This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
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
"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...)
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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...
"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.
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.
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 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."
Wait, wait, I've seen this one!
applies Netherlands flag sticker to 8 ft. ceiling by extending arm and making small hop
The comment section is all over the place gawd damn
"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.
