[tedd4u]

    'Q:What does China's competitive edge look like in practice?'
    
    'A: One example from The Times article: When Jobs decided just a month 
    before the iPhone hit markets to replace a scratch-prone plastic screen 
    with a glass one, a Foxconn factory in China woke up about 8,000 workers 
    when the glass screens arrived at midnight, and the workers were 
    assembling 10,000 iPhones a day within 96 hours.
    
    'Another example: Apple had originally estimated that it would take nine 
    months to hire the 8,700 qualified industrial engineers needed to oversee 
    production of the iPhone; in China, it took 15 days. Anecdotes like that 
    leave you "feeling almost impressed by the no-holds-barred capabilities 
    of these manufacturing plants," says Edward Moyer at CNET News, 
    "impressed and queasy at the same time."'
    

From: https://theweek.com/articles/478705/why-apple-builds-iphones...

[api]

A popular misconception is that manufacturing is done in China because it’s cheaper. That hasn’t been true for a while. There are cheaper places, many of them. China is now simply the best, at least when it comes to electronics and adjacent stuff.

[tuna74]

A lot of things are much more efficient in China as well. Compare the cost in time and money for travel between Beijing to Shanghai vs New York to Chicago for example.

[tedd4u]

Especially if you want to make like 100,000 units per day of your product.

[lenerdenator]

Best == cheaper. Could you do it in the US? Probably. But it'd take longer and you'd have to pay more money.

[midnighthollowc]

That's pretty amazing, honestly.

Here I can't even get a tradesperson to give me a quote, much less show up on a dime. I guess I need another eight billion dollars, give or take a penny

[MisterTea]

> a Foxconn factory in China woke up about 8,000 workers when the glass screens arrived at midnight

Yea must be really amazing living a crowded factory dorm room with suicide safety nets under the windows only to be abruptly woken up because some schmuck in California demands his precious phones be assembled. Must be a wonderful gig.

[kakacik]

Project this a decade or two into future and I honestly don't have a solution for the west but a gradual decline into mediocrity. We have less corruption and communicate directly also about problems, so at least that will work for us for some time too.

But maybe China and similar places will elevate their overall prosperity enough that people will refuse to be treated like this en masse, so there is some hope.

[tedd4u]

I should also link Tim Cook's comments on "why China" from a talk in China at a Fortune event. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wacXUrONUY

Transcript:

    There's a confusion about China — let me at least give you my opinion. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago. That is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. 

    The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill, in one location, and the type of skill it is. The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with the materials that we do, are state-of-the-art, and the tooling skill is very deep here. 

    You know, in the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure we could fill this room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields. It's that vocational expertise that is very deep, very very deep here. And I give the education system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that, even when others were deemphasizing vocational. Now, I think many countries in the world have woken up and said, you know, this is a key thing and we've got to correct that. But China called that right from the beginning.