yall seriously need some media literacy classes. or basic reading comprehension classes.
NYT paraphrased some industry people who posited that Chinese manufacturing benefits from small lady hands. that’s literally just covering a story. they didn’t say “us can’t make stuff because we don’t have little china-fingers and only tiny-china-fingers can make the pocket computers.” they just reported that some unnamed assholes said that.
Follow your own advice then, you’ll learn that it’s the role of the journalist to qualify wrong and offensive statements reported, or it is implied that the journalist approves of the position.
Wait a second:
it’s hard for apple to manufacture devices in a country with robust labor rights.
Robust labor rights? The US?
We have child labor making a comeback here. It’s not that far fetched to imagine children working in hypothetical US factories if things keep going the way they’re going.
I think that’s exactly where they were aiming with the small finger stuff. They want kids in factories again.
After China and India, yeah, the US has very robust labor laws
Gigaset produces in Germany.
TLDR
“Young Chinese women have small fingers,” the article reads, “and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said.” […]
there doesn’t seem to be a lick of evidence […] that small hands are preferable for manufacturing small devices. The closest thing we could find was a paper that found that surgeons with smaller hands actually had a harder time manipulating dextrous operating tools, which would seem to contradict the NYT’s claim that small hands are an advantage for small specialized movements.
(…so should they be hiring big white men instead? Not clear to me how this article thinks that’s a rebuttal of the ‘race science’)
I don’t really know what I’m talking about nor do I have a horse in this race, but could it be that small handed surgeons struggle with tools because the tools themselves are designed for big hands?
The size of the tools are dictated from the use of the tool, not the surgeon’s hand size. You simply have the same tool in different size.
that does seem plausible.
A valid hypothesis
The comment section is all over the place gawd damn
As with most news source, I take them with a grain of salt. Especially when the news sources are owned by billionaires who have financial incentive to twist public media
I wipe my ass with NYT these days. All they’ve been publishing is straight garbage
Wiping your ass with horse shit is not quite something to be proud of.
Terrible journalism. The author entirely neglects the fact that lemurs possess fingers even smaller than those of Chinese women. Why not have lemurs manufacture iPhones, given the particular daintiness of their digits? A true investigative journalist wouldn’t leave such crucial avenues of inquiry unexplored.
Hahahhhaahahha
“Young Chinese women have small fingers,” the article reads, “and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said.”
This 100% reads like LLM output; it’s confidently wrong, isn’t using proper news copy syntax, and got weirdly vague as it trailed off (“the small device”).
NYT is publishing AI articles.
Wasn’t this also the argument for child labor? “Small children can fit into tight spaces easier, lets use them to unjam dangerous machinery”
Yes. For example I know in textiles especially, they were small enough to run under & between machines to get things without the factory having to them off. (Surprise surprise, guess how kids got maimed and/or killed…)
But the children yearn for the mines!
It’s all about the roboblox these days. The kids yearn for robots.
The right watched snow piercer and needed therapy after see all the horrible things that the back of the train did to their betters.
Probably scrapped articles with “labor in Asia” to get this spat out
China use child labor, so……
Does it? They’re a middle-upper income country now, and child labor tends to be an issue at much lower levels of development. Anyway, for the Chinese electronics sector, you’re vastly more likely to see humanoid robots than children.
We can’t claim that everything weird is written by AI, because there are weird human writers too. Although even if not AI, “experts claim” is such a dodgy source, that alone makes it untrustworthy.
Ah, NYT. Amongst all subscriptions that I have come across in my country, NYT is the most expensive. Since they haven’t heard of region specific pricing and just multiply by exchange rate; it’s only six times more expensive than YT Premium in India.
Atleast I was under the belief that they had decent editorial standards but looks like that ship has sailed away as well.
Boss I hate to be the one to tell you, but this is exactly what their editorial standards have always been lol
Huh, didn’t realize that NYT was disliked from before only. I thought it was a decent American newspaper. The only other American newspaper I can think of is Washington Post, but that is so capitalist friendly to say the least.
Among overseas newspapers, I had decent idea of UK based ones (looks and judges Sun readers :p) but not otherwise.
Yeah def what I was thinking. It’s strange that instead of admitting to this they’re just rolling with it saying it’s based off something they read.
Yeah, that’s weird.
The reason iPhones are impractical to make in the US has nothing to do with anatomy or genetics, it’s purely labor costs. You can hire someone to work for very little and for very long in China, you can’t do that in the US. That’s it. That’s the only reason.
hire
They’ve been known to literally lock people in their factories, and even put up suicide nets to prevent slaves from killing themselves.
Iqbal Masih
Google this boy if you haven’t heard of him everyone. Two adult men assassinated a child for what he had to say
This is the darkest thing I’ve seen today, thanks
That’s it. That’s the only reason.
Manufacturing labour costs are far cheaper outside of China but the skills aren’t available. While labour costs are always a factor, the US just doesn’t have enough skilled manufacturing engineers or the supply chain you get somewhere like Shenzen.
Neither did China until Apple trained them
Shenzen’s supply chain is hardly all on Apple’s behalf or behest.
So 20-25 years from now we can be in the same place?
We? Not unless the entire government decided to fundamentally change overnight. The US government would never tell conglomerates what to do, it takes it’s orders from them.
Yes. But also the labour thing. Like alot.
While being subsidized by the tax code to do so🤡
the US just doesn’t have enough skilled manufacturing engineers or the supply chain
That’s because it was all outsourced to China because they utilize cheap/free labor.
If we had started doing tariffs 30 years ago we could have prevented that. Or if we enacted tariffs as part of a larger plan to slowly transition that industry back over the next 20 years, we could probably do that as well.
But just slapping a 250% tariff overnight and expecting everything to sort itself out is the kind of a plan only the orange moron could come up with.
The US had and has plenty, which is why manufacturing started in the US and migrated out once processes standardized enough to bring in less competent labor. Then labor became more competent, so more companies moved their operations there. A lot of US manufacturing engineers work with Chinese manufacturing facilities, because that’s where the labor is.
If the US wants to bring manufacturing back, it needs to be cheaper to do it domestically. That means automation, better materials transportation, and cheap raw materials.
I don’t see the point. Instead of bringing back manufacturing, improve education and focus on higher value work.
What’s important to note is all the pieces that get screwed together are still made over there…
We can pay tariffs on all the pieces and screw them together here, but that’s going to essentially have the same tariff costs as a completed iPhone.
Having someone screw the pieces together here would also raise costs due to labor costs. But they’re two completely different things.
Quick edit:
Times author is legitimately named “Trip” and started out as a sports writer before pivoting to “apple, bourbon, and beer”.
These days it might just be AI, but if it’s a human it’s almost certainly a nepo hire…
They could even waive the tariffs and it would still be impractical to assemble in the US. The only way it’s practical here is with near full automation, and even then it’s probably still cheaper in China.
Labor and land are just so much cheaper there.
Apple spent literal decades training workers over there, and the Chinese government busted up Apple and all their workers went to competitors…
Like, sure, someone has to assemble the screws but it didn’t take Apple 20 years of investment to just teach them to use a screwdriver. It’s skilled labor.
Jon Stewart had some guy that wrote a book on it a week or two ago.
There’s some skilled labor, sure, but most of it is processes, and those can be replicated elsewhere. Apple brought the processes and refined them with local labor. But none of it is so special that it can’t be replicated elsewhere in a couple years (assuming facilities exist).
Look at phone repair, you can go to any mall and a teenager can disassemble and reassemble your phone with only a month or so of training. Making that process efficient is the hard part, and that only requires a few skilled jobs in a factory of thousands. The vast majority of jobs in assembly are pretty unskilled.
and those can be replicated elsewhere
Apple isn’t in the process of spending billions over decades to train people just to install screws…
Like, fuck Apple, I’ve never owned a single Apple product. But they wouldn’t have spent that much for so long to train people for unskilled labor.
Quick edit:
Apple in China[1] is a 2025 book by Patrick McGee[2][3][4] (Financial Times reporter[5] from 2013 to 2023[6]), about how Apple Inc. invested in China in order to build iPhones and other technology, and by doing so helped China become more competitive. In the book, McGee says that under Tim Cook Apple invested $275 billion over five years from 2016. McGee compares this to the Marshall Plan as this is in excess of other corporate spending. McGee says the Marshall Plan was about half Apple’s investment, in real terms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China
275,000,000,000 over five years…
That’s 55 billion a year, for five years straight.
It doesn’t cost that much to train someone to put a screw in
Sure, but it does cost that much to build a suite of factories complete w/ automation and whatnot. Buildings are expensive, especially high tech ones, but that doesn’t mean the labor involved is particularly high skill. Components, processes, software, etc are still largely designed by highly skilled workers in western countries.
Yes, there are some skilled jobs there, but the ratio is much lower for the employees in China than domestically.
Yes, there are some skilled jobs there, but the ratio is much lower for the employees in China than domestically.
You can just keep repeating the same thing over and over again despite it being wrong…
Doesn’t make it true tho, just makes other people eventually stop responding
Chinese wages are not actually that low. In Beijing minimum wage is ¥26.4 which is $3.66
US federal minimum wage is $7.25
Yet for these types of jobs, nobody gets paid minimum wage, even $15/hr is probably low. What is the typical Chinese employee making for this type of work?
Also several times the minimum wage. The minimum wage jobs are the do nothing jobs like door man.
The fact is, the difference is in concentration. You have millions of workers in Shenzhen all in the same area doing similar jobs. It makes it easy to ask one factory to manufacture a thing and the one next door to assemble it.
China ain’t the cheapest anymore and has not been for a while.
No, but it’s substantially cheaper than the US and cheap enough that moving operations isn’t practical. Companies are moving to other south Asian countries, but China remains a staple for reasonably competent and reasonably cheap labor.
China also has an established, robust, and technically advanced manufacturing sector. That honestly is the biggest thing keeping manufacturing there. Things made from raw resources could be moved easily but the lower labor costs would be offset by the decreased demand due to most of their customers being back in China.
Things are even worse for anyone making something that requires manufactured components as all those suppliers are in China so now not only are they taking a hit for reduced demand, but also the headaches of having to import their components from China just to build anything. Labor would need to be ridiculously cheap compared to China for that to start looking like a good idea.
China also has an established, robust, and technically advanced manufacturing sector
So does the US, they just do a lot less manufacturing than they used to because it became cheaper to send that to other countries. The US does a lot more design work than actual production.
Labor would need to be ridiculously cheap compared to China for that to start looking like a good idea.
Right, which is why labor moved to China in the first place. If labor gets more expensive in China, manufacturing will move elsewhere, both for components and finished products.
The only way to get large scale back to developed countries is through automation, which dramatically reduces the labor cost. But at that point, it’s not creating jobs anyway, so why not do that nearer to where the raw materials are extracted anyway?
I personally don’t understand why developed countries are so interested in moving manufacturing back. I understand it’s not great for national security and whatnot, so it makes sense to have some domestic production capability if there’s ever war in the region, but a lot of that issue can be solved by diversifying where things are produced, since war is unlikely to impact the entire supply chain if you maintain naval dominance, which the US has and they share it w/ other developed western powers.
Well it’s also about supply chains. All the components are also made in China so you’d end up ordering the parts and then having to wait a month or more for them to be shipped to the US. If you want to avoid delays that means maintaining a significant stockpile of parts in the US that you may or may not ever actually use.
Sure, but I don’t think supply chains are the critical factor here. You don’t necessarily need local supply if you can break up delivery into small enough chunks, so whether it takes a day or a month to get a part isn’t important once the flow is going smoothly. You only need local supply if there’s a significant risk of disruption/delays.
Yes, it’s probably a bit cheaper to assemble things closer to where they’re produced, but I still think labor costs are the determining factor. US workers expect higher pay, more PTO, less hours worked per week, and more benefits, so even if all the parts were shipped in perfectly consistently, it would still be significantly more expensive to assemble iPhones in the US vs in China.
“Young Chinese women have small fingers,” the article reads, “and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said.”
Fucking what? Who are these supply chain experts? Did you pull them out of your ass?
This reads like AI. I’ve lost any speck of respect I still had for NYT.
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Their response is literally “he said it on a podcast,” and his comment on the podcast was the fingers statement plus “Apple engineers talk about this.”
Go suck a railroad spike bud, you might as well have said that foot binding is the reason for good workplace retention, because Apple workers said so.
You still had respect for it? It’s owned by and has been pushing Bezo’s agenda for ages now
Bezos owns the Washington Post not the NYT.
Wait, wait, I’ve seen this one!
applies Netherlands flag sticker to 8 ft. ceiling by extending arm and making small hop
I guess the NYT no longer has an editor on staff? Who the fuck let that go to print, also who writes something like that into an article - that little paragraph where the NYT claims that “industry experts” said Chinese girls are better at assembling phones reads like cringe AI slop.
I feel like literally one person proofreading that should have been enough for them to go, “maybe don’t print the stupid racist thing about small fingers.”
Authors name is “Tripp” and if he’s a real person he 100% used AI to write it.
I’m guessing his grandfather was/is loaded and connected. I’ve never met a man in my life who goes by “Tripp” and isn’t an insufferable douche coasting off generational wealth.
The crazy part is he just “wrote” a book about Apple, and there’s a good chance Apple execs he talked to really said that stupid racist thing.
He goes by tripp because, according to his personal image consultant, “Leopold reitbarth the third” didn’t test well with under 30s in their focus groups
If it’s children doing it then it’s not racist anymore. – NYT, probably
They will fire the editor and writer (who are probably overworked and forced to use AI slop to meet deadlines), and the cycle begins anew.
capitalist mutual masturbation and manufactured cognitive dissonance / distraction so they don’t have to actually change anything and effect profit potential. while they wait for daddy dictator trump to open their proposals in the form of a cotton sack with a dollar sign on the side.
“Grown ass men with sausage fingers are also out there painting tiny dolls using nail art brushes so they can play house… with their friends,” Jeong joked. “American men have plenty of manual dexterity.”
OH, man. I feel attacked. I’m going to cry onto my D&D minis now.
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It’s been the punchline of a dark joke for years.
You gotta get those little hands building the little toys.
We make the dark joke because we know it’s true, but we can collectively point at a tech company and say it’s their fault, and still enjoy the fruits of their labor at prices we can afford.
Globalism - hyperglobal capitalism - is all about externalizing the negativities and internalizing the positives.
