I totally get that but what I don't understand is why they'd shift it to India instead of the USA or somewhere closer. This might create the same problem a few years from now.
My guess would be to get around Indian import bans on products made outside of India. India has traditionally been very protectionist.
It's a large population and growing in affluence. So potentially a big new market for Apple.
Manufacturing in India would allow them to be seen as a "home choice" there and also provide Apple with a chance to hedge future sanctions on products made in China in other export markets.
They can also placate CCP concerns by telling them that they are only manufacturing in India to access that otherwise inaccessible market.
At some level, slave labor or literally wage slavery is necessary to make the things most of us enjoy. It’s not just the low pay that’s the issue though. Big companies need to be able to dump production waste somewhere otherwise costs increase.
An Apple product that was truly, 100% made in the USA from parts that are also 100% made in the USA would be extremely expensive. The Librem 5 USA is about as close as you can get at $2000 for a phone with pretty anemic specs; and many individual parts and raw materials still come from abroad.
It's not like Apple can compel anyone to work for them - they must offer competitive pay to attract workers. By definition, the people in India taking jobs at Apple are doing so because it's the best option available to them. The reality is that foreign industry factory jobs are generally considered quite desirable and high-paying in these countries. This "slave labor" is, in fact, one of the primary mechanisms by which living standards in developing countries are elevated over time.
You may (understandably) feel bad about enjoying a product made by someone getting nominally paid orders of magnitude less than you. But naively arguing that Apple should be mandated to pay more (or even be forced to produce in the US) does the opposite of help the people you claim to be worried about.
I don't feel bad at all. I'm just saying, that's the way it is. I'm not arguing for Apple to be paying more. What I am calling "slavery" for lack of a better word, in whatever form it may take, is a key component of capitalism. I'm just saying that no one really wants something made 100% in the USA because very few people could afford it.
You are 100% right in that this is the primary mechanism for increasing the standard of living around the world. It's worked so well in fact that the wages in China are not nearly as low as they once were. I would say that low wages alone are no longer the primary benefit of having something made in China. It's much more the scale and loose environmental regulations that are valuable now. There are quite a few things that you use every day which are almost exclusively made in China or India or similar.
I think people in general do not realize just how much we rely on China and Chinese manufacturing, and how beneficial it is for everyone to have things made abroad. People focus on the higher end factory items like iPhone assembly but don't often think about all the sub-components. Base materials like adhesive, spray on preservatives, plastic containers, labels, etc. are almost all made in China or somewhere with loose environmental regulations. There are so many items that go into day-to-day items that are either made in China or made from products imported from China. If it's made from plastic or for plastic, and it's made at scale, there is a really good chance it's made in China.
> What I am calling "slavery" for lack of a better word
I would object to calling a mutually beneficial arrangement "slavery", but whatever.
> I'm just saying that no one really wants something made 100% in the USA because very few people could afford it
While this is true, it invites reasonable-sounding criticism to the effect of "well if you can't make your cheap toys without exploiting people then maybe you shouldn't have it at all" and so misses the most crucial point. Forcing something to be made 100% in the USA is bad for _everyone_. It doesn't empower workers at the cost of the rich or empower Indians at the cost of Americans. It simply satisfies some misguided and/or nationalistic sentiment while leaving everyone worse off for it.
> I would say that low wages alone are no longer the primary benefit of having something made in China. It's much more the scale and loose environmental regulations that are valuable now.
While yes, a huge component is the vast amount of manufacturing expertise and capital that has been built up in China. It may have started as a country from which you bought cheap junk manufactured for low wages, sure. But after decades of that unsavory and seemingly exploitative relationship, China is now home to lots of advanced, high quality manufacturing with skilled and productive workers that can demand better pay than ever before.
In a funny sense, it reminds me of that quote about how "the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them". At no point did any of the foreign industries investing in China have any intention more noble than "exploiting" cheap, undifferentiated labor from a developing country. Yet that very behavior has apparently driven wages so high that companies are willing to spend billions to start the process all over again in another country.
> At some level, slave labor or literally wage slavery is necessary to make the things most of us enjoy.
I'm not sure how true this is. I mean, today it is, because we don't have any production capacity to build those misc parts. Apple can't just say 'i want everything made in the USA from USA made parts', because it would be literally impossible to do so. You have a few small outlets you could probably source, but not enough for a mass market device.
That said, -if- we could get there, I'm not convinced it would be all that much more expensive to the end user just due to the massive scale of everything. How much more? Who knows, but even if we say something rather high like $200 per unit, it's not much when you're spending $1200 already. I get most people would take the cheaper option, but a company with Apple's clout and fan base may be the one company to actually effect change, if they wanted to.
Apple suppliers already have infrastructure in place to assemble iPhones in India (and Brazil?) so it makes sense to boost that capacity. Lower hanging fruit.
