Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Well, now:
1- Apple is the one raking in a cool billion a week in *net* profit...
2- ...at a time the Commander-in-chief is betting his reelection on populism and demonizing the wealthy...
3- ...and a time when the media is free of the old distortion zone and feels free to take shots (earned or otherwise) at previously-untouchable Apple.
Translation: Without St Jobs at the helm, Apple is just another greedy evil corporation, according to the mainstream media.
About time they got a turn as the whipping boy!  |
Apple was never untouchable in the media and it and its users are *constantly* bashed by defensive techie-types.
The problem with the poll is that it presents a false dichotomy. It's simply not the case that Apple, Amazon, MS, etc. could produce the same product in the US or another western country by simply paying the wage differential.
The fact is that they couldn't produce the products in the west *at all.* Just looking at labor costs assumes that the US already has the existing factories and other infrastructure and just needs to plug in the US workers. But that's not true at all - first you'd have to build the factories from scratch, and then come up with a comparable infrastructure...which is very difficult because the 100's of suppliers you would need are also in Asia.
And I have no idea how complicated it would be to build something on the scale of of Foxconn factory - it's been 80 years since the US had a factory with 100,000 workers, and I'm not sure if building something like that is even really doable.
And, maybe more importantly, I'm not sure that any western factory would have the flexibility that the Chinese factories have to quickly retool and begin producing new devices.
And - even assuming that it were possible to produce an iPad, iPhone, Macbook, etc., for 50% more, this would basically kill that product unless all competitors also manufactured their products in the west. It's a big problem for iPad-type competitors that they can't produce basically equivalent products for less than the cost of the iPad (i.e, the 32 GB Asus Transformer Prime costs $600, as does the 32 GB $600 iPad. ) If the equivalent iPad suddenly costs $900...well, I don't think that many of the workers at the US iPad plant should count on lifetime employment.