your
| calendar, call people, or set a timer or a reminder?
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Siri already has LLM integration...
|
| ...that will grind your request to set email Vacation Mode
| through the world's worst speech-to-text, jam the text into
| Chat GPT, and spend the next three minutes reading you an
| uninterruptible 3 minute essay about violence.
| therealcamino wrote:
| Over on Android it's the opposite situation. The voice
| interface to Google Assistant was very reliable for simple
| things like reminders and appointments, and even for general
| knowledge questions. It was part of why I didn't switch to an
| iPhone. Then Gemini came along, and that core functionality
| got a lot worse.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > LLM Siri cannot come fast enough.
|
| I don't think it's been demonstrated that _Apple_ could make
| Siri better with an LLM.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Even that seems to work only half the time. ~50% she just
| doesn't respond to a voice command "Siri" or "Hey Siri" for me.
| TMWNN wrote:
| When Siri first debuted it would automatically beep, so I
| could immediately tell if the phone did not recognize
| recognize "Hey Siri" (just "Siri" didn't work). A couple of
| iOS updates later this went away, which means I can't tell
| without actually picking up the phone and looking at it
| whether the command was accepted.
|
| Even more annoyingly, sometimes there _is_ a beep! -\\_(tsu)_
| /-
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Yup, the UX has gotten so much worse.
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| I would pay $500bn to get siri to distinguish between a 13
| minute timer and a 30 minute timer.
| brador wrote:
| The problem is AI current best use case is creative work,
| art, music, programming, but skilled creative professionals
| is a/the core userbase for Apple products.
|
| Apple is stuck and it's AI will never be good enough until
| those creatives embrace it. Right now it's disdain when
| mentioned.
| dartos wrote:
| Uhh
|
| > The problem is AI current best use case is creative work,
| art, music, programming
|
| By "best" do you mean "marketable?"
|
| Seems weird to see a bunch of creatives and creative
| professionals "disdain" a tool and still say it's "best"
| for them...
| troupo wrote:
| An oft-cited quote goes something like this: "we wanted
| robots/AI to automate boring, routine, meaningless jobs to
| let people be free to pursue arts, music, creativity. It's
| a sad state of affairs that AI is taking over
| arts/music/creativity stranding people with boring,
| routine, meaningless jobs"
| jamil7 wrote:
| > It's a sad state of affairs that AI is taking over
| arts/music/creativity stranding people with boring,
| routine, meaningless jobs"
|
| So far it's not though.
| troupo wrote:
| Oh. It already is. Artists are already saying that a lot
| of commission work is drying out (e.g. illustrations).
| amelius wrote:
| > skilled creative professionals is a/the core userbase for
| Apple products.
|
| Then why doesn't it have a professional CAD application?
| dijit wrote:
| It does.
|
| AutoCAD came to the Mac when Intel was shitting the bed
| (with aggressive OEM contracts for first party system
| integrators that prevented AMD adoption across
| HP/Dell/Lenovo-lines) and Windows 11 was being forced on
| users.
|
| WINTEL played the monopoly game too hard and is starting
| to lose ground.
|
| You love to see it.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Even Apple doesn't do CAD on OSX. They run Siemens NX on
| Windows.
|
| But your statement isn't quite right. Fusion 360 runs
| fine in mac. I'm ex-Apple btw.
| amelius wrote:
| Ok, that's good to know, but my colleagues all use
| SolidWorks so it doesn't change much for me.
| jamil7 wrote:
| > The problem is AI current best use case is creative work,
| art, music, programming
|
| This is where it's being pushed and marketed but I'm not
| actually sure it's the best use case.
| blitzar wrote:
| I am very resourceful so I got around this by setting a 14
| minute timer to outsmart the Ai.
|
| "Your 40 minute timer starts now".
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| I don't know if this is an actual problem you have, but since
| Siri appears to be composed of independent voice-to-text and
| text-to-action systems, you can say "start a one three minute
| timer".
| newAccount2025 wrote:
| I solve this by asking for a 31, 41, or 51 minute timer.
| jonwachob91 wrote:
| How does this help me se a 13, 14, or 15 minute timer?
| hansvm wrote:
| Could you ask to set a 780 second timer?
| bombcar wrote:
| You can, and it works.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| "10 minute timer" + "add 4 minutes"
| boringg wrote:
| When I put in timers -- for some reason my timer
| frequently/randomly just sets to 79 hours and a random
| assortment of minutes and seconds. I have no clue why. I
| always have to double check otherwise I might be waiting
| awhile.
|
| It feels like it was a residual timer or something but I have
| never set anything like that - it is quite strange.
| layer8 wrote:
| Workarounds: 781 seconds timer, or 29/31 minute timer.
|
| I'm serious, that's what I use.
| grahamj wrote:
| Apple software is already largely written my Americans.
|
| Somehow I don't think fealty will change its quality.
| boringg wrote:
| Funny I turned Siri off because i didn't want apple
| intelligence running amok. The follow-on problem --> lack of
| Siri killed my Carplay because Siri is required (also use itf
| for setting alarms/timers). The kicker? I can't seem to turn
| Siri back on after look through all the menus.
|
| I.e. My preference for apple CarPlay supersedes my concerns on
| GPT running over my contents. Though the UI/UX has made it next
| to impossible to turn it back on.
|
| What a world to live in.
| wpm wrote:
| If your phone is new enough for Apple Intelligence, Siri is
| now under that umbrella. There's no "just Siri" option
| anymore, unless you're rockin an iPhone 14 or older.
| rafram wrote:
| Or a non-Pro iPhone 15.
| afro88 wrote:
| Apple Intelligence and Siri are still separate (though Apple
| like to make it look like they are fundamentally
| intertwined). You can turn Apple Intelligence off and leave
| Siri on for CarPlay.
|
| How did you turn Siri off in the first place? That's where
| I'd start...
|
| Settings -> Apple Intelligence & Siri:
|
| Talk and Type to Siri -> turn all this back on
|
| Allow Siri When Locked -> turn this back on
| mossTechnician wrote:
| The part of Siri that causes the most trouble is the speech
| recognition - which uses a voice recognition model that we
| now colloquially refer to as "AI." The part that works
| reliably, the part that sets your alarm or sends the message,
| is an action that's hardcoded.
|
| IMO, moving towards AI just leads to increased uncertainty
| and undesirable outcomes, which is something several
| journalists reviewing Apple Intelligence have attested to.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I'm a formerly non-mac guy who finally bought a brand new iPad.
| I got bored with the wallpaper but couldn't figure out how to
| change it. "Hey Siri, how do I change the wallpaper?"..."Sorry,
| I can't help with that". Tried a couple more questions and all
| it did was Google it for me. This is the latest M4 that was
| around $2k.
|
| This is what our "AI accelerated" chips give us in return? What
| a disgrace
| apwell23 wrote:
| hey thats what alexa is for
| coliveira wrote:
| No, Alexa is only good to interrupt you randomly when you're
| watching TV.
| konschubert wrote:
| After an oligarchy, looks like the us is also getting a planned
| economy now.
| lazide wrote:
| 'Planned'. A command economy anyway.
| konschubert wrote:
| ?
| lazide wrote:
| A planned economy has a plan. I doubt that will exist.
|
| A command economy has different elements of the economy
| ordered around to do what leadership wants.
|
| That seems a lot more likely.
| pupperino wrote:
| Is this a joke that I'm not getting? "Planned economy"
| and "command economy" are synonyms.
| mapt wrote:
| We used to call this an "Industrial policy" or an "Economic
| development policy". Back in the golden era when a strong labor
| movement coexisted with a Red Scare. 78 years after Taft-
| Hartley and 44 years since PATCO, not so much.
|
| We have maybe fifty or a hundred million people rotting away in
| areas where jobs are scarce and housing is plentiful, because
| we used government policy to shut them out of areas where jobs
| are plentiful and housing is scarce. We systematically exported
| jobs from places that aren't big cities because they can be
| performed overseas and our aristocracy can still profit from
| them by owning those people overseas.
|
| I don't know if returning to a little more deliberate of an
| economy is even a partial salve for the place we've found
| ourselves, but I don't think this laissez faire thing is
| sustainable for a whole lot longer. We are overleveraged, and
| arrogantly delusional about our sway at the moment; "Ownership"
| is not some valuable skill. The fall of an anchor currency and
| global conversion to an alternate financial network would be a
| spectacular thing, an astroid striking terrain, which might
| leave craters on entire other continents from secondary ejecta.
| World wars have been fought over less.
| hooverd wrote:
| "We" wasn't big government. It was a million homeowners who
| decided that the neighborhood they moved into should be
| frozen in amber forever. Everyone wants housing to be cheap
| but also for their property values to rise onto infinity.
| They push back against any attempt to change this and then
| complain about the inevitable results.
| blitzar wrote:
| > now
|
| I guess before is before Christopher Columbus
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Oh god. Hopefully they're lighter than the old xserves. We had
| one still running up until a few years ago when we finally
| removed it. You could break a toe if it dropped while pulling it
| out of the rack. People are still selling them on eBay.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hey quality stuff is heavy!
|
| The desktop case for my 286, I could stand on it and it would
| not bend!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I suspect that was the RAID drive bay (ridiculous item). That
| was a 3-4U monster.
|
| The Xserve, itself, was a 1U unit that was pretty much the same
| (or lighter than) any other 1U server (we also had HP and Dell
| servers that were _heavy_ ). The weight distribution could be
| weird.
|
| That stupid drive bay was a proprietary nightmare. The disks
| cost a fortune.
|
| However, from what I can see, this will be for "internal-use"
| servers. I don't think they will be selling iron; just services
| run on the iron.
| michelb wrote:
| I'm curious what they will look like, given that these are not
| for anyone else to buy. Maybe Apple made a different form
| factor/configuration that suits their datacenters better?
| chippiewill wrote:
| I don't think it's AI servers for Apple to sell. I think it's
| just regular x86 Linux servers to power Apple's AI cloud
| services. It's a commitment to internal investment rather than
| a product.
| hhh wrote:
| They have hiring positions for running a Darwin-based server
| OS, and their private cloud compute is on Apple Silicon. I
| doubt it's going to be swaths of x86.
| tux3 wrote:
| Does this mean competing with Asahi to run a Linux kernel, or
| will this be an attempt to run AI workloads on XNU?
|
| Consider the cost of GPUs, losing what could be double digit
| percents on overhead might not make this very competitive. The
| macOS microkernel can still beat NT in some situations (like not
| having filters slowing filesystem down to a crawl), but it lags
| significantly behind the investment in Linux performance over the
| years by every other major company.
| chippiewill wrote:
| I don't think it's AI servers for Apple silicon. I think it's
| just regular x86 Linux servers to power Apple's AI cloud
| services. It's a commitment to internal investment rather than
| a product.
| cube2222 wrote:
| FWIW, Apple's AI "private cloud compute" is Apple Silicon-
| based, and it's a core part of some of the security
| guarantees offered. See [0].
|
| [0]: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'll honestly love to see an Apple Silicon based XServe and
| comeback of "macOS $VERSION Server" add-on, and maybe an
| XSAN box.
|
| Doing a Mac Mini sized version for SOHO would be great,
| too.
|
| One can dream, I guess...
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Apple doesn't like B2B and Steve Jobs was very vocal on
| this (there are various videos where he explains why).
| Ever since they can afford to, they reduced their B2B to
| the bare minimum needed. So don't expect anything server-
| like from Apple.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Yeah, I know, this is why I added "One can dream, I
| guess". :)
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Funny, because I think Apple could do quite well in this
| realm.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'm not sure. Because the moment you enter the system
| room, the ecosystem is a completely different universe.
|
| You can't easily sell "Good / Better / Best" version of a
| single model, and tell "These are the options, take it or
| leave it". Servers are customized to the screws they come
| with and are expanded throughout over the years. So, the
| logistics are somewhat different for these kinds of
| devices.
|
| Plus, macOS is not a CLI first operating system for
| server operations, and macOS Server is not updated for
| some years. Allowing Linux would be a different offering,
| and allowing macOS to work with all kinds of hardware
| from ordinary Ethernet to 100G+ Ethernet and 400gbps
| Infiniband (plus all the other interconnects) will be a
| fun exercise in testing flexibility of both macOS and
| Apple development teams.
|
| So it's quite complicated. All servers are built to order
| SKUs. Dell keeps configurations "per server" in their
| databases, for example. If you have a Dell server, enter
| its service tag to support site, and you'll get the
| configuration of the device as it left the factory.
| mysteria wrote:
| They don't have to go all the way though and fully
| compete with Dell EMC/HPE. I'm not sure what the original
| commenter was thinking but in my mind they could simply
| sell a Mac Studio variant with dual PSUs, better
| networking, a rackmount chassis, etc. Basically have
| their existing consumer machine placed in a more
| datacenter friendly factor.
|
| I mean places like Github and AWS are painfully racking
| up Mac Minis for their deployments and this theoretical
| server model would simplify everything. It also becomes
| an option for on premises AI inference using MLX,
| especially if they manage to get ANE support working in
| conjunction with the GPU for faster prefill.
|
| The support and software stack for the server model would
| be the exact same as the consumer variant and they
| certainly wouldn't have special Linux offerings,
| Infiniband, and all that. If there's networking beyond
| their existing 10G it's going to be built into the board
| and they aren't going to support random 3rd party cards.
| The unit also doesn't need to be upgradable either.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| I believe the intention is to use their own M-Series CPUs - to
| get what they call "Private Cloud Compute". The cpu on your
| phone will encrypt data and a request, send it over the network
| to am M-series CPU which will decrypt and process/send back an
| encrypted response.
|
| The idea being there's no VMware, kernel or piece of hardware
| that can have backdoors built into unless someone files off the
| top of the chip and somehow probes the silicon
|
| > Apple said that it, together with Foxconn Technology Group,
| will later this year begin producing the servers that power the
| cloud component of Apple Intelligence -- a system called
| Private Cloud Compute -- in Houston. That marks a relocation,
| at least for some production, from overseas. Next year, it says
| a 250,000-square-foot facility for such manufacturing will open
| in the city.
|
| > The Private Cloud Compute servers use advanced M-series chips
| already found in the company's Mac computers. Those chips
| themselves, however, continue to be produced in Taiwan.
| matrix2596 wrote:
| what can people outside US and china do?
| michelb wrote:
| Depending on where you live, be thankful for a functioning
| democracy?
| ozmodiar wrote:
| IMO we've really got to start pressuring our own governments to
| take control of their networks, as well as the companies the
| population is going through (not just Facebook, but even
| international contractors for services). Letting a foreign
| government have this much control over the data of your
| populace and the ability to feed whatever algorithmic message
| they like is a path bound for disaster in the long run. The
| powers of the world are way too consolidated as is, and a
| company can turn into a state actor at the drop of a hat. I
| don't think we can maintain kayfabe about the country/corporate
| divide. I also think this can be done without impacting freedom
| of speech for your population, as long as you don't consider
| corporations people.
|
| Most countries don't have the resources to do much, but even
| then they can try their hardest not to be beholden to any
| single foreign country _cough_ China, America _cough_.
| paxys wrote:
| Anyone keeping count of how many trillions in hypothetical
| investments and millions of jobs large American corporations have
| promised in the next 3-5 years?
| jasdi wrote:
| :) its like the dot com boom. How many around here remember those
| days?
| treaba1098 wrote:
| Reverse technology transfer from countries like China is kind of
| fair. But EU companies should be very wary of Trump tariff
| blackmail that forces them to build production lines in the US.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >But EU companies should be very wary of Trump tariff blackmail
| that forces them to build production lines in the US.
|
| That's the whole point of tariffs, to encourage domestic
| production.
|
| Put another way, what is the difference between what you wrote
| and
|
| >But US companies should be very wary of EU tariff blackmail
| that forces them to build production lines in the EU.
|
| ?
|
| Whether a particular tariff is economically viable is a
| reasonable debate. Calling Trump's tariffs "blackmail" without
| assigning that epithet to all tariffs from whatever source is
| not.
| briandear wrote:
| So the EU has no tariffs?
| kaveh_h wrote:
| Not a lot of them, but Trump accuse EU of tariffs because it
| has VAT. That's not the same thing because VAT apply to
| domestic companies as well so there's no real unfair
| advantage. You could make the claim that it's still worse for
| foreign goods as VAT can be offset with VAT from supplier
| purchases, but that only works if you produce goods in the
| same country as you sell them. But US companies have even
| larger advantage already as they don't have any VAT, so in
| the end the playing field is kind of level.
|
| This doesn't stop Trump from pressuring and squeezing and
| making false claims to justify his standing point. Expect an
| unstable trade environment due to tariffs and retaliation.
| This will hurt small businesses that have even more complex
| environment to operate in.
| dboreham wrote:
| > they don't have any VAT
|
| VAT is what Americans call "sales tax" and US companies do
| pay and charge that.
| rs186 wrote:
| Reminder: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/30/20747765/apple-mac-
| pro-20...
| jmyeet wrote:
| There's a lot of understandable skepticism about this
| announcement because there are so many PR announcements. I want
| to temper that with an alternative perspective.
|
| I actually think Apple is a potential dark horse when it comes to
| AI hardware. What we have now is essentially a three-layered
| monopoly: ASML, TSMC, NVidia. This has been incredibly lucrative
| for NVidia. But, as we know, Apple doesn't like to rely on third-
| party hardware. They've invested heavily in ARM going back to
| buying PA Semi [1]. Apple replaced Intel chips (which originally
| replaced Power chips) with the M series in recent years. Apple is
| in the process of replacing Qualcomm modems in iPhones, which is
| not only a technical feat but a legal one given Qualcomm's patent
| dominance over 4G/5G.
|
| Apple has the resolve for long-term initiatives that few other
| companies have. Apple Pay continues to chip away and get slowly
| better in a way that, if it were a Google product, would've been
| cancelled, rebranded, relaunched probably 3-4 times by now
| (Google Checkout, Google Wallet, Google Pay, Android Pay, etc).
|
| Apple clearly sees AI as a strategic issue. They have loads of
| cash on hand to finance basically anything they want. And they
| won't want to be beholden to NVidia.
|
| I expect Apple to have a significant impact here but it won't be
| tomorrow or even this year. It'll be over the next 5-10 years.
|
| [1]: https://www.wired.com/2008/04/four-reasons-ap/
| nobankai wrote:
| Apple's incentives have definitely aligned with replacing
| Nvidia entirely ever since they ceased diplomatic relations.
| But Nvidia also knows this, which is why they invest heavily in
| things Apple will never do. They write the official Linux
| drivers Apple wouldn't get caught dead supporting. They give
| users and integrators freedom to choose their OS, software and
| library stacks to better suit their application. They sell
| individual GPUs and unlocked edge compute hardware with no
| distribution terms or $99/year "developer license" bullshit.
| Nvidia is a hardware company in places where Apple tries
| shipping services instead.
|
| Then there's also the software issues. Nvidia has invested in
| GPU-based compute nonstop for the past 10+ years. Apple
| invested in Nvidia, then invested in OpenCL after abandoning
| Nvidia, then abandoned OpenCL for Metal compute which would
| eventually become the proprietary Accelerate framework.
| Nvidia's eggs are all organized in one, valuable basket.
| Apple's investments are spread out all over the place, with
| much of the time and money going into projects that don't even
| exist anymore.
|
| Apple has the TSMC advantage, but that's just about it. Their
| GPU designs aren't comparably efficient or compute-oriented to
| what Nvidia ships today. Additionally, Nvidia will continue
| investing in places that Apple principally refuses to support.
| Unless a serious tide change occurs at Apple, they aren't going
| to get a fair competition with Nvidia.
| rvz wrote:
| All for the purpose of the AI servers that will power Apple's own
| private AI models for training and inference running on Apple
| Silicon.
|
| Still in a AAPL long position since $170 and waiting for the re-
| introduction of Xserve with a new Apple Silicon-based OS. [0]
|
| Probably "aiOS" (Just guessing).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278371
| nobankai wrote:
| > waiting for the re-introduction of Xserve with a new Apple
| Silicon-based OS.
|
| I nearly tripped over a skeleton holding up a sign with the
| same sentiment walking into HN today. I expect you'll be
| waiting quite some time...
| alphabetting wrote:
| Good to see but brings to mind the deal they cut with China in
| 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29482351
| cgcrob wrote:
| Cynical take here, but I think realistic.
|
| There's a lot of noise I can see behind the scenes on investor
| confidence. Noise as in "everything is fucked" sort of level of
| noise. Thus I expect this is being said to try and stop the AAPL
| stock collapsing in the upcoming recession that the analysts are
| predicting more than a tangible expansion and recruitment goal.
|
| I also take issue with their being 20,000 people on the market
| who are still able to contribute something useful. They will be
| culled quickly and quietly down the line in the annual corporate
| lay offs.
|
| It is not the time to make grand gestures unless you're trying to
| gain political favour, at which point any respect I have at least
| is gone.
|
| Market opening today should be interesting...
| foxandmouse wrote:
| Coincidentally, construction isn't set to start until late
| November 2028--convenient timing. If this mess blows over, they
| can quietly backpedal and carry on like nothing happened.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Every major business leader is stuck saying "do what we have
| to" a lot.
|
| The difference between the great leaders and the crap leaders
| is all in the details.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Good timing because Trump should be significantly weaker, and
| it'll be clear where Trumpism is headed in the culture, but
| also it will be more clear where AI will end up.
|
| Even if the move forward with investment, they will be a bit of
| a 'late' mover, but will have had a chance to see what is
| working and what isn't working for everyone else.
| gsibble wrote:
| Trump might be weaker but if Vance were to win the 2028
| election he'd just continue the same policies.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Maybe, but that's a huge IF. It's assuming
|
| 1. JD Vance independent of Trump will have the same
| policies.
|
| 2. JD Vance will have enough popularity for a serious 2028
| run. He might fall out favour with Trump as Trump tries to
| mount a bid for a third term, Trumpism might just generally
| lose popularity if policies lead to bad outcomes.
|
| 3. Dems don't figure their shit out. They should be able to
| take back some control in mid-terms, and then start to push
| their own policies, or at least credibly show that the most
| extreme policies from the exec branch don't have teeth
| anymore.
| amazingman wrote:
| And you're assuming that the 2028 election (and 2026 for
| that matter) will be business as usual elections, against
| all evidence to the contrary staring us directly in the
| face.
| astrange wrote:
| The federal government doesn't control elections in the
| US so they don't have much power here. Also, firing all
| the FBI agents is a bad first step to using them for
| interference. They have no clue how to be authoritarians;
| to do that, you need to be popular and have the security
| forces like you.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's incredible this is a possibility at this point.
| layer8 wrote:
| Source on the construction start?
| nilkn wrote:
| The NYT says the Texas facility will open in 2026:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/business/apple-tariffs-jo...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| This is an insane amount of cash to throw at any problem. They
| could have Apple rockets mining asteroids with $500,000,000,000.
| There is no way all this cash goes into AI. What will actually
| happen is they will take 1/10th this cash to an over-valued
| startup and acquire them.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Between land, hardware, having to build multiple power plants,
| the labor costs involved in all of this, and setting money
| aside to run all of those for however long, then yeah I can see
| where it gets up to that price. 20k engineers is easily 5
| billion per year in salaries, probably more.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The maths are not adding up.
|
| Assume the human resources at $100,000 per head, and you get
| $2B/yr. Four years comes to just $8B for human resources.
| Assume land costs $10B. Assume construction costs $100B.
|
| 100+10+8 is $118B
|
| Where is the money actually going?
| fundad wrote:
| Apple is just giving a PR win to the administration like they
| did last time their preferred party was in power.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Looks like the US is moving fast to bring the whole supply chain
| for everything and anything into its own borders.
|
| I wonder where this will lead to.
| Tepix wrote:
| Will they remain competitive with other big players producing
| in cheaper countries?
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Who are those "other big players" when it comes to building a
| complete AI stack?
|
| Who can compete with Tesla and Waymo without having to buy
| hardware and software from the US?
|
| Who can compete with OpenAI, Google, Grok, Perplexity without
| US hardware and software?
| willvarfar wrote:
| The Chinese?
|
| It sounds flippant but the US hasn't got some unassailable
| moat around chip production or their application.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| It's not a small feat. China would have to:
|
| 1: Take over Taiwan to get TSML under their control
|
| 2: Find a way to make a deal with ASML for the needed
| lithography machines
|
| 3: Somehow aquire the knowhow that Nvidia has
|
| Taiwan would require a conflict with the US. ASML is a
| dutch company but seems to be somehow under US control. I
| have not yet figured out the exact setup there. And
| Nvidia is a US company.
| willvarfar wrote:
| China has steadily been developing its own processes and
| the laser tech needed for smaller sizes.
|
| It is very clear that both US and China are racing to
| onshore and establish sovereign control of chip
| production.
|
| Sucks to be Taiwanese right now. The "silicon shield" is
| evaporating.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Citation needed.
|
| I have yet to see anything that hints at China being able
| to catch up with ASML+TSMC+Nvidia.
| themagician wrote:
| They are trying, and will eventually catch up, the same
| way they have in software and in hardware in many other
| spaces. Maybe it will take another 10 years. Maybe
| another 10 months.
|
| This idea that EUVL is--and always will be--outside of
| the reach of China is, frankly, silly. It's a silly
| strategy to maintain dominance. They will straight up
| steal the technology if needed.
|
| We should stop pretending like we can roadblock the
| technological development of the largest country. It's
| just going to make the fall that much harder. Once they
| do attain the ability to manufactuer EUVL domestically,
| capital is going to flood out of US tech stocks like no
| tomorrow.
|
| You haven't seen anything that hints at it, because most
| news about what happens in China doesn't leave China. The
| propoganda machine is hard at work reminding you that
| China is terrible and eveyrone in China is poor. You'll
| learn about China catching up only after it's already
| happened.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Deepseek seems to prove there's no super secret sauce that
| makes these models irreproducible outside the US and that
| the companies here are suffering a bit from the glut of
| cash/credits leading them to burn tons of extra processing
| power that could have been optimized away.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| DeepSeek has been trained on US hardware.
| rtkwe wrote:
| US hardware in what sense? My understanding was it was
| trained on spare compute owned by the parent company but
| I didn't bother looking that deep.
| 827a wrote:
| A nice model, does not a billion dollar company make. The
| hard part of AI is not the model; Apple needs people to
| do the 80% rest-of-the-work; how do you make AI useful to
| the average person? How can we get inference on edge
| devices as cheap and efficient as possible? Models are
| boring. Everyone fully expects that we'll see an N%
| increase in intelligence every six months now. Yawn. The
| exciting thing now is: What are we using AI for?
| rtkwe wrote:
| Spending a couple billion dollars also doesn't make an
| actual billion dollar company. It's yet to be proven that
| all this spend on LLM training and running can actually
| get translated into an actual profit.
| ghaff wrote:
| With the combination of very real geopolitical risk (which
| was a topic of considerable discussion at a tech conference
| I attended late last fall) and the current political
| climate, there's a significant mindset that the US should
| be pulling back a lot of things to its own borders where
| practical even if not optimal _at the moment_.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Tesla makes a lot of promises that it can't keep and losing
| money and market share globally.
|
| I doubt Waymo is going to be a big deal in much of the US
| over the next decade. Even if they do figure out all of the
| technical issues. People will accept hundreds dying from
| car crashes. But not one dying from autonomous cars.
| matwood wrote:
| > Who can compete with Tesla
|
| BYD says hi.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It won't happen. The supply chain is far too complex. Not to
| mention that the labor market in the US is not willing to do a
| lot of the work that you see in China and isn't large enough
| even if there were enough willing people.
|
| And then you have the rare earth minerals that aren't available
| here.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Work will be increasingly done by robots.
|
| Which raw earth materials could be a show stopper for the US?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| That was a typo above (since edited). I meant _rare_ earth
| materials.
|
| And why hasnt that happen yet instead of Foxconn employing
| 770K people?
|
| These are the raw materials used by the iPhone
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/the-metals-inside-your-
| ipho...
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| why hasnt that happen yet
|
| Because the past is not the future.
| brandon272 wrote:
| Until things are actually built, I take press releases like
| these with a grain of salt. Similar to the stories about Mark
| Zuckerberg removing tampons from men's washrooms the week
| before the Presidential inauguration, I believe that a lot of
| these stories are intended for an audience of one.
| ActionHank wrote:
| Depression.
|
| The US is a great place to have your headquarters and a
| terrible place to have your not-so-cheap labor.
|
| Their actions will drive prices higher and, indirectly, wage
| higher. Businesses without a war chest will not be able to keep
| going and fold, the labor market will collapse.
|
| The rest of the world will trade amongst each other and I
| suspect to save themselves, some big tech companies will
| relocate their headquarters.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Labor is only costly when humans do the work.
|
| But that will be less and less the case.
|
| Waymo is doing 150,000 autonomous rides per week now.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| In three cities with good weather and they don't do
| highways.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| And a year ago they did less than 15,000!
|
| That is not even one tenth!
|
| They clearly will not get anywhere with this.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes, just like every startup pitch deck.
|
| "We grew from 10 customers to 100 customers in a year. At
| this rate we will have 20% of the world's population in a
| decade!!!"
|
| The first cohort of customers of any company is always
| the easiest to obtain with the lowest acquisition cost.
| You solve the easiest problems first.
|
| This is Cohort Analysis 101. Not to mention Waymo still
| hasn't shown to be able to operate in less than ideal
| weather conditions or proven that the unit economics will
| make sense or be economical especially taking into
| account maintenance, or utilization ratios.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| we will have 20% of the world's population in a decade
|
| That is roughly what happened with Facebook, Google, the
| iPhone ...
|
| None of these products were as good when they started as
| when they had a billion users.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| https://www.scribbr.com/research-bias/survivorship-
| bias/#:~:...
|
| Is that really what you want to argue in front of
| investors? That you are going to be the next Facebook,
| Google or Apple?
|
| There was also MySpace, Friendster, Altavista, InfoSeek,
| RIM, Nokia...
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Facebook was the next Facebook with Instagram.
|
| Apple was the next Apple with the iMac. Then with the
| iPod. Then with the iPhone.
|
| Google was the next Google with Android. With Chrome.
| With Gmail. With Google Maps. With YouTube.
|
| Google becoming the next Google with Waymo would not be a
| black swan event.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Google also had literally hundreds of failures and
| Android is not an amazing financial success by any means
| and Google still ends up paying Apple over $20 billion a
| year because people with money buy iPhones.
|
| Google is not exactly known for its success rate getting
| products out of the door that aren't ad related.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Give stuff for free, ???, profit. It's kinda worked for
| them, but not as well as Apple's strategy.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You can't give hardware away for free profitably.
|
| You also have hundreds of failures
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| Including Google Fiber.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2019/02/googl...
|
| Google Stadia was disaster.
|
| In the phone market. The Motorola acquisition was a major
| failure and Pixels aren't taking the world by storm.
|
| The entire "Other bets" haven't led to any major
| successes.
|
| There are only two tech companies that have shown any
| ability to do hardware at scale as mass consumer products
| in the last 25 years - Apple and Tesla.
| sbochins wrote:
| It's been operating safely in each market they're in. The
| AI keeps getting better. They have no competition (please
| don't bother mentioning Tesla vapor ware). Path to high
| growth seems pretty sure at this point.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And the markets they are in are low hanging fruit with
| good weather. I'm not saying Waymo is less safe than
| human drivers. I am saying that it will only take _one_
| fatal accident by any self driving car for people to lose
| confidence, investigations to start, rollouts to be
| paused etc. I'm also not saying that is a logical
| response.
| flutas wrote:
| > I am saying that it will only take one fatal accident
| by any self driving car for people to lose confidence,
| investigations to start, rollouts to be paused etc.
|
| Uber and Cruise are both great examples of this, but it
| seems like the effect is mostly localized to the company
| itself that has the issue.
|
| Uber hit and killed a jaywalking pedestrian, resulting in
| their self driving tech being sold to Aurora. [0]
|
| Cruise hit a pedestrian that was flung into the cars path
| that a human driver hit previously. This resulted in GM
| completely abandoning Cruise and their future seems foggy
| at best. [1]
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_(autonomous_veh
| icle)#Su...
| no_wizard wrote:
| Which is very very few markets, and all of them share
| weather patterns that are very similar.
|
| When Waymo can demonstrate reliably going from Chicago to
| Ann Harbor in the middle of a snow storm thats when we
| can start talking about how its good enough.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It reminds me of the advanced ED209 robot in Robocop that
| was taken out by an inability to go down a flight of
| stairs
|
| https://youtu.be/_MS4sLlBvbE
| gs17 wrote:
| That could also lead to a depression. I haven't heard a lot
| of politicians here (Andrew Yang in 2020? does he even
| count as "a politician"?) with good plans for what to do
| when automation hits jobs even harder.
| SllX wrote:
| A failed politician is still a politician.
| 827a wrote:
| All else being equal, companies are going to use the source
| of labor that results in the cheapest product they can
| produce. No one is forcing companies to move this kind of
| manufacturing to the United States. A 10% (let me reiterate
| that: TEN PERCENT) tariff on incoming goods is inflationary,
| but by very little, and quickly absorbed by companies and
| consumers. No one is moving their labor supply from China to
| the US to avoid a ten percent tariff; US labor is more
| expensive than that, and there are fifty other places around
| the planet you could find cheap low-skill labor that aren't
| on Trump's shitlist.
|
| But you won't believe any of that, because you _want_ all
| this to happen. You 're a doomer; doomers and preppers
| secretly want the doom they predict to happen, even if they
| won't admit it to themselves.
| ActionHank wrote:
| For now they are going with the tide, because they don't
| want to relocate head office.
|
| If trump's terrible plans are rolled back there's no harm.
|
| If they aren't rolled back they will undergo the costly
| move to relocate.
|
| The world is a bigger market than USA and just about every
| other country has cheaper labor and no tariffs.
|
| It's just logic, I have no emotion tied to this.
| 827a wrote:
| Your "logic" (masking) conveniently avoids the point I
| raised: That these tariffs are being enforced to the tune
| of 10%. That isn't enough to alone justify this level of
| investment, or relocation of significant production
| capacity. Obviously, Apple agrees with this, because the
| investments they're making aren't as far as I can tell a
| relocation of capacity from China to the United States,
| but rather greenfield investment in high-skill research
| and development. Apple has also made significant
| investment into advanced silicon manufacturing in the
| United States; something they _also_ did not rely on
| China for previously.
|
| > The world is a bigger market than USA and just about
| every other country has cheaper labor and no tariffs.
|
| Have you done zero research into this? The EU imposes a
| tariff on Chinese EVs. India imposes insane tariffs on
| all imported electronics. China tariffs Australian wine.
| Russia tariffs agricultural products from the EU. Brazil
| tariffs all imported automobiles. The list goes on.
| Tariffs are everywhere, everyone uses them for something.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| As an ex Apple engineer, i think you're overlooking that a
| huge fraction of labor is robotic, and has been for at least
| 15 years.
|
| (even in the famous contract manufacturers used by Apple and
| Dell, etc.)
|
| The point is that what you counted as not cheap labor
| probably is largely capex.
| no_wizard wrote:
| This is all intended policy to benefit Trumps super donors.
| They can then scoop up marketshare and competition for
| pennies, then lobby to get the tariffs lowered or removed,
| but the higher prices - that we will be used to paying at the
| point this all comes together - will not go down.
| tootie wrote:
| 20K people is a drop in the bucket.
| tremarley wrote:
| That what tariffs will do
| kittikitti wrote:
| Texas is big tech's choice to skirt employee protections. I'm
| sure these are the type of jobs, similar to Foxconn per the
| article, that Americans are looking forward to.
| voidfunc wrote:
| When Texas flips blue like California did way back it's going
| to be interesting
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Nah, watch what happens when California goes red, if Dems
| repeat their 2024 performance trends.
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| Unlike Texas, California thankfully hasn't been
| gerrymandered to death. It still has a functioning
| democracy.
| hooverd wrote:
| California's housing crisis is a result of small-c
| conservatives wanting their property values to rise
| forever. Prop 13 and it's consequences have been a disaster
| for the state.
| quesera wrote:
| Prop 13 is a disaster, but it was not the product of any
| specific political persuasion.
|
| It was even well-intentioned, but the unforseen (although
| predictable in direction if not magnitude) consequences
| are in fact disastrous.
|
| I have wondered about how to repeal Prop 13, but I can't
| come up with a repeal that doesn't do equal and opposite
| damage.
| psygn89 wrote:
| No thanks
| mrcwinn wrote:
| I know a lot of tech workers in Texas, specifically in the
| Austin area. They seem to be doing very well. I'm quite proud
| of America's working conditions. A lot of workers in other
| countries would marvel at our opportunities and be grateful
| these investments are happening here as opposed to elsewhere.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >A lot of workers in other countries would marvel at our
| opportunities and be grateful these investments are happening
| here as opposed to elsewhere.
|
| "In other coutries"...any particular ones?
| rbanffy wrote:
| I can't think of any developed country where that'd make
| sense.
| 42772827 wrote:
| While that's certainly a key component, Texas is also home to
| the largest potential solar and wind capacity in the country.
| There's also a ton of land to build on.
| hooverd wrote:
| At this rate, Texas is going to go the way of it's hat and
| ban "woke energy" like solar and wind. [0]
|
| [0] https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/spotlight/renewable-
| ener...
| 42772827 wrote:
| Unlikely. Texas is the largest exporter of crude oil and
| natural gas, the largest in capacity for refining
| petroleum, and huge exporter of petrochemicals in the US.
| More solar and wind means more oil for refinement and
| export.
| rbanffy wrote:
| And Austin was an island of sanity according to my friends
| who lived there.
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| I'm in Dallas and doing just fine tyvm.
|
| I do find it slightly offensive that you would insinuate that
| hiring in Texas is solely about less worker protections and not
| that we have plenty of skilled workers in one place and with a
| lower cost of living.
|
| I'm a worker not an owner,and I prefer living in Texas at this
| stage in my life and have turned down offers to move back to
| California.
|
| Working in tech in a big Texas city easily puts you in the top
| 10% of the cushiest jobs in the US. Based on how I've been
| treated here, I really doubt that worker protections (or lack
| thereof) is the real driving force behind more tech jobs moving
| here. We are far from being oppressed here.
|
| The most likely driving force of tech moving to Texas is that
| mid career professionals like myself don't see a future in
| California due to the insane cost and bad vibe of raising a
| family there. It's a great place for people just out of
| college, but Texas is a better place to settle down unless you
| are pulling an outrageous salary. The other big advantage
| California has is VC and startup networks being located there,
| which is also something that primarily benefits early career
| people rather than those of us that need a stable job at an
| established company.
|
| It's also worth pointing out that Texas has long had a large
| technology industry presence. The dominance that California
| experienced during the early 2000s through to mid 2010s is an
| outlier and it shouldnt surprise anybody that things are
| evening out.
| neolithic wrote:
| "Four years ago, a few months after President Joseph R. Biden
| Jr.'s inauguration, Apple announced an "acceleration" of its U.S.
| investments, pledging to spend $430 billion and add 20,000 jobs
| over five years. In January 2018, during Mr. Trump's first term,
| the company said that its "direct contribution to the U.S.
| economy" would be $350 billion over five years and that it
| planned to create 20,000 jobs over that period. Apple did not
| immediately respond to a request for comment."
|
| Is this just lip service? What happened to those previous
| investments?
| htrp wrote:
| they are all counted as part of this 500bn?
| bombcar wrote:
| I think the question is "have they done anything" or do they
| just keep promising to do something someday?
| ghaff wrote:
| This happens all the time with large investments in $X that
| make for impressive sounding press releases. If you (can) dig
| into the details, invariably a lot of the money is in
| previously committed/spent allocations in a whole bunch of
| different buckets (or, per bombcar's sibling comment, money
| that may never be spent at all).
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Official release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-
| will-spend-more...
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158187)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Did they basically just recycle this?
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-commits-430-bil...
| Handy-Man wrote:
| Yup.
|
| "Apple's most recent announcement on US investment was a 2021
| promise to spend $430 billion over the following five years,
| including a 3,000-employee campus in North Carolina, though
| development on that project has since paused."
|
| https://www.theverge.com/news/618172/apple-500-billion-us-in...
| dmix wrote:
| Some new things in the article
|
| - a larger investment number in a previously announced Austin
| campus
|
| - new factory in Houston "which will create thousands of
| jobs"
|
| - "doubling its $5 billion US Advanced Manufacturing Fund to
| $10 billion"
|
| - "It will also open an Apple Manufacturing Academy in
| Detroit in which Apple engineers and other experts will offer
| consultations to local businesses on "implementing AI and
| smart manufacturing techniques," along with free classes for
| workers."
| jtbayly wrote:
| The 2021 announcement works out to $86B per year. The 2025
| announcement works out to $125B per year.
|
| In my mind that's a pretty substantial increase.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| About half of that is just inflation; $86B is $104B now.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| IIUC, that $86B in 2021 plus inflation works out to ~$100B in
| 2025. So it's a 25% increase then?
| DannyBee wrote:
| They paused the last one they announced, so it's an
| infinite increase if it happens.
|
| But i expect, once the media cycle dies down, it'll get
| paused too, and then ignored because can't admit that
| something didn't work out!
| echelon wrote:
| Does anyone have a list of the times Apple has lied about
| bringing jobs back to the US (or keeping them here)?
|
| I recall Apple making a lot of noise about Macbooks being
| manufactured here, but that they eventually got shipped
| off to China.
| refulgentis wrote:
| No dog in this fight, and I agree with the premise,
| however there was never a time Apple made a ton of noise
| about MacBooks being manufactured in the US.
|
| There was a _ton_ of noise about _Mac Pros_ being
| manufactured in the US, but sadly, I am not nearly as
| familiar with Apple after, say 2018*. Not even sure if
| they have a Mac Pro anymore. :X and if they do, I assume
| it 's not the same model (the black trashcan), so it
| makes me wonder if they bothered retooling here, or
| quietly moved it somewhere else
|
| * TL;Dr at some point it became clear to me Cook is
| Sculley 2.0. I date it to around walking around NYC and
| seeing an absurd amount of Apple News bus-stop ads.
| Services! (TM)
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Yep. With Trump, people make promises, he forgets, they
| forget. But the base get their little thrill of the day.
| dspillett wrote:
| Much as it might be pandering to Trump's nationalist
| (America first / American only) policies, or simply an
| action to avoid some of the effects of tariffs that might
| be imposed, this time around, I see no such connection
| for the 2021 announcement. Unless they are connected as
| they are a more generic "pleasing the incoming
| administration" to try curry favour for when decisions
| that might affect the company are being made.
| dang wrote:
| (This comment was originally posted to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158187, so "they" was
| Apple. We merged that thread hither.)
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| "Hither" sadly underutilized word. Doubly true for "thither"
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Follow those two up with a `yon` and buddy, you got a stew
| brewin'
| evereverever wrote:
| Yep, just with less Austin Texas.
| blitzar wrote:
| They are focused on sustainability, why not extend it to
| recycling investments.
| blindriver wrote:
| Say what you want about Trump, this is the kind of deal that
| wouldn't have happened with any of the previous administrations,
| both Democrat or Republican. It's the kind of deal that keeps
| MAGA loyal to him, despite all the noise about DOGE.
| soperj wrote:
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-commits-430-bil...
|
| Never would have happened with any of the previous
| administrations...
| DannyBee wrote:
| They already did it once in the previous administration, so i
| guess that argument is out the window.
|
| Got any others?
| fma wrote:
| What keeps MAGA loyal is only consuming news that do not bring
| up when previous administrations did such kind of deals.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > Four years ago, a few months after Mr. Biden's inauguration,
| Apple announced an "acceleration" of its U.S. investments,
| pledging to spend $430 billion and add 20,000 jobs over five
| years. In January 2018, during Mr. Trump's first term, the
| company said that its "direct contribution to the U.S. economy"
| would be $350 billion over five years and that it planned to
| create 20,000 jobs over that period
|
| Anyways, the land (obviously in Texas) is already purchased and
| has been sitting empty. The unbuilt factory keeps getting more
| expensive though.
| xyst wrote:
| Mark my words: it will end up like the Apple Car.
|
| Apple "Intelligence" has been a flop.
| nobankai wrote:
| I can't tell why you're being downvoted, we have quite a
| laundry list of protracted investments at Apple leading to
| nothing worth shipping. Given how much of a nothingburger AI
| has been up to this point, I have zero hope that Apple will
| succeed at commoditizing a zero-demand service.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| lol. lmao.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Apple better hope none of their customers realize how
| comparatively mid of a product iphones are by the time those
| servers are ready.
| Febra33 wrote:
| Time to move away from Apple before they train their AI Models on
| the rest of my data that they left untouched
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| If only they could spare a few dozen devs to update the command
| line tools to the 21st century.
| klysm wrote:
| Please explain how this will increase the stock price in the
| next week, otherwise it will not be prioritized
| behnamoh wrote:
| to Tim Cook, yes, but not to Steve Jobs.
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| I don't think Steve Jobs would care any more about command-
| line MacOS tools than Tim does
| emidoots wrote:
| Steve Jobs would lean into making Apple the #1 AI
| developer platform and showcase at WWDC how the terminal
| is now obsolete
| rbanffy wrote:
| He wasn't stupid. He'd observe their own developers and
| see how they rely on the terminal and command line for
| their work. He'd ask pointed questions and demand
| thoughtful answers.
|
| Then he'd find a way to make it the #1 AI developer
| platform or distort reality until it is.
| paulddraper wrote:
| :(
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Yeah, the real stock market mover is the mouse cursor. That
| wiggly thing they did that grows the mouse cursor really send
| ripples throughout Wall Street.
| altairprime wrote:
| Given its value for aging users with weakening eyes, that
| tracks :)
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| You mean how the Unix standard tools on Mac are way behind
| Linux?
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| So are the BSD tools by some definition of "behind". Another
| way to look at this is to say that GNU tools as typically
| seen in modern Linux are bloated (I know, Linux and "bloat"
| are kind of a meme, but it is generically true for the most
| part when it comes to the command line utilities feature
| creep over the years, so it's a useful and descriptive word).
|
| I have to work with old machines and legacy operating systems
| quite a bit in my day to day and I always am going to prefer
| something lighter and with less ways to shoot myself in the
| foot w.r.t. POSIX compliance. MacOS is Unix certified so I
| appreciate them being somewhat reserved in the features they
| add on top of POSIX.
|
| Modern GNU userland utils are nice and fun but if you are
| looking for compatibility it's best not to use them.
| Consequently, the MacOS situation doesn't bother me
| especially given you can install more up to date tools if you
| want. I think keeping the defaults older and more compatible
| is a good thing.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| What tools do you prefer?
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| I prefer a lot of the BSD variants of the typical POSIX
| tools (i.e. bsdtar vs GNU tar, ksh or similar instead of
| bash, etc etc). Usually because they add less extensions
| on top of what is required by POSIX, but are still easily
| acquired in a modern Linux distribution. I mostly just
| alias them.
|
| If I write a script using BSD esque tools I can be
| reasonably sure they will work on any Unix-like, whereas
| if I write/test my script on a machine using GNU utils,
| I'm fairly likely to accidentally use a GNU extension
| that would cause the script to fail on an older Unix-like
| OS. For instance, I do a lot of work migrating code off
| of AIX,and I need the scripts I develop to work on AIX
| when I'm gathering environment information from
| customers. I can't just assume they will have a ~2020+
| implementation of Unix userland tools with all the GNU
| extensions and nice features. Sometimes the machines have
| been sitting quietly in the back of a data center not
| being updated for quite a while and will have more "90s
| style" of Unix tools.
| homebrewer wrote:
| There is poor cross-UNIX compatibility if you're doing
| anything complicated, anyway. I maintained a large test
| suite for about a year that was written in POSIX sh and
| targeted Linux, macos, {Free,Open,Net}BSD. It wasn't fun
| because every program behaved in slightly different ways,
| half of them undocumented (for example, I remember having
| lots of pain with how different versions of tail handled
| SIGPIPE).
|
| In the end it was was easier to rewrite in Perl than to
| keep maintaining that thing, struggling for hours to find
| ways of implementing every little bit of functionality that
| worked reliably on every OS. You'd add or fix something,
| and the tests would break on FreeBSD. You would fix it
| there and it would stop working on NetBSD. And so it goes.
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| This is true about cross Unix compatibility. I can still
| dream though.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Desktop Linux is right here, desktops Linux has always been
| here!
|
| I don't understand why people complain about Apple neglecting
| developers when desktop Linux provides a superior experience
| aside from the rare times you need to compile an iOS/Mac
| specific application.
| dingnuts wrote:
| I don't get it either, it takes twenty minutes to burn a USB
| stick and run the installer. It takes me longer to remove the
| bloatware and set up my preferred settings on a proprietary
| OS than it does to install Linux nowadays, and that's been
| true for a decade at least now.
|
| It's just not hard! It's not more work! And yet the meme
| about it being more trouble just. won't. die.
|
| You people are supposed to be technologists! Why won't you
| spend 20 minutes of one time setup to get a better
| experience?
|
| Not all hardware works? I don't see anybody complaining about
| having a limited set of hardware options when they buy Apple!
| Canonical maintains a list of fully compatible computers;
| just pick one, buy it, and you wind up with a computer just
| as easy to use as Mac OS but without the endless paper cuts
| of using a system that has no respect for you at all and
| thinks it knows better
| foldr wrote:
| I use Apple laptops primarily for the hardware. But Linux
| has never really been a great experience on Mac laptops
| when it comes to battery life, reliable suspend/resume,
| etc. etc. I used to use Yellow Dog Linux on a G4 PowerBook
| way back in the day, but I haven't had much luck with Linux
| on Mac hardware since then.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Most of us have .dotfiles, I can snap any macos
| installation into my preferred configuration in about 5-10
| minutes unattended depending on internet speeds. I do most
| of my work in a terminal, as long as that works, I'm good
| on Linux, MacOS, and BSD's. They all have pros and cons.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I only wish Apple's terminal supported Tektronix and
| ReGIS. And provided a sane implementation for sixels.
| jebarker wrote:
| > desktop Linux provides a superior experience aside from the
| rare times you need to compile an iOS/Mac specific
| application
|
| or reliably use peripherals
| trey-jones wrote:
| Wow, did you travel here from 2002?
|
| Edit: In case it's not clear from my initial, gut-driven
| snark: I definitely think if you use a reasonably popular
| distro (commercially backed or not) in 2025, you should
| never have any trouble connecting peripherals to it, with
| the possible exception of Bluetooth, which I hear also
| applies to macOS.
| jebarker wrote:
| Nope, I came directly from an MS Teams meeting where the
| desktop linux users had no audio.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I'm on Windows, and my work laptop has no audio via its
| headphone jack.
|
| I have no idea how this is supposed to even work, and
| since it's not my computer I don't mess around trying to
| install drivers. I just use my phone to call in for
| Teams.
|
| Things happen, let's not act like any OS is perfect.
| jebarker wrote:
| MacOS is definitely not perfect. I'm being snarky. But it
| has been my anecdotal experience as both a user and
| observing colleagues that MacOS is more reliable and
| stable for desktop use than Linux. This is unsurprising
| since it's easier to build a stable walled garden than an
| open ecosystem.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Macs are generally more reliable, but if you buy a year
| old ThinkPad Linux will be just as stable .
|
| The only issue Linux really has is when new chipsets come
| out you might need to wait 6 months or so for the drivers
| to be updated. But to be completely fair, on one of my
| laptops I had no webcam support for like six or seven
| months until Windows update decided to finally install it
| for me.
|
| If you need a significant amount of hard drive space,
| Macs are almost always exorbitantly expensive. I make
| music so I find myself dual booting between windows and
| Linux. I don't want to speed 3k+ on a MacBook just to get
| a 4TB SSD I can add to any Windows PC for 200$.
|
| Plus on Linux you can customize your personal experience
| to a much greater level. If you dislike X,Y,Z you can
| disable it or find an alternative.
|
| Both OSX and Windows are cramming so much monetization
| into the OS, there's a very real feeling that I'm just
| sharing my computer with a giant corporation rather than
| actually owning it.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's less convenient when you are on the go, but you can
| pack an external SSD and offload stuff to it. A friend of
| mine had one velcroed to the back of the screen.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| It's actually cheaper to own a MacBook Air for things
| that need to work 100%, like a coding interview, and then
| a secondary laptop when you're playing video games or
| making music .
|
| That's basically what I do now, my old M1 MacBook air is
| more than good enough for LeetCode and I'm more or less
| know it's never going to fail.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > But it has been my anecdotal experience as both a user
| and observing colleagues that MacOS is more reliable and
| stable for desktop
|
| You mean a few month after a new MacOS version has
| shipped and they've got time to fix all the bugs it
| introduced, right?
| jebarker wrote:
| I haven't personally experienced that problem. Updates on
| Mac have always been smooth for me. But I'm a sample of
| one and it's probably workflow dependent.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| MS Teams audio issues aren't the best example -- ask
| anyone forced to use Windows
| cancerhacker wrote:
| Presumably these users have audio in other contexts? Are
| they running the web app version of teams? Do other web
| apps play audio? From 10000 feet up, I wouldn't start by
| blaming Linux here (even as a non-Linux-desktop user,)
| jebarker wrote:
| This isn't a hill I want to die on, but isn't it the case
| that even if the problem is in MS software compatibility
| with Linux that still results in desktop Linux being a
| less reliable platform for day to day use?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Depends on the day to day use. I have experienced a lot
| more pain on Windows than on any other platform. Perhaps
| HP-UX or AIX 3.x were more painful.
| macrocosmos wrote:
| The inability of the people you work with to use their
| devices means almost nothing. It's as if you said
| nothing.
| mrj wrote:
| I came from meet where none of the macs could screen
| share due to recent OS updates :)
| JLCarveth wrote:
| to be fair Teams barely works on Windows
| rbanffy wrote:
| Team barely works, period. It's almost a feature,
| actually.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Last year I was using a Windows laptop for work and Teams
| was very unreliable with audio and video. And don't even
| think of using the nice camera on top of the expensive
| video conferencing monitor on my desk.
| eknkc wrote:
| I went through 5 distros a month ago dealing with
| fractional scaling issues on my 4K monitors. Decided it
| is not worth dealing with a went back to macOS so... No.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| I feel like I spent a significant chunk of the mid 1990s
| editing /etc/X11/XF86Config in search of the right
| incantation...
| edwardsdl wrote:
| > with the possible exception of Bluetooth
|
| Good thing no one uses that!
| adastra22 wrote:
| Tons of peripheral devices do not work well or reliably
| on Linux, and I literally cannot remember the last time I
| have had ANY issue with Bluetooth on macOS. Certainly not
| in the last decade.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I don't remember the last time I had an issue with
| Bluetooth on Linux either. Most likely before 2010 or so.
| adastra22 wrote:
| The last time I did was this morning. I get dropped
| connections constantly, microphone not working in Teams
| (solved by reboot), pegged connections preventing
| handoff, etc.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Desktop Linux is an oxymoron. i've tried it many times and
| every single time I went back to macOS.
| fsflover wrote:
| Any particular reasons?
| medion wrote:
| I had an old i5 Mac mini laying about I wanted to use desktop
| Linux on the other day. The last time I tried, was about 20
| years ago. I note nothing has changed since.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I have one of those running the latest Fedora. It's a great
| workstation.
| paulddraper wrote:
| I use macOS because it's the only OS to reliably support
| Apple's Macbook M series.
|
| (Unless someone wants to correct me.)
| rbanffy wrote:
| If you are paying for Apple hardware, it's silly to use an
| OS that'll make it only less reliable and compatible.
| spudlyo wrote:
| I very recently tried again to adopt Linux on the desktop.
| I'm really sick of feeling like a frog in a pot of water.
| It's becoming harder and harder to bypass their literal
| gatekeeping of which applications I can run on my computer,
| and with every new version of macOS the temperature in the
| pot keeps rising.
|
| The main problem I have with living in a Gnome desktop
| environment, is with the keyboard. I'm not willing to abandon
| my use of Emacs control+meta sequences for cursor and editing
| movements everywhere in the GUI. On macOS, this works because
| the command (super/Win on Linux/Windows) key is used for
| common shortcuts and the control key is free for editing
| shortcuts.
|
| I spent a day or so hacking around with kanata[0], which is a
| kernel level keyboard remapping tool, that lets you define
| keyboard mapping layers in a similar way you might with QMK
| firmware. When I press the 'super/win/cmd' it activates a
| layer which maps certain sequences to their control
| equivalents, so I can create tabs, close windows, copy and
| paste (and many more) like my macOS muscle memory wants to
| do. Other super key sequences (like Super-L for lock desktop
| or Super-Tab for window cycling) are unchanged. Furthermore,
| when I hit the control or meta/alt/option key, it activates a
| layer where Emacs editing keys are emulated using the Gnome
| equivalents. For example, C-a and C-e are mapped to home/end,
| etc.
|
| The only problem is, this is not the behavior I want in
| terminals or in GNU/Emacs itself. So I installed a Gnome
| shell extension[1] that exports information about the active
| window state to a DBUS endpoint. That let me write a small
| python daemon (managed by a systemd user service) which wakes
| up whenever the active window changes. Based on this info, I
| send a message to the TCP server that kanata (also managed by
| a systemd user service) provides for remote control to switch
| to the appropriate layer.
|
| After doing this, and tweaking my Gnome setup for another day
| or so, I am just as comfortable on my Linux machine as I am
| on my Mac. My main applications are Emacs, Firefox,
| Mattermost, Slack, ChatGPT, Discord, Kitty, and Steam. My
| Linux box was previously my Windows gaming box (don't get me
| started about frog boiling on Windows) and I'm amazed that I
| can play all my favorite titles (Manor Lords, Hell Let Loose,
| Foundation) on Linux with Proton.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata
|
| [1]: https://github.com/hseliger/window-calls-extended
| riscy wrote:
| For a simple version bump, I feel like brew is fine. Or do you
| have other tooling updates in mind?
| mihaaly wrote:
| Apparently there is a 20,000 surplus somewhere waiting to jump
| in.
| smallnix wrote:
| I heard they have strong Nordic developers waiting for free
| markets in Greenland.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I bet the Panamanian Ai industry masses are also sitting on
| the edge for this.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Or you can take the extra minute to install them yourself with
| brew, this a complete non issue for anyone that understands the
| command line in the 21st century using MacOS. Also, I would
| never build anything against macos userland because it's almost
| never the target.
| behnamoh wrote:
| these two are orthogonal to each other.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Brew takes a minute just to update itself, let alone install
| anything.
|
| And then everything needs to have the
| /opt/brewsomethingsomething PATH.
| /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin not good enough.
| rbanffy wrote:
| MacPorts is The Way.
| nobankai wrote:
| In the big '25? Nixpkgs is the New Way.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| So what? Do you complain when apt, yum, dnf, pacman, ports,
| or any other package management system does a download? I
| bet you don't, so it's not really a usable argument.
| Secondly, yeah, not tainting my systems OS and system paths
| is a good thing and opt/ from the filesystem perspective is
| the absolute right place to put add on packages.
| "The /opt/ directory is normally reserved for software and
| add-on packages that are not part of the default
| installation"
| trey-jones wrote:
| Many people here are commenting that brew is a good way to get
| modern tools. I must say, I prefer Docker by several country
| miles.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's like having the tools in a different computer. You can
| mount your local filesystem onto the container, but if feels
| like WSL - there's always an "impedance mismatch" between the
| two sides.
|
| I prefer to use the tools running locally on the same OS I'm
| working with. For that, MacPorts is great.
| kilna wrote:
| I made this. It makes it easy to use all of the most common gnu
| tools via brew, without having to do gsed for sed, etc... all
| with working man pages. It also lets you switch back easily in
| a shell session if you need the mac native ones for some
| godforsaken reason:
|
| https://github.com/kilna/gnu-on
| beefnugs wrote:
| Sounds like ireland or wherever their tax haven is might make
| some real savings from this
| machinekob wrote:
| Thanks to ireland all big US corporations saved hundreds of
| billions of dollars past few years so now they can get back to
| US with this massive cash for anything they want (ofc. nothing
| will get back to EU as long as they ignore tax heavens)
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Some part of me thinks they are billing an overbudget here to
| report that they actually didn't need to spend that much so that
| they can beat lower guidance (same play for MS, Google, Meta).
| We've heard that actually training these models doesn't cost even
| a billion dollars.
| iteratethis wrote:
| Quite a lot of cash to generate AI stickers in messenger.
| hu3 wrote:
| this is it. siri will finally be reliable
| pchristensen wrote:
| Apparently right inline with their plans:
| https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/02/24/apple-500-billi...
| whalesalad wrote:
| Apple has been sitting on a war chest the size of Jupiter for a
| long time. Glad to see them putting it to good use.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Will it be collocated with the promised Foxconn plant?
| quantum_state wrote:
| That is a con to con the con ...
| quantum_state wrote:
| It's a con to con the con ...
| rcleveng wrote:
| I don't get why folks keep saying x86 linux servers here for AI,
| if anything it'd be M series arm based servers, either running
| linux or macos. Realistically I'd imagine a set of scaled up mac
| mini arm servers for running inference or fine tuning on them as
| more likely being the "ai servers" than x86 based anything. Power
| is the key thing that they'll be optimizing for, and that's where
| ARM shines.
| m463 wrote:
| Don't they need gpus (for training)? Apple already did a
| footshoot wrt gpus in the apple ecosystem. unless they have
| some sort of apple-internal ai chips ready to train models.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Apple's Private Cloud Compute is on racks of M4 chips which
| have NPUs and GPUs on-die and unified memory access to
| however much RAM they want to put on them. All of a sudden
| they're competitive with NVIDIA, but they don't let anyone
| else use that platform.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| The sentiment in this thread. Surely Apple has a fiduciary duty
| and so no reason for FUD.
| abalone wrote:
| Some useful context: this is almost certainly being driven by
| Apple's Private Cloud Compute architecture and not tariffs, as an
| investment of this magnitude is not planned overnight.
|
| Why is PCC driving Apple to spend billions to build servers in
| the states? Because it is insane from a security standpoint
| (insanely awesome).
|
| PCC is an order of magnitude more secure server platform than has
| ever been deployed for consumer use at planet scale. Secure and
| private enough to literally send your data and have it processed
| server side instead of on device without having to trust the host
| (Apple).[1] Until now the only way to do that was on device. If
| you sent your data for cloud processing, outside of something
| exotic like homomorphic encryption[2], you'd still have to trust
| that the host did a good job protecting your data, using it
| responsibly, and wasn't compromised. Not the case with PCC.
|
| To accomplish this Apple uses its own custom chips with Secure
| Enclaves that provide a trust foundation for the whole system,
| ultimately cryptographically guaranteeing that the binaries
| processing your data have been publicly audited by independent
| security auditors. This is the so called hardware root of trust.
|
| It is essential then that the hardware deployed in data centers
| has not been physically tampered with. Without that the whole
| thing falls apart. So Apple has a whole section in their security
| white paper detailing an audited process for deploying data
| center hardware and ensuring supply chain integrity.[3]
|
| You can imagine how that is the weak point in the system made
| more robust by managing it in the US. Tighter supply chain
| control.
|
| [1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
|
| [2] Fun fact, Apple also just deployed a homomorphic encryption
| powered search engine! It's also insane!
|
| [3] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-
| compu...
| very_good_man wrote:
| Are they going to abandon H-1B and focus on hiring Americans for
| this project?
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