[tcherasaro]

As one of the “skilled electronics engineers” in the US you could count on US soil (whatever that means) I can tell you this article reads very strangely to a EE.

“we were able to take all those designs and spin up our own SMT, it's called Surface Mount Technology”

“run that through our surface mount technology by our line operators”

“meaning the printed circuit board or PCBA assembly”

So, he’s definitely not an EE. No EE talks like this when they are trying to explain the nuts and bolts to a lay person. Either that or the editor took liberties they shouldn’t have.

[donnachangstein]

No one ever said he was an EE?

It's a transcript of an informal podcast interview with - clearly - a marketing guy who may or may not have 'engineer' in his title.

I've worked with dozens of guys like this over the years. They could elegantly bullshit their way through any discussion. They had an answer for every question, even when they didn't.

There's a reason they don't send the design engineers to trade shows.

Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.

Not that any of that matters, because engineering is a team sport, and that's where taking this too literally becomes a problem. Just how like a football team is made up of different skills and varying physical builds. The reason they don't send the design engineers to the conventions is because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details.

[danso]

> * Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.*

Before Apple entered its iPod era, Jobs could do a reasonable job of taking questions from a technical audience

https://youtu.be/yQ16_YxLbB8?si=GK5NvbyND1xriiYm

[dmix]

> because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details

Yeah, getting upset an EE who has the skills to build a cellphone from scratch isn't actually moonlighting as a writer doing a blogspam version of a podcast interview fits that quite well

[sambeau]

Steve Jobs was not a marketing guy. If anything, he was a designer. His technical knowledge was also way beyond most CEOs. He designed his presentations with a high attention to detail just like he designed his products, product ranges and companies. If you watch any one of the many interviews he gave you'll see that he can talk off-the-cuff, in depth on all kinds of subjects. And, unlike many modern CEOs, he pauses to think before opening his mouth.

[reaperducer]

Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting.

That's the currently-fashionable revisionist history. But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff. He was also good at marketing.

I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations,

I suggest going back and re-reading some of the print interviews he gave to technical publications. There's no question he knew what he was talking about.

[pqtyw]

> A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting

We can call product design "marketing" but that's a bit like calling Linus Torvalds a "code monkey"...

[thenthenthen]

There are even more than a million of those in SZ haha

[tdeck]

You're just jealous. These guys have spun up their own RoHS and are doing a 100% EDA automation with full Verilog over there. By doing the reflow process (it's a way of building integrated circuits) they're able to offer complete impedance right here in the USA.

[Tade0]

Before retirement my father was employed in a company certifying medical devices.

Half the descriptions provided by those who made the devices were this sort of word salad because they concerned products which were obvious scams[0].

On person in particular was editing the description on the fly and was looking for a word so dad jokingly suggested "impedance". "Yes, thank you!" replied that person - her face lighting up as she added the word.

[0] Like a vacuum cleaner which was supposed to dispense a mist of medication. Initially rejected as there was no dosage control whatsoever, but I heard that eventually somehow it was certified.

[turtledragonfly]

Go back to /r/vxjunkies/, and take your retro-encabulator with you :Þ

[_fizz_buzz_]

Too much impedance is outsourced to Asia these days …

[apercu]

Amazing. I'm not an EE and the first half of that sentence had be believing you.

[croemer]

I hope you're joking - what you wrote makes no sense at all.

[dragontamer]

Thanks. I hate it.

Have my upvote.

[Taniwha]

You're mixing your processes - is he making his own circuit boards (reflow) or making his own chips (verilog) - and I have no idea what "complete impedance" even means in this context - HN really needs to stop AI posting here

[Animats]

Indeed.

There's a somewhat better discussion of this phone here.[1] At least the making of the board. Board manufacture, SMT pick and place, and soldering are all automated, and the equipment is widely available. Everybody does boards roughly the same way.

The assembly problems in phones come from all the non-board parts. See this iPhone teardown.[2] Look at all those little subassemblies. Some are screwed down. Some use elastic adhesive. Some are held in place by other parts. They're connected by tiny flexible printed circuits. That's the labor-intensive part. Usually involves lots of people with tweezers and magnifiers. They don't show that.

So here's that part of assembly in a phone factory in India.[3] Huge workforce.

For comparison, here's a Samsung plant.[4] More robots, fewer people. Samsung made something like 229 million phones in 2024. If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down.

[1] https://puri.sm/posts/manufacturing-the-librem-5-usa-phone-i...

[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+13+Pro+Teardown/14492...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQZycjXZAKI

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ5t7zgoQRM

[Animats]

There's another way to do it. Here's a teardown of a classic Nokia "brick" phone.[1] That's designed for automated low-cost vertical assembly. The case provides the basic structure, and everything can be put into the case with a vertical push. There are no internal wires to connect. There are simple machines for that kind of assembly. Then everything gets squeezed together, and you have a hard block of an object that's hard to damage.

If you can design something which can be assembled in that simple way, high-volume manufacturing can be automated cheaply. Smartphones are not built from parts intended to be assembled in that way, but that's a decision based on cheap labor, not one that's inherent in smartphone design.

Design for assembly was more of a thing when manufacturing was in the US. The Macintosh IIci was designed for vertical assembly. Everything installed with a straight-down move. The power supply outputs were stakes that engaged clips on the motherboard. No internal wiring.

Then Apple gave up on US manufacturing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xglr0Zy8s8

[mschuster91]

> If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down.

The problem is, there are no Western manufacturers left that have the brand loyalty to bring such a large volume of purchases to the table.

The giants are so giant, it's almost impossible to compete with them in the consumer mass market. The only way you can outcompete the giants is by focusing on tiny small niches where consumers are willing and able to pay a premium - the government (auditable supply chains) and eco-progressives. That's where Tesla started, that's where Purism and Frame.work live.

[tonyedgecombe]

>More robots, fewer people.

It would be amusing if after all this turmoil the work came back to the US but it barely increased manufacturing employment.

[numpad0]

I don't buy that [3] is bad and [4] is good examples. That Samsung plant reel doesn't show the same parts of assembly as the first one - I bet those videos are just focusing on different parts of fundamentally identical factories.

[Saigonautica]

I was going to skip this article until I read your post, it got me curious. You're totally right, it does read really weird. It made me laugh a bit, I needed that this morning. Thanks!

I have also "spun up my own SMT". It's a 50 USD hot air rework station and maybe 20$ of consumables in a 4 meter square workshop (I live in Asia). It would be challenging, but possible, for me to assemble the PCBs in their photographs by hand. There are indeed a lot of people like me.

[varjag]

He certainly meant an "SMT line", because phones assembled on a manual station in the USA (outside of shit quality) would cost well in excess of $2000.

[fooker]

> There are indeed a lot of people like me.

Are there a lot of people like you that are willing to do this as a minimum wage job? Because that's the real ask.

[somenameforme]

It extrapolates broadly. It's kind of a funny thing. When somebody doesn't know much about something but wants to pretend they do, their vocabulary comes off sounding like a thesaurus of vernacular, but when you speak to somebody who genuinely knows something, to the point of having an intuitive feeling/understanding of it, they could easily explain, at least roughly, even the most esoteric topic in a relatable enough language that a high schooler could understand.

Space stuff is another domain that's just chock full of this.

[watwut]

I don't think this is true. Knowing something well and being able to explain it in simple terms are unrelated skills. Plenty of people who know their domain super well just can't explain to lay person.

[brookst]

What, you’ve never dip switched the manufacturing process despite investor resistors?

[DonHopkins]

Quick, fetch the firewall extinguisher! The AmeriPad is having an unplanned thermal excursion!

[amatecha]

The interviewee is described as "Purism's founder", who even says "we took our own electronics engineers (EEs)", implying (though not explicitly stating) he doesn't include himself in that category.

[killjoywashere]

I do think there's an interesting conversation to have here though about workforce management, as someone who lives in adjacent worlds.

If you are long term greedy, like China, a great strategy to capture dominance of a discipline would be along the lines of how to boil a frog. Start by sending grad students to the top universities, ensuring they work for the PIs for cheap, bring as many of them back to China as you can, but tolerate a leaky return path so as not to stir up notice. Advertize their high post-training employment rate back to the universities to keep their valves open even as you start developing your universities internally, and eventually throttle down the outbound grad student pipeline. At some point after it's too late, the top universities, and their countries, look around, bemoan the lack of people in their discipline, and then just give up because by now they're old and tired.

Seems like something that has happened in chemistry, physics, and EE for sure. Once you start thinking this way, all sorts of things start making sense. Like maybe they looked at solar as a cheap, low threat point of entry for developing silicon fabrication capabilities. Software engineering, being a relatively soft skill, comes along for the ride.

Not sure about other fields, but if AI can take on a rapidly increasing set of fields, you start seeing this as how China primarily harvests not IP but workforce training from the global West, then technologies happen to fall out, then one day China has solved for their own graying work force at the same time they've solved for global economic dominance.

And a non-trivial contributor was the US governments (I blame the states too) defunding education.

[Liftyee]

This is an interesting suggestion. I'm curious what you mean by "sending grad students to top universities": 1.) the target universities have to accept the students, right? 2.) This implies some top-level RTS-game-esque control of the grad students when, in reality, they're making independent choices (albeit influenced by many factors, including govt promotion) 3.) Seems like the rational decision for ambitious grad students is to apply to said top universities (which may just happen to be abroad).

Same for "bringing many of them back": I read it at first like it was akin to some sort of spy agent network when in reality "bringing back" probably means various incentives, not some forced thing. Carrot, instead of stick.

[thehappypm]

A quick Google search shows that there are somewhere in the range of 20,000 electrical engineers who graduate US universities every year. Even if not all of them do electronics, and not all of the ones are considered “skilled” (by this author’s definition), there are not a “countable” amount.

[StefanBatory]

... that seems to be, a really small number. I always thought it's going to be way more.

[elzbardico]

I think the journalist think the people who solder components in a assembly line are Engineers.

[protocolture]

My guess: The guy who paid the bill for the Hanwha surface mount machines was interviewed.

[karel-3d]

He is originally a software engineer that only later started a hardware company

[timcobb]

My read on this that they don't mean EEs as in IEEE, but "engineer" as in "sanitation engineer", i.e. people who assemble electronic devices in factories.

[kees99]

"PCBA assembly" is up there with "IQ quotient" and "ROI on investment". No editor writes like that either.

[skort]

The audio of the interview is on the page. The "Surface Mount Technology" bit is at 7 minutes in.

[the__alchemist]

I suspect this is a case of Gell-Mann amnesia. This article is not inconsistent with the quality of articles in blogs, the news etc. I believe you (And I) notice this due to expertise in the area.