“A study by researchers at UC Irvine found that the iPod was responsible for creating nearly 14,000 jobs in the United States and another 27,000 abroad,” Bill Snyder reports for InfoWorld. “And those numbers are a few years old. Given the age of the product today, the iPod may not be generating many new jobs, but think of the positions that have been created subsequently by the far more complex iPhone and iPad.”
“Sure, the iPod, iPad, and iPhone are assembled in Asia. But the real value in those products was added in Cupertino, Calif. — part of Silicon Valley — where they were invented, and in the offices and cubicles of developers around the country who crank out the apps that make the iPad and the iPhone so useful,” Snyder reports. “The offshore jobs are mostly in low-wage manufacturing, while the jobs in the states are more evenly divided between high-wage engineers and managers and lower-wage retail and nonprofessional workers. As a result of this and of cross-country wage differences, U.S. workers earned a total of $753 million, while workers outside the country earned $318 million, the researchers found.
Snyder reports, “The conclusion of that report argues directly against one of the most pervasive myths of today’s economy: U.S. workers and the middle class are not reaping the gains of the high-tech economy.”
Read more in the full article here.
bullshit. It’s not enough to only create things…if you don’t make things, you don’t have an economy.
What are you talking about? A guy that makes a chair is worth something, but a guy that writes a book is not? I’d rather have an economy of people using their minds then people using their hands.
Yeah, then you can use the vivid imagination of your mind to enjoy the food that no one produced and the products no one manufactured. Oh, and don’t forget about wiping your ass with that fantasy toilet paper. What a wonderful world it would be.
Where is the writer gonna sit down to write?
Pretty sure he is gonna need the guy who makes chairs. What is he gonna write on? Pens and pencils and paper are manufactured.
Hmmm. This can’t be tolerated. Clearly this evil corporation needs to pay their fair share. Let’s increase their taxes. Get rid of as many of those jobs as possible. That’s the ticket.
“low wage manufacturing” … Once upon a time, manufacturing jobs were middle wage jobs.
You mustn’t have heard of topics such as the Industrial Revolution, cotton mills, and so on. Speaking with a little historical spread, SOME manufacturing jobs have been middle wage jobs.
Right, and then we grew up and became a post-industrialist country. No one aspires to work in a factory anymore.
Because not everyone is cut out to do the same thing 100s or 1000s of times a day. That’s why so many jobs have been outsourced to robots.
be nice if it was 41,000 jobs in the US
all 41k and more jobs would be in the United States, however the tax burden of skilled manufacturing employees paying for two ten year undeclared wars and financing pseudo-NATO military potshots at the current “villain du jour” make it unfeasible to have those manufacturing jobs here, where they belong. I don’t blame Apple for this shift of economic power to the East, I blame the Pentagon, the whores of the military-industrial complex and the perpetrators of the demise of the American economy & spirit.
Wall Street has never given any goodie points for a company employing a lot of people. Wall Street is usually most happy when lots of workers are getting canned. To Wall Street, employees are just useless cogs that cause unnecessary overhead which gets in the way of profits.
And what does this have to do with Apple, a company that historically couldn’t care less about what Wall St. and shareholders think? Huge revenue and profit gains speak for themselves, no matter how the business is run.
To be clear, I personally don’t care about the manufacturing jobs leaving. I mean, really, who aspires to work in a factory? I’d rather be a nation of inventors and innovators, a nation of ideas, than a nation of assembly line workers.
Regardless, manufacturing will never come back to the US unless one of two things happen:
1. Americans start caring more about where its manufactured than what it costs (not likely).
2. The manufacturing process can be totally automated with machines (possible, but doesn’t create many jobs).
A third seeming option, that cost of living increases greatly in the manufacturing countries (and thus, wages increase), is not viable because is that were to happen, the factories would just be moved again to somewhere like Africa.
If Apple was stupid, like you, all the iThingies would cost twice as much because of high wages.
If Apple pulled out of China, Brazil, Ireland and other countries to employ Americans exclusively, they would find serious tariff walls between their factories and their foreign markets.
So, twice the cost of the product and about one third of the market. Sounds good to me but the shareholders would not stand for it.
uh Alth, I just said that and also stated why.
I wasn’t answering your comment, I was reenforcing it.
Yes, your full support and reinforcement for his comment was made obvious when you called him stupid.
What about the contribution of the design, manufacture, and sale of iPod and iPhone accessories?
It is sad that so many can’t see the road in front of them. The more Apple miniaturizes and combines the sub assemblies while pushing more of the device features to the cloud the easier it will be to assemble. So easy even a robot can do it. (“Foxconn to replace some workers with 1 million robots within 3 years” http://macdailynews.com/2011/07/31/foxconn-to-replace-some-workers-with-1-million-robots-within-3-years/ )
The last jobs standing will be those not assembling and manufacturing the Apple devices.
Somebody’s going to have to make those robots.
In Japan they have a food services robot that can carve an entire turkey perfectly in 26 seconds flat. The more we mechanize society, the more unemployment goes up – next on the list: supermarket checkers and short order cooks.
Ya’ll love tech. You wanted it, you worshipped it, now you got it. Enjoy.
@W.T.Effyall,
Design the robots, yeah. But “make”? They’ll be made by other robots!
I can guarantee you iPhone/iPad, etc. created a lot more than 14,000 jobs. Millions at least. But Apple can’t be the whole economy: the US economy lost 28,000 million jobs since 1998 due to offshoring, guest workers, etc. And what is the ONE tech company that CLOSED all its R&D in India in 2006? Apple, of course! If every company in the US would focus on just making awesome products instead of being run by bean-counters and MBAs, there would be no recession.