As one of the “skilled electronics engineers” in the US you could count on US soil (whatever that means) I can tell you this article reads very strangely to a EE.
“we were able to take all those designs and spin up our own SMT, it's called Surface Mount Technology”
“run that through our surface mount technology by our line operators”
“meaning the printed circuit board or PCBA assembly”
So, he’s definitely not an EE. No EE talks like this when they are trying to explain the nuts and bolts to a lay person. Either that or the editor took liberties they shouldn’t have.
It's a transcript of an informal podcast interview with - clearly - a marketing guy who may or may not have 'engineer' in his title.
I've worked with dozens of guys like this over the years. They could elegantly bullshit their way through any discussion. They had an answer for every question, even when they didn't.
There's a reason they don't send the design engineers to trade shows.
Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.
Not that any of that matters, because engineering is a team sport, and that's where taking this too literally becomes a problem. Just how like a football team is made up of different skills and varying physical builds. The reason they don't send the design engineers to the conventions is because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details.
> * Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.*
Before Apple entered its iPod era, Jobs could do a reasonable job of taking questions from a technical audience
No single person on this planet can know everything about a product as complex as a phone or any other modern device, and the expectation of some people form execs even ones who were engineers is simply unrealistic.
If you know everything about your product down to the most low level technical detail your product is either a brick (and I think that even that is too complicated) or you greatly overestimate what you actually know.
> because they are too honest and will spill the beans on the product's shortcomings, or inundate the customer with irrelvant details
Yeah, getting upset an EE who has the skills to build a cellphone from scratch isn't actually moonlighting as a writer doing a blogspam version of a podcast interview fits that quite well
Steve Jobs was not a marketing guy. If anything, he was a designer. His technical knowledge was also way beyond most CEOs. He designed his presentations with a high attention to detail just like he designed his products, product ranges and companies. If you watch any one of the many interviews he gave you'll see that he can talk off-the-cuff, in depth on all kinds of subjects. And, unlike many modern CEOs, he pauses to think before opening his mouth.
Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting.
That's the currently-fashionable revisionist history. But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff. He was also good at marketing.
I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations,
I suggest going back and re-reading some of the print interviews he gave to technical publications. There's no question he knew what he was talking about.
> But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff.
Read anything on folklore.org, and you can see that's not really the case. He prescribes a lot of stuff that they just had to get around, typical pointy haired boss stuff.
I think that's a very myopic view of what Jobs did. I am of the opinion he was one of the greatest designers of all time.
Just because he didn't move pixels across the screen doesn't mean he wasn't setting the design language, defining taste, sweating detail and holding the vision. No-one would suggest that a show-runner didn't make TV, or that a director wasn't a filmmaker. Jony Ive's design changed (and improved) immensely one he was working closely with Jobs. Once Jobs was gone things drifted. Similarly Pixar was hyper-focused under Jobs then began to drift as soon as he was no longer involved.
Visionary and Product Designer are different jobs. Generalize them as the same thing if you like, but he was a CEO and a visionary. He didn't design products, he criticized and made demands of the designers.
You're just jealous. These guys have spun up their own RoHS and are doing a 100% EDA automation with full Verilog over there. By doing the reflow process (it's a way of building integrated circuits) they're able to offer complete impedance right here in the USA.
Before retirement my father was employed in a company certifying medical devices.
Half the descriptions provided by those who made the devices were this sort of word salad because they concerned products which were obvious scams[0].
On person in particular was editing the description on the fly and was looking for a word so dad jokingly suggested "impedance". "Yes, thank you!" replied that person - her face lighting up as she added the word.
[0] Like a vacuum cleaner which was supposed to dispense a mist of medication. Initially rejected as there was no dosage control whatsoever, but I heard that eventually somehow it was certified.
It's a complex problem, there's a lot of resistance from consumers who react badly to the price of domestic goods. Maybe tariffs will induce more demand, but I'm not sure the capacity is there in the first place.
It's not really a problem of "resistance", it's more about purchasing power, common and avoiding feeling ripped off.
People buy stuff competitively and that's it. There are modifiers, notably being rich enough that regular items prices make no difference to you, so you can buy all from your own country without affecting you too much.
But even if you are middle class, buying most items at a higher price just because they are from your country is just a waste of money from an individual utilitarian point of view.
It directly affects people and they always favor that, even if in the long run doing so might have a second order effect that will affect them in worse ways.
Tariffs, taxations and special legislation is actually the only way to make some product competitive for your own country. Especially when they are a participant in the trade willing to take a hit just to corner the market. This is basically what China did for many things, so here we are...
Not sure watt you guys are on about. Not to be too negative here or polarise the debate, but I remember the electrifying experience as a child to source local products instead of relying on imports from faraday countries. I guess technology has lost some of its radiance and has just become a mains to an end, to feed the addiction.
I'm hoping it induces the reversal in reckless culture of consumption and waste and longer end-product life cycles on the companies that design and manufacture them.
You're mixing your processes - is he making his own circuit boards (reflow) or making his own chips (verilog) - and I have no idea what "complete impedance" even means in this context - HN really needs to stop AI posting here
We really should not be doing jokes like this in times like these where the US president makes those kinds of remarks on a daily basis while being 100% serious
There's a somewhat better discussion of this phone here.[1] At least the making of the board.
Board manufacture, SMT pick and place, and soldering are all automated, and the equipment is widely available. Everybody does boards roughly the same way.
The assembly problems in phones come from all the non-board parts.
See this iPhone teardown.[2] Look at all those little subassemblies. Some are screwed down. Some use elastic adhesive. Some are held in place by other parts. They're connected by tiny flexible printed circuits. That's the labor-intensive part. Usually involves lots of people with tweezers and magnifiers. They don't show that.
So here's that part of assembly in a phone factory in India.[3] Huge workforce.
For comparison, here's a Samsung plant.[4] More robots, fewer people. Samsung made something like 229 million phones in 2024. If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down.
There's another way to do it. Here's a teardown of a classic Nokia "brick" phone.[1] That's designed for automated low-cost vertical assembly. The case provides the basic structure, and everything can be put into the case with a vertical push. There are no internal wires to connect. There are simple machines for that kind of assembly. Then everything gets squeezed together, and you have a hard block of an object that's hard to damage.
If you can design something which can be assembled in that simple way, high-volume manufacturing can be automated cheaply. Smartphones are not built from parts intended to be assembled in that way, but that's a decision based on cheap labor, not one that's inherent in smartphone design.
Design for assembly was more of a thing when manufacturing was in the US. The Macintosh IIci was designed for vertical assembly. Everything installed with a straight-down move. The power supply outputs were stakes that engaged clips on the motherboard. No internal wiring.
The trade-off of the current smartphone assembly process (many parts and many steps) is driven by numerous factors, including cheap labor. It also considers: incremental design improvement, testing, defects, supply chain, model differenciation, ...
"but that's a decision based on cheap labor, not one that's inherent in smartphone design"
This is the heart of the matter. The US has abandoned skills because cheap labor in Asia. An example from the story about dealing with touch screen tests: they're employing disposable workers to toy with pinch and zoom testing; something easily automated with a simple machine and image comparisons. How sad. This is an actual regression in technology.
If the US wants to get manufacturing back, the only areas that matter are electronics and, to a lesser extent, machinery. See this chart.[1] That's an achievable goal.
Here's a useful smartphone that could become big:
- Solid state battery that will last at least 5 years.
- 5 year full warranty.
- No connectors. Inductive charging only.
- Screen as unbreakable as possible.
- Sealed unit. No holes in case. Filled with inert gas at factory.
Then Tim Cook gave up on manufacturing. Which was how it saved Apple.
Steve Jobs always had a somewhat fantasise vision of dark factory. He wasn't able to accomplish that when Apple was still fighting for survival. But now Apple has more cash then it knows what to do with it.
a bit of the problem is that modern elements like display + touch screen require a lot more bandwidth than 3110 - for example the displays require ridiculous bandwidth in comparison to the nokia, like 10 gigabit/s for Samsung Galaxy S25 (basic model, not plus/ultra), plus connectors for the cameras.
At the very least you can't really make the screen soldered-on, and the simple connectors used in Nokia might not work out for such high bandwidth use case. Same with cameras.
Thin ribbon connectors are one of the hardest things to automate from what I remember regarding Sony's efforts to automate PS5 manufacture.
> If a US company produced phones at Samsung volumes, the price would come down.
The problem is, there are no Western manufacturers left that have the brand loyalty to bring such a large volume of purchases to the table.
The giants are so giant, it's almost impossible to compete with them in the consumer mass market. The only way you can outcompete the giants is by focusing on tiny small niches where consumers are willing and able to pay a premium - the government (auditable supply chains) and eco-progressives. That's where Tesla started, that's where Purism and Frame.work live.
Your scenario is more like a best-case option, actually. I mean currently there are only 13M people employed in manufacturing in the US [0], while output is at an all time high [1]. The vast majority of this manufacturing is dependent on components imported from other countries - which just got much more expensive. So even if employment in manufacuturing would increase by 20% (unrealistic IMO), that would only translate to 2.6M people - while at the same time losing multiples of that in better-paid jobs in other industries, mostly services.
I think you might even lose a bunch of these jobs, at least in the short term, as businesses now need to free up money (they likely hadn't planned to initially) to pay for tariffs before their goods / parts are auctioned off at the port. That's even before consumer spending tightens up due to rising prices, and declining stocks.
Pretty much guaranteed. The goal of modern automation isn't more people it's less. People love to spout "but the industrial revolution just made people able to do more jobs". But the goal of modern automation is to _replace all jobs_ that it can.
Then you hire 4 guys to maintain all the automation between 5 factories they drive between as needed.
Yes, that's what civilization -> industrialization -> automation does: eliminate jobs, which opens up opportunities for new jobs.
you are no longer an animal spending most of your waking life searching for food, nor do you build your own shelter, make your own clothes, construct tools, etc
yes, automation seeks to eliminate factory jobs, most of them are pretty awful anyway. this opens up new options as every step along the way always has
and yes, the change isn't always easy for the folks that have to find something new
The goal isn’t actually specifically employment increases, that’s mostly a marketing strategy, the real goal is national security. US, Japan, and South Korea seem to have decided enough is enough with Chinese aspirations and threats to Taiwan, so US has convinced them to build additional capacity in the US and also to have those nations increase defense spending. Notice Japan has started joining NATO command and participating in NATO missions. I predict Japan will the be first “deal” announced by Trump administration, with South Korea soon afterwards. It makes sense for these allies, the logic is we should fortify our supply lines building redundant facilities in US homeland which is much harder for China to disrupt and attack, you guys start buying lots of F-47s, we start massive ship building, re-industrialize as rapidly as possible. Then should China try anything and somehow mess you guys up, the US will come back a get you out of it.
That would be sane, but it makes no sense then why Trump is threatening tarrifs on Canada or the EU - both places that also need to do the same. (move manufacturing out of China)
Sure it does. The strategy is based on chaos and reminding all the world, allies included that the US is in charge and they want some very specific changes from both Canada and EU, they need them to militarize quickly, the US military is furious that all their allies appear to be almost incapable, very little naval power specifically. I’d even argue the implied threat to leave NATO, the talk of annexation of Canada and Greenland, it’s all strategic psychological warfare on allies to shock them into action … and it’s working … take a look a Germany’s new military budget and plans. There is also an intentional devaluation of the dollar to assist in re-industrialization. This is all national security and world order driven, not economics, and it’s actually the optimal time during a strong domestic US economy to try to make these changes.
It's national security to destroy all of your alliances? In that case, what is the reason Russia is exempt from these tariffs? Reverse-psychological warfare?
First of all there is (EDIT: almost) zero trade between the US and Russia currently, same with North Korea. (EDIT: perhaps some token signal of wanting to negotiate over Ukraine? or perhaps even more “sinister” - getting US political opposition to falsely argue Trump is a Russian agent and make themselves look silly)
Second, yes part of the strategy is to force allies to self assess themselves and their dependence on US power. Trump and Nixon had a personal relationship and his fundamental strategy in business is based on creating uncertainty, it’s literally like point 1 of his “Art of the Deal” and however another part of that strategy is being willing to walk away.
We are living through a turning point in history where current US administration has reversed the open policy to China and for national security reasons are working to re-industrialize and militarize quickly as a strategy to deter Chinese ambitions.
It’s fine to disagree and argue the neoliberalism strategy of globalism isn’t dead but politically it is. Of course that world order is fighting to survive where it can, UK, France, Germany all putting up resistance to the rise of neo-mercantilism and nationalism but we will see if canceling elections, restrictions on speech and jailing politicians will work to block it.
Maybe one change, but there is far too much going on and thus diverting attention. Pick something and fix it, not a million things and divide your attention and thus get nothing done. (not that other presidents were better, but part of that is good change is slow in many cases)
I don't buy that [3] is bad and [4] is good examples. That Samsung plant reel doesn't show the same parts of assembly as the first one - I bet those videos are just focusing on different parts of fundamentally identical factories.
I was going to skip this article until I read your post, it got me curious. You're totally right, it does read really weird. It made me laugh a bit, I needed that this morning. Thanks!
I have also "spun up my own SMT". It's a 50 USD hot air rework station and maybe 20$ of consumables in a 4 meter square workshop (I live in Asia). It would be challenging, but possible, for me to assemble the PCBs in their photographs by hand. There are indeed a lot of people like me.
He certainly meant an "SMT line", because phones assembled on a manual station in the USA (outside of shit quality) would cost well in excess of $2000.
They might, if their expectations are as simple as an on ramp to better or more stable things. It would also make sense for those who are using this method for career change.
I have a coworker who "couldn't hack it" as a paralegal and is now working in the line for server assembly. Or another coworker who came from a major daytrading firm to work quality control with me.
That’s not what they do. As Tim Cook said multiple times the engineers are needed as floor and line managers, to coordinate parts of the process, to set up new lines quickly etc… those are not the ones doing the actual soldering.
It extrapolates broadly. It's kind of a funny thing. When somebody doesn't know much about something but wants to pretend they do, their vocabulary comes off sounding like a thesaurus of vernacular, but when you speak to somebody who genuinely knows something, to the point of having an intuitive feeling/understanding of it, they could easily explain, at least roughly, even the most esoteric topic in a relatable enough language that a high schooler could understand.
Space stuff is another domain that's just chock full of this.
I don't think this is true. Knowing something well and being able to explain it in simple terms are unrelated skills. Plenty of people who know their domain super well just can't explain to lay person.
The interviewee is described as "Purism's founder", who even says "we took our own electronics engineers (EEs)", implying (though not explicitly stating) he doesn't include himself in that category.
I do think there's an interesting conversation to have here though about workforce management, as someone who lives in adjacent worlds.
If you are long term greedy, like China, a great strategy to capture dominance of a discipline would be along the lines of how to boil a frog. Start by sending grad students to the top universities, ensuring they work for the PIs for cheap, bring as many of them back to China as you can, but tolerate a leaky return path so as not to stir up notice. Advertize their high post-training employment rate back to the universities to keep their valves open even as you start developing your universities internally, and eventually throttle down the outbound grad student pipeline. At some point after it's too late, the top universities, and their countries, look around, bemoan the lack of people in their discipline, and then just give up because by now they're old and tired.
Seems like something that has happened in chemistry, physics, and EE for sure. Once you start thinking this way, all sorts of things start making sense. Like maybe they looked at solar as a cheap, low threat point of entry for developing silicon fabrication capabilities. Software engineering, being a relatively soft skill, comes along for the ride.
Not sure about other fields, but if AI can take on a rapidly increasing set of fields, you start seeing this as how China primarily harvests not IP but workforce training from the global West, then technologies happen to fall out, then one day China has solved for their own graying work force at the same time they've solved for global economic dominance.
And a non-trivial contributor was the US governments (I blame the states too) defunding education.
This is an interesting suggestion. I'm curious what you mean by "sending grad students to top universities":
1.) the target universities have to accept the students, right?
2.) This implies some top-level RTS-game-esque control of the grad students when, in reality, they're making independent choices (albeit influenced by many factors, including govt promotion)
3.) Seems like the rational decision for ambitious grad students is to apply to said top universities (which may just happen to be abroad).
Same for "bringing many of them back": I read it at first like it was akin to some sort of spy agent network when in reality "bringing back" probably means various incentives, not some forced thing. Carrot, instead of stick.
1) target universities have to accept the students
Yes! Which the US incentivizes by a) underfunding K-12 education, reducing the internal applicant pool, b) competing grants in a way that incentivizes PIs to grasp for cheap labor. Additionally, the individual states also incentivize this. Look at the UC's own statistics: since 2009 the highest chance of acceptance goes to foreign, ethnically Asian applicants. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321493
2) RTS-game-esque control of the grad students
Yes! Having been in the room when one of those grad students got a very stressful call from home (like broke down crying multiple times), it's definitely not all carrots. And the removal of carrots eventually looks like a stick.
3) Seems like the rational decision for ambitious grad students
A quick Google search shows that there are somewhere in the range of 20,000 electrical engineers who graduate US universities every year. Even if not all of them do electronics, and not all of the ones are considered “skilled” (by this author’s definition), there are not a “countable” amount.
My read on this that they don't mean EEs as in IEEE, but "engineer" as in "sanitation engineer", i.e. people who assemble electronic devices in factories.
I suspect this is a case of Gell-Mann amnesia. This article is not inconsistent with the quality of articles in blogs, the news etc. I believe you (And I) notice this due to expertise in the area.
“we were able to take all those designs and spin up our own SMT, it's called Surface Mount Technology”
“run that through our surface mount technology by our line operators”
“meaning the printed circuit board or PCBA assembly”
So, he’s definitely not an EE. No EE talks like this when they are trying to explain the nuts and bolts to a lay person. Either that or the editor took liberties they shouldn’t have.