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I switched to iphone from android very recently and I do feel bad about it.


Almost all consumer electronics are made at these Chinese manufacturers. Only the high-end chips are from Taiwan, South Korea, or Arizona.

I'm software engineer at a Danish company that also manufactures a lot of industrial electronics. Our insight is that China is still the cheapest place to manufacture PCBs but it is surprisingly more efficient to setup pick-and-place robots here in Denmark to place the components onto the PCBs. The pick-and-place machines and assembly robots run all night now.

If we can figure out how to efficiently print the PCBs in Denmark/EU we will no longer have any critical reliance on China.


> If we can figure out how to efficiently print the PCBs in Denmark/EU

see my other post. It used to be part of a garage-shop economy here in Silicon Valley.


Modern pcbs cannot be compared to garage shop pcbs. No one in a garage is going to be making me blind/buried/stacked micro vias, controlled impedance traces, exotic substrates etc. there are a handful of proto shops in the USA that can do it but the vast vast majority is in china. For large scale pcbs needed for consumer electronics I’m not sure any domestic supplier could meet the demand. I don’t know the situation in EU but it’s probably similar. Don’t even get me started on flex pcb vendors…


that was kinda tongue-in-cheek.

Back when you could do it in garages, things were a little simpler.


Almost all is not all right?


Most Androids are included in the almost all, even if the chips are made in fabs in Taiwan so many other components have Chinese sourcing


It's pretty safe to rest assured that the cheaper the device (or piece of clothing or mostly any consumer good) you're buying, the more shoddy the kitchen side of it is.


Sure, a small but growing percentage of iPhones are assembled in India, sure. Some other manufacturers will be doing the same.


Apple is moving their iPhone production to India, so you supported that in some way, perhaps.

Dunno if their factories will be any less gulags, but given what kind of a place China is, perhaps they are.




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