Earlier in the year, President Trump pushed the tech giant Apple to “start building their damn computers and things in this country,” rather than overseas in China. Despite an effort in 2012 to do just that by producing Mac Pros in Austin, Texas, one major snag is preventing Apple from making the switch to American-made: U.S. manufacturing capabilities are simply too far behind.
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“The skill here is just incredible,” Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said at a conference in China in late 2017. “Making Apple products requires state-of-the-art machines and lots of people who know how to run them. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”
When Apple began its failed attempt at American production, machine shops couldn’t keep up with their demand. Custom screw suppliers were struggling to meet short-notice requests for the micro fasteners; a 20-employee shop could produce at most 1,000 a day, while Chinese factories were able to churn out vast quantities in the same time frame. In the end, speed won. After delaying the Mac Pro sales for months due to a shortage of the tiny screws, Apple had ordered them from China.
The tech-oriented nation thrives on the manufacturing industry; by making everything from custom shoulder bolts to children’s toys, China continues to be an economic force in the world (though custom shoulder bolts are not something Apple requisitions). The factories that Apple contracted much of its work to are absolutely massive — some stretch for miles and employ hundreds of thousands of people who assemble, test, and package Apple products. Though the company has committed to its location in Texas, promising to add a staggering 15,000 new jobs to the local economy, none of them are expected to be in manufacturing. If Trump’s threat to place additional tariffs on products made in China comes to fruition, Apple may be facing serious financial strain.
Society has come a long way since the origin of the first handmade screws in 200 BC, and even farther since the National Screw Thread Commission established a screw thread standard in 1928; unfortunately, the future of American manufacturing remains shrouded in uncertainty.