> The idea that China is a low wages country should just die. It was the case 10y ago, not anymore.

The wages for factory work in a few Eastern European countries are cheaper than Chinese wages. I suppose they don’t have the access to infrastructure and supply chains the Chinese do but that is changing quickly do to the Russian war against Ukraine

But it's not like China had the skills, tooling and supply chain to begin with....and it's not like the US suddenly stopped having all those things. There are reasons manufacturing moved out of the US and it was not "They are soooo much better at all the things over there!"

Tim Cook had a direct hand in this and know it and is now deflecting because it looks bad.

One of the comments on the video puts it way better than I could:

@cpaviolo : "He’s partially right, but when I began my career in the industry 30 years ago, the United States was full of highly skilled workers. I had the privilege of being mentored by individuals who had worked on the Space Shuttle program—brilliant professionals who could build anything. I’d like to remind Mr. Cook that during that time, Apple was manufacturing and selling computers made in the U.S., and doing so profitably.

Things began to change around 1996 with the rise of outsourcing. Countless shops were forced to close due to a sharp decline in business, and many of those exceptionally skilled workers had to find jobs in other industries. I remember one of my mentors, an incredibly talented tool and die maker, who ended up working as a bartender at the age of 64.

That generation of craftsmen has either retired or passed away, and the new generation hasn’t had the opportunity to learn those skills—largely because there are no longer places where such expertise is needed. On top of that, many American workers were required to train their Chinese replacements. Jobs weren’t stolen by China; they were handed over by American corporations, led by executives like Tim Cook, in pursuit of higher profits."

I would say, it pays more consistently than small jobs. As by nature small jobs are not generally continuous, most often piecemeal.

The other factors are: In any sort of manufacturing, the only time you are making money is when the equipment is making product.

If you are stopped for a change over or setup you are losing money. Changing over contains risk of improper setup, where you lose even more money since you produce unusable product.

Where I live, the local machine shops support themselves in two way: 1. Consistent volume work for an established customer. 2. Emergency work for other manufacturing sites: repair or reverse engineering and creating parts to support equipment(fast turn around and high cost)

They are willing to do small batches but lead times will be long since they have to work it into their production schedules.

Manufacturing expertise that have been transferred from the West over the last 40 years. Knowledge and expertise are fluid, they can go both way, they can be transferred to other countries as well, India, Vietnam, etc. The world doesn’t stand still.

Western engineers worked relentlessly on knowledge transfer to China to do so, it might be easy to bring back with the 10x industrial subsidies that the CCP provided to do so.