alt Hacker NewsMac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
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Helene survivor here. What's wild to me is that, regardless of the small scale of this facility, it's only a few hundred meters from a 1% flood zone: https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search
The address I found for the facility is 9101 Windmill Park Lane Hudson, TX 77064
This seems ill advised given recent events like Hurricane Harvey
The woman in the pink smock-like clothing:
In the video there are Chinese characters on the clothing above the front pocket area. In a picture of her later on in the news article the Chinese writing is gone.
Has it been photoshopped out for the press release images?
Is no one else interested in the "assemble advanced AI servers, including logic boards produced onsite, which are then used in Apple data centers in the U.S." in the pictures? Are they using nvidia GPUS? Their own silicon? Is there any data out there on what these servers are like? I don't think we've ever seen a picture of them before.
"advanced manufacturing center" which is 20k sqft, about 1/7 the size of a typical Costco. I wouldn't hail this as the great revival of american manufacturing
Gotta love PR embracing the many definitions of "made in"
Why does the video show them assembling rackmount servers and not the Mac Mini?
Is that assembly really in the US? Asking because the woman in the first shot appeared to have Chinese letters on the left side of her uniform.
Hah! I just noticed something - in the video at the top of the page, the female technician assembling servers is wearing a pink smock with Chinese text on it, right above the ESD grounding lead. She features in a still photo down below, but they've digitally removed the Chinese. I think it says "富士康科技" for "Foxconn Technology." Funny that they would go out of their way to hide the depth of their partnership.
For anyone who liked Apple's Xserve lineup, it's very cool to get a peek at these rackmount Apple "advanced AI servers"
I'm excited for these to fall into collectors hands in a decade or two.
Mac minis are sold out in NYC these days because everyone gets them to try out openclaw. Even if this move by Apple is unrelated to the recent demand, it certainly was timed right for the policy and market makers.
To all critics . This is something good going on in the country. It’s national interest protection .
Together with robotics push , it has a chance , and even they do small things . Today they make body , tomorrow cpu , etc it’s a good thing going on regardless of politics
Hilarious and perfect. Apple know how to play this silly government like a fiddle. Gotta survive the idiot years somehow.
That's a lot of American flags in one article
US manufacturing will not take off without fully autonomous robots because Americans don't want to work 18 hour days for pay that is competitive with Asia, and labor laws make it difficult anyway.
Apple produced MacPro in US a few years ago, what about that facility and workers? Will this facility has the same destiny like MacPro?
Right when it gets off the boat from India, they will have contractors and H-1B visa workers snap the pieces together and now its Made in America.
Really looking forward to seeing how this ends up, especially over the next few years. I knew about their recent Arizona TSMC chips in iPhones, but this is nice to see.
It doesn't say the Mini will be exclusively produced at this US facility. I wonder in say 2 years what % will be "produced" in the US? 1%? 0.1%?
Still no jobs about this location posted on Apple’s career page. Anyone know how one could find employment at this location?
Next, are European made Apple devices?
Didn't they build the trash can mac pros in Texas?
Others need to follow. It's strange that we don't view the manufacturing of advanced electronics as a matter of national security.
Is this because of China/Taiwan situation I assume?
While shopping I look where items are produced and by whom company. When I see an item is manufactured in Texas I put it back on the shelf and keep walking. That State is too politically corrupt for me to financially support, same with Florida.
I'm sure Texas is going to try to give them the "freedom" to "compete" with china. If I owned property in Houston, I'd have sold a long time ago, but with this, I'd panic sell. Take what you can, it's going to be a wasteland if this pans out.
This feels like tariff evasion tactics, I am not against it tho, I think apple is handling it well.
Has anyone seen this documentary? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Factory
Probably
H-Town hold it down!
Didn’t know they were also pushing education so heavily, I mean it makes sense, but still great to see that they don’t expect skills and knowledge to appear out of thin air and is putting money to improving it.
I understand apple's push for US manufacturing in general but what do they mean by AI servers? I thought apple's current AI strategy is using other AI models?
I absolutely love my Mac Mini. But wtf is an "advanced AI server"?
> Apple today announced a significant expansion of factory operations in Houston, bringing the future production of Mac mini to the U.S. for the first time. The company will also expand advanced AI server manufacturing at the factory and provide hands-on training at its new Advanced Manufacturing Center beginning later this year.
So, servers and minis share a production line then.
I kinda knew it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45599894
It's interesting they have decided to build it in a blue state.
Nothing against American ingenuity, but when situations like this occur, quality often declines for a time. The process may be replicated from its original source, but the key difference lies in the workers’ experience—something the Chinese have already mastered.
Possibly a hot take but Houston makes more sense in my mind as a city to do this in compared to Austin. Houston is the fourth largest city in the US, it has no city zoning, and is the most wonderful place in the world to do business (at least in my experience). There's a risk if you do it in Austin that suddenly all your employees get priced out whenever the city forgets to update zoning (which has happened in the past, although to their credit they did eventually increase density and prices dropped)
In addition to Mac Mini, hoping more Mac Studios are able to be built including more regular updates.
Either of these devices (per watt of computing power) could become a home appliance pretty easily.
Love my Mac Minis..great computers to connect to a TV for a full Internet experience on your TV.
HOUSTON REPRESENT!!
Very happy to see this!
They've been teasing domestic production for over a decade. I'll believe it when I see it.
Translation: Apple agrees to lose money on Mac Mini production for x quarters as a concession to the WH for midterm optics in exchange for undisclosed consideration.
Good but they should be named 'Mac Donald' or Trump Mini or something and it should be engraved with gold letters. And they are too small, they should be huge
"made" == "assembled"
Now with OpenClaw pre-installed!
What's the over-under for Trump mentioning this in the State Of The Union speech tonight? The timing of this release can't be a coincidence.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/02/24/apples-us-mac-min...
> Apple's work on a new Mac mini factory in Houston wasn't a quickly-conceived plan to appease President Donald Trump. The reality is that Apple had a plan ready to do this long before the demands started.
[dead]
Apple is very tied to Chinese manufacturing in a way that is hard to replicate in US.
They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government, but if it goes as well as last time, they will stop as soon as they can.
In china they were often able to iterate on designs and have custom screws and other parts made and ramped up in very short times. Something about having the whole supply chain in one place and very motivated and it all fell apart when tried to move to US.
So things that took weeks became hard on anytime line.. per Apple in China book.