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Apple Moves Mac Pro Production to China (Oh my)
Wall Street Journal (no paywall) ^ | June 28, 2019 9:32 am ET | By Tripp Mickle and Yoko Kubota

Posted on 06/29/2019 4:20:15 AM PDT by ImJustAnotherOkie

Apple Inc. AAPL -0.91% is manufacturing its new Mac Pro computer in China, according to people familiar with its plans, shifting abroad production of what had been its only major device assembled in the U.S. as trade tensions escalate between the Trump administration and Beijing.

The tech giant has tapped Taiwanese contractor Quanta Computer Inc. to manufacture the $6,000 desktop computer and is ramping up production at a factory near Shanghai, the people said. Apple can save on shipping costs for components given the proximity of many of its suppliers to Shanghai, rather than having to supply a factory in the U.S.

While the Mac Pro isn’t one of Apple’s higher-volume products, the decision on where to make it carries outsize significance. Apple’s reliance on factories in China to manufacture its products has been an issue for the company, especially under President Trump, who has pressured Apple and other companies to make more in the U.S.

(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: apple; applemac; applemacpro
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To: PIF

Hahahaha Mac user?


41 posted on 06/29/2019 8:13:07 AM PDT by rhombus10
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To: ImJustAnotherOkie

Never owned on, never will.


42 posted on 06/29/2019 8:21:32 AM PDT by yoe
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To: ImJustAnotherOkie

Oh? Well, I hadn’t planned on buying one anyway.
Damn sure won’t now.


43 posted on 06/29/2019 10:00:10 AM PDT by sparklite2 (Don't mind me. I'm just a contrarian.)
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To: PIF
Unfortunately that is not true - the last company hired by Apple to make the screws for the trash can model could not supply the required 20,000 screws per day Apple needed. And have you looked at the manufacturing specs for the Mac Pro? And if you believe there is such a company in the US that could produce the boxes at volume, please contact Apple and save them the headache of changing production venues.

No company moves production “just because they want to”.

That is a complete myth. The Apple Mac Pro 2013, was and is still manufactured in Austin, Texas, from parts manufactured in the USA, including all the screws necessary for it. There was NEVER any need for a mythical “20,000 per day production of screws” for the 2013 Mac Pro model as it never had a production run requiring such a demand. That was a lie made up by a member of the Apple Hate Brigade and spread by people such as you who thought it sounded good, no matter how illogical it is, or unfactual it is.

In actual fact, it is extremely EASY to manufacture screws to specs required in the USA in high numbers. I know. My business has had complex Titanium, or Vitalium, screw parts manufactured in quantity at very reasonable quantity in a very short time to even MORE exacting standards than would be required by Apple to use as dental implant systems. . . and these were manufactured by a small machine shop in a small town in Central California, within a week of our making the order.

Just like this article, which is possibly true, although I doubt it, talking about merely the final assembly of the new Mac Pro, but news can be FUD, which is based on an anonymous source, which have no official standing, but merely cited as “according to people familiar with its plan.” But it really makes no sense, because in fact, the vast majority of the parts in the 2019 Mac Pro, in fact, the most expensive parts, the XEON processors, RAM memory, and SSD, are already manufactured and sourced from the USA and other countries which have zero trade issues with the US. It makes little sense for Apple to send those components to China for assembly when re-exporting them to the US will result in a 25% (minimum $1500) tariff added to the already high $6000 retail price on the lowest configuration. Use your heads.

44 posted on 06/29/2019 1:17:10 PM PDT by Swordmaker (My pistol self-identifies as an iPad, so you must accept it in gun-free zones, you hoplaphobe bigot!)
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To: devane617; ImJustAnotherOkie
I’m a exclusize Mac user and the Mac community are in meltdown mose over the price, so not many users of these devices at all.

The 2019 Mac Pro is not intended for consumer usage, it is in all ways designed for the professional market who will use it for production and making money. For them, it is far more economical than the competition.

Another good example of this is Apple’s new XDR 6K Reference 32” monitor. At $6000, it also is not intended for consumers but for the professional production market. It competes against Sony’s 31” 4K BVM-HK-310 Master Monitor, which has a retail MSRP of $43,000! . . . But the Apple actually has more features and better specifications than the Sony competition. Apple will sell tons of these to the professional movie and TV producing editing and FX market.

A fully configured new Mac Pro can drive SIX of these monitors for those kind of purposes. . . And produce 56 Teraflops of computing power. No consumer needs that.

45 posted on 06/29/2019 1:33:41 PM PDT by Swordmaker (My pistol self-identifies as an iPad, so you must accept it in gun-free zones, you hoplaphobe bigot!)
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To: ImJustAnotherOkie
Add in the fact that Apple’s design Chief quit yesterday then this announcement, it would be a good time to be a fly on the wall at Apple HQ.

Jonny Ive really hasn’t “quit.” He’s left on his own terms to form a new exclusive design company with Apple as its primary customer. He’s moved up from employee to exclusive design consultant and vendor.

46 posted on 06/29/2019 1:40:53 PM PDT by Swordmaker (My pistol self-identifies as an iPad, so you must accept it in gun-free zones, you hoplaphobe bigot!)
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To: ImJustAnotherOkie; ~Kim4VRWC's~; 1234; 5thGenTexan; AbolishCSEU; Abundy; Action-America; ...
Another thread on WSJ article on the supposed claim, from anonymous sources, that Apple will be making the new Mac Pro in China.—PING!


APPLE 2019 Mac Pro
PING!

If you want on or off the Apple/Mac/iOS Ping List, Freepmail me.

47 posted on 06/29/2019 1:48:18 PM PDT by Swordmaker (My pistol self-identifies as an iPad, so you must accept it in gun-free zones, you hoplaphobe bigot!)
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To: ImJustAnotherOkie
Remember this one? The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies
48 posted on 06/29/2019 2:43:04 PM PDT by kevin_in_so_cal (Saw this, but noticed an error. So I wanted to make one thing clear: I don't smoke cigarettes.)
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To: kevin_in_so_cal

Except the article was BS.


49 posted on 06/29/2019 9:18:16 PM PDT by Henry Hnyellar
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To: kevin_in_so_cal; ImJustAnotherOkie
Remember this one?

Never happened. The chip Bloomberg pictured wasn’t what they claimed, was never found on any production servers, and the claim was entirely a HOAX that could not have been done the way the idiotic author of the article claimed it was done, as such a thing would have stood out like a HUGE SORE THUMB in Quality Assurance on the US Designed board. You don’t just add a spurious IC to a six level server logic board without completely re-designing the board’s traces and layout. It can’t be done. Not a single bogus board with a spurious IC was ever found. . . And the so-called spurious IC pictured was a standard component found on many logic boards.

The claims that Apple, Amazon, and other buyers of the servers had cancelled orders was also bogus. Didn’t happen. In fact, Amazon increased orders and is still using these servers.

50 posted on 06/30/2019 8:00:10 AM PDT by Swordmaker (My pistol self-identifies as an iPad, so you must accept it in gun-free zones, you hoplaphobe bigot!)
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To: Swordmaker

No I Don’t remember it.


51 posted on 06/30/2019 11:46:58 AM PDT by ImJustAnotherOkie (All I know is The I read in the papers.)
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To: Swordmaker

I want to believe you, I really do. We’re living in a delicate time right now. Just a few years ago, Andrew Breitbart was yelling for people to get their smartphones in the air and capture the moment to share as proof. He of course didn’t live long enough to understand the ramifications of deep fakes.
Can you provide a link or two that convinced you that the Bloomberg story was wrong? I really don’t trust places like The Verve and such.
This is quite a claim against Bloomberg, which as far as I know, has not published a correction or retraction. We’re on the same team, my friend. I just want to know what you know.


52 posted on 06/30/2019 4:27:47 PM PDT by kevin_in_so_cal (Saw this, but noticed an error. So I wanted to make one thing clear: I don't smoke cigarettes.)
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To: kevin_in_so_cal
Can you provide a link or two that convinced you that the Bloomberg story was wrong? I really don’t trust places like The Verve and such. This is quite a claim against Bloomberg, which as far as I know, has not published a correction or retraction. We’re on the same team, my friend. I just want to know what you know.

Sure can, aside from the in-depth research I did independently myself, here’s a FR article (which unfortunately linked to NASDAQ, that doesn’t keep it’s stories), in which the US company involved had it’s logic boards audited by an independent third party which found nothing awry.

Here’s another earlier FR article, citing even US government officials in NSA who found NO SUCH BOGUS PARTS in the logic boards in the Bloomberg article.

"I've got all sorts of commercial industry freaking out and just losing their minds about this concern, and nobody's found anything," Joyce added.

Joyce, a former White House cybersecurity coordinator, noted that all of the companies named in the Bloomberg Businessweek report have issued strong denials, including Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro. He said those companies would "suffer a world of hurt" if regulators later determine that they lied.

Here is a link to Apple’s official statement denying the entire Bloomberg article’s contentions. In part Apple’s spokesperson stated:

On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement.

Bloomberg based its entire article on a single source, Yossi Appelbaum, a man who owns a company which has as it’s reason for existence selling a device to scan logic boards for what the company says may be spurious software and hardware added to the boards. HE claims his device can locate additional hardware added to any PC board added by bad actors, and used his discovery of the so-called spurious chip on the Supermicro logic boards as proof to the totally clueless, non-technologically oriented Bloomberg article authors and editors, who ran with their “bombshell” story. One expert categorically stated “This makes no sense,” a comment that was left out of the story.

Bloomberg was even challenged by their own experts they cited in their article, who were aghast when they saw the final article and found they were quoted out of context, most often with the qualifying statement that it “might be theoretically possible to add a chip” but not at all practical to do so.

I posted my initial analysis of the events surrounding the Bloomberg Claims also on FR back when the article was published:

SOMETHING SMELLS LIKE BLOOMBERG'S DIRTY SOX. Apple was going to use the hardware in their iTunes Streaming video/movie service they were installing back in 2015-2016 order 30,000 rack mounted servers from Elemental Systems who had their servers made by Supermicro. However, even Bloomberg BusinessNews states that Apple cancelled the order when their engineers discovered the malicious IC chip on the motherboard of test units they received.

The more I think about this the less sense it makes for several very good reasons.

  1. Both Amazon and Apple supposedly discovered this malicious IC chip in 2015, three years ago.
  2. Nothing was said about it in any security bulletin to the industry warning about security problems with servers made in China.
  3. IN THREE YEARS! Seriously?
  4. Software could have been developed to disable or block transmission of the stolen data back to China since it was known. Really? The URL of the target server had to be available.
  5. The revelation about this malicious chip comes from a single main stream media news source which cites only anonymous sources both in the impacted government and the two major companies, Amazon and Apple, the two largest companies in the world by market cap. Yet we hear crickets.
  6. Other companies are vaguely mentioned but not by name.
  7. Amazon, Apple, and Supermicro vigorously deny any such chip exists and that any such events happened.
  8. Amazon acquired Elemental Systems in late 2015 and continued ordering Supermicro servers for use in their Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud and for Amazon Prime streaming video / movie service
  9. AWS CEO independently said there were no spurious hardware installed in or on the Supermicro motherboards.
  10. Apple did not break off doing business with Supermicro until sometime in 2016, selecting another supplier, perhaps due to the increased demand Amazon was placing on Supermicro due to growth of Amazon Prime.
  11. Altering the design of a motherboard to add another chip is not an easy thing to due and must be done from engineering on. . . especially on a multilayered board.
  12. None of the articles have shown this IC chip in situ on a motherboard, instead they show a photo of a generic miniature grain of wheat chip perched on a finger tip. Why not show one in situ?
  13. No one has described how this tiny chip accomplishes what it accomplishes with the various scenarios a server environments that might be encountered. It just is.
  14. The denial by both Apple management and Amazon management is backed by the fact that they face penalties if they are lying imposed by the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 which imposes PERSONAL fines of from $10 million to $20 million and imprisonment in a Federal institution for ten to twenty years. What incentive do these managers and officers have to lie. In Apple's case, they never even USED the products involved, cancelling the order.
  15. Bloomberg has published FAKE NEWS before.

Given all that, something here doesn't smell right. . . my BS o'meter is almost pegged at 100%!


53 posted on 06/30/2019 6:54:17 PM PDT by Swordmaker (My pistol self-identifies as an iPad, so you must accept it in gun-free zones, you hoplaphobe bigot!)
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To: Swordmaker

Just wanted to show up one more time here to thank you for posting your independent research.

“Bloomberg based its entire article on a single source, Yossi Appelbaum...”

I didn’t know this, and thanks again.


54 posted on 07/01/2019 10:54:16 AM PDT by kevin_in_so_cal (Saw this, but noticed an error. So I wanted to make one thing clear: I don't smoke cigarettes.)
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To: kevin_in_so_cal
Just wanted to show up one more time here to thank you for posting your independent research.

You are welcome.

55 posted on 07/01/2019 1:46:43 PM PDT by Swordmaker (My pistol self-identifies as an iPad, so you must accept it in gun-free zones, you hoplaphobe bigot!)
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