Apple Says It Will Add 20k Jobs, Spend $500B, Produce AI Servers in US
129 comments
·February 24, 2025cadamsdotcom
matwood
Sounds like a throwback lol
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/23/tech/apple-mac-pro-united...
le-mark
This should be the top comment. Apple are doing business the way business is done, just like last time. Results don’t matter, it’s economic policy via press release. Form over substance.
tesch1
Results matter, it's not hard to imagine that Apple considers the real risk of its promise and market position of being the privacy option being undermined by their supply chain risks, and leverage being used against them by privacy unfriendly actors.
null
Evidlo
I don't understand. Can companies curry government favor to get tariff exceptions? Aren't the tariffs in place already?
runjake
Apparently, yes. I saw mention of discussion around the Trump administration potentially giving Apple a tariff waiver. And I believe in Trump’s last term, Apple did have some sort of waiver.
I’m on mobile but Googling for “Apple tariff waiver” and “Apple tariff exemption” will point you to several news items.
monero-xmr
I am a free trader in principle. However you have a country (China) with an authoritarian government that makes favored industries subsidized.
Of course the standard economic argument is that China using its GDP to make goods cheaper for our own citizens to purchase is better for us - they are subsidizing our economy. However it ignores the strategic disadvantage by our country losing its manufacturing capabilities.
The graphs may show economic advantage. It’s hard to quantify the long term strategic and militaristic disadvantage to not being able to make anything yourself if a world war occurs.
curt15
>However you have a country (China) with an authoritarian government that makes favored industries subsidized.
If things keep going the way they are going, that could describe the US just as well in a few short years.
rayiner
Maybe the next administration should keep up the tariffs (as Biden did to a degree). Cheap trade with China distorts the tech sector too. Jobs and Wozniak were the products of a system in which americans had to build products at home. Tim Cook is the product of a system where you can become a trillion company by hyper-optimizing foreign supply chains. Which is better?
hypeatei
When did isolationism become cool? Isn't this why we declared independence in the first place? To get away from the British restricting free trade?
rayiner
You’re incorrect about history. Mercantilism not only restricted foreign trade, but restricted domestic industrial development by requiring the colonies to sell raw materials to Britain and buy finished goods from the Britain. Tariffs were a core pillar of the Lincoln Republican Party.
There’s been an isolationist wing in tech as long as I’ve been in it (early 2000s). I remember chatting with someone at Cisco/Juniper in the late aughts about Huawei ripping off their router designs down to the silk screening. Of course today Huawei makes their own state of the art routers with their own silicon, and some lower-end Cisco/Juniper gear is white boxed foreign equipment. And of course tech folks were complaining about immigration and outsourcing back in the early 2000s when Republicans were enthusiastically supporting both.
lenerdenator
When the people with the money decided it was better spent in places that weren't their own country.
rufus_foreman
>> Isn't this why we declared independence in the first place? To get away from the British restricting free trade?
No. I'm not sure where you got that idea. If you look at something like the Boston Tea Party, it wasn't high taxes on tea that were being protested against, it was lowered taxes on tea that undercut the smuggling operations of people like Sam Adams and John Hancock. "No taxation without representation" makes better press than "No undercutting my smuggling operation" though.
In the early years of the US, between 80 and 90 percent of federal revenue came from tariffs. Not exactly free trade.
margorczynski
> When did isolationism become cool?
Ask maybe China.
boringg
A bit revisionist here.
ipaddr
Apple went bankrupt under Jobs and Wozniak and was saved by hyper optimizing foreign supply chain company Microsoft only to rise 10 years later by focusing on hyper optimizing foreign supply.
relistan
There was a lot more than that going on and I think you've pretty generally mischaracterized the main problem with the mid-80's era Apple—which had nothing to do with domestic manufacturing and everything to do with not delivering new products that people wanted, at a reasonable price. You can claim overseas manufacturing solved the pricing component of that, but that's not at all clear: other companies were manufacturing in the US at the time and still out-competing Apple.
bluedino
All of the big PC companies had factories in Texas in the 80's and early 90's, didn't they?
And Dell became a case study of outsourcing everything (and sending your stock and profits soaring the whole time), until you have nothing.
grahamj
My first thought was payment to avoid sanctions for being "woke" (read: anti-discrimination)
foxandmouse
Coincidentally, construction isn’t set to start until late November 2028—convenient timing. If this mess blows over, they can quietly backpedal and carry on like nothing happened.
crowcroft
Good timing because Trump should be significantly weaker, and it'll be clear where Trumpism is headed in the culture, but also it will be more clear where AI will end up.
Even if the move forward with investment, they will be a bit of a 'late' mover, but will have had a chance to see what is working and what isn't working for everyone else.
bell-cot
Every major business leader is stuck saying "do what we have to" a lot.
The difference between the great leaders and the crap leaders is all in the details.
jonplackett
Maybe $500 billion will finally be enough to make Siri useful for more than just setting an alarm.
boringg
Funny I turned Siri off because i didn't want apple intelligence running amok. The follow-on problem --> lack of Siri killed my Carplay because Siri is required (also use itf for setting alarms/timers). The kicker? I can't seem to turn Siri back on after look through all the menus.
I.e. My preference for apple CarPlay supersedes my concerns on GPT running over my contents. Though the UI/UX has made it next to impossible to turn it back on.
What a world to live in.
checkyoursudo
I would pay $500bn to get siri to distinguish between a 13 minute timer and a 30 minute timer.
blitzar
I am very resourceful so I got around this by setting a 14 minute timer to outsmart the Ai.
"Your 40 minute timer starts now".
boringg
When I put in timers -- for some reason my timer frequently/randomly just sets to 79 hours and a random assortment of minutes and seconds. I have no clue why. I always have to double check otherwise I might be waiting awhile.
It feels like it was a residual timer or something but I have never set anything like that - it is quite strange.
bqmjjx0kac
I don't know if this is an actual problem you have, but since Siri appears to be composed of independent voice-to-text and text-to-action systems, you can say "start a one three minute timer".
newAccount2025
I solve this by asking for a 31, 41, or 51 minute timer.
jonwachob91
How does this help me se a 13, 14, or 15 minute timer?
brador
The problem is AI current best use case is creative work, art, music, programming, but skilled creative professionals is a/the core userbase for Apple products.
Apple is stuck and it’s AI will never be good enough until those creatives embrace it. Right now it’s disdain when mentioned.
jamil7
> The problem is AI current best use case is creative work, art, music, programming
This is where it’s being pushed and marketed but I’m not actually sure it’s the best use case.
amelius
> skilled creative professionals is a/the core userbase for Apple products.
Then why doesn't it have a professional CAD application?
dartos
Uhh
> The problem is AI current best use case is creative work, art, music, programming
By “best” do you mean “marketable?”
Seems weird to see a bunch of creatives and creative professionals “disdain” a tool and still say it’s “best” for them…
troupo
An oft-cited quote goes something like this: "we wanted robots/AI to automate boring, routine, meaningless jobs to let people be free to pursue arts, music, creativity. It's a sad state of affairs that AI is taking over arts/music/creativity stranding people with boring, routine, meaningless jobs"
oldpersonintx
[dead]
cloogshicer
Even that seems to work only half the time. ~50% she just doesn't respond to a voice command "Siri" or "Hey Siri" for me.
TMWNN
When Siri first debuted it would automatically beep, so I could immediately tell if the phone did not recognize recognize "Hey Siri" (just "Siri" didn't work). A couple of iOS updates later this went away, which means I can't tell without actually picking up the phone and looking at it whether the command was accepted.
Even more annoyingly, sometimes there is a beep! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
cloogshicer
Yup, the UX has gotten so much worse.
joshstrange
Whoa, whoa, whoa, on occasion, if the planets align just right, I can also get Siri to set a reminder (and at least half the time Siri gets it 80% right).
LLM Siri cannot come fast enough.
nottorp
LLMs are there for generating/hallucinating text, not for understanding text.
For natural language processing you need a different kind of neural network don't you?
zzbzq
It's the other way around. The model is impeccable at "understanding text." It's a gigantic mathematical spreadsheet that quantifies meaning. The model probably "understands" better than any human ever could. Running that backwards into producing new text is where it gets hand-wavy & it becomes unclear if the generative algorithms are really progressing on the same track that humans are on, or just some parallel track that diverges or even terminates early.
joshstrange
I’m confident that LLM’s will not have hallucination problems in the type of requests that I send to Siri.
I don’t ask Siri for facts (just like I don’t ask LLM’s for facts). As long as it can correctly, understand what and when I ask to be reminded about something, that would be a huge improvement for me.
That and being able to map “Bedroom Fan”/“Bedroom Fan Light” to “Bedroom Fan Lights” without having to specify aliases (and even then it hearing me wrong).
I’ve see Home Assistant working with LLMs and it can understand groupings that I never explicitly defined which is very nice. I can say “Turn off all overhead lights” and it will find all my overhead lights and turn them off. Siri/Alexa can’t handle those tasks currently.
drodgers
What are you talking about? We've invented the Universal Translator already.
nessex
If you haven't tried OpenAI's advanced voice mode, it's a mind blowing version of exactly what things like Siri really ought to become with a little more development. If that's what you mean by LLM Siri, I totally agree.
Being able to chat casually with low latency, correct yourself, switch languages mid-sentence, incorporate context throughout a back-and-forth conversation etc. turns talking to these kinds of systems from a painful chore into something that can actually add value.
skydhash
But does it do actual stuff, like adding a meeting to your calendar, call people, or set a timer or a reminder?
therealcamino
Over on Android it's the opposite situation. The voice interface to Google Assistant was very reliable for simple things like reminders and appointments, and even for general knowledge questions. It was part of why I didn't switch to an iPhone. Then Gemini came along, and that core functionality got a lot worse.
smallmancontrov
Siri already has LLM integration...
...that will grind your request to set email Vacation Mode through the world's worst speech-to-text, jam the text into Chat GPT, and spend the next three minutes reading you an uninterruptible 3 minute essay about violence.
gosub100
I'm a formerly non-mac guy who finally bought a brand new iPad. I got bored with the wallpaper but couldn't figure out how to change it. "Hey Siri, how do I change the wallpaper?"..."Sorry, I can't help with that". Tried a couple more questions and all it did was Google it for me. This is the latest M4 that was around $2k.
This is what our "AI accelerated" chips give us in return? What a disgrace
grahamj
Apple software is already largely written my Americans.
Somehow I don't think fealty will change its quality.
apwell23
hey thats what alexa is for
mrweasel
While I have no real opinion on this, I do have questions:
* What type of jobs?
* Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and skills?
* Does this mean moving to US based fabs for the M-series chips?
* Is this actually profitable, or is this just a political move?
wodenokoto
* What type of jobs? - "The 20,000 additional jobs, Apple said, will focus on research and development, silicon engineering and AI."
* Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and skills? - "The company is opening up what it calls a manufacturing academy in Detroit, where it will help smaller companies with manufacturing. It already operates an academy for app developers in the city. It’s also doubling its manufacturing fund in the US to $10 billion." - Sounds like they are upskilling, and will count the employees of companies joining the academy as "jobs created"
* Does this mean moving to US based fabs for the M-series chips? - "[M-Series] chips themselves, however, continue to be produced in Taiwan.
* Is this actually profitable, or is this just a political move? - Define profitable. It is cheaper than paying tariffs.
mrweasel
I might be reading it wrong, but that's the 20,000 ADDITIONAL jobs, which is going to be R&D, engineering and "AI".
Those 20,000 people won't be staffing the production lines. So how many manufacturing jobs, especially low skill, entry level with decent pay, will this create? The whole thing is framed in a way that makes it sound like Apple is creating thousands of manufacturing jobs.
AnAnonyCowherd
> Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and skills?
For 30 years, IT managers at blue chip US corporations have exploited the H1-B visa program by saying, "No," and then hiring a never-ending stream of barely-capable Java coders from programmer mills in India, take 5 times longer to make an app than it should have taken, get promoted, and leave everyone holding the bag with shitty web app that we all hate because it's too slow, too bloated, and doesn't work like it needs to. And the companies who can't get enough of that bullshit in-house just hire it out to sub-sub-contractors that do the same thing. Can we not invest in our native population and education systems this time around? I'm so tired of the fact that 90% of the IT staff in my Fortune 250 is Indian, and I know people who would be better at their jobs living in my home town. It hurts our community and our country, in the long run, and by the VERY same logic as re-homing our chip production.
acdha
It sounds like you should be directing more of your anger to the C-suite than the people they’re hiring. If they couldn’t get even cheaper Indian immigrants you’d be complaining about code boot camp hires instead - what you need is a tech union which would give you the ability to push back against short-sighted decisions which make your life worse cleaning up messes.
pupperino
Well, those Indians living in the US will have families of their own, and over time become part of the community you claim to be a part of. Very much like your ancestors did, except they likely didn't face the arbitrary constraints on immigration that Indians (and any other nationality) face today.
nottorp
And one more:
* Will this raise prices for customers outside the US for no justifiable reason?
Aeolun
The required people can just be imported from China?
notahacker
And related to your last bullet point: will it actually happen or is floating this just a political move...
xadhominemx
It will actually happen because it’s nothing new. The 500b is almost all wages for existing US-based employees. They are looking for a carve out from the new China tariffs (same as last time). Note - they made a very similar announcement 4 years ago https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-commits-430-bil...
apwell23
> Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and skills?
doesn't matter because we have work visas
paxys
Anyone keeping count of how many trillions in hypothetical investments and millions of jobs large American corporations have promised in the next 3-5 years?
treaba1098
[flagged]
tux3
Does this mean competing with Asahi to run a Linux kernel, or will this be an attempt to run AI workloads on XNU?
Consider the cost of GPUs, losing what could be double digit percents on overhead might not make this very competitive. The macOS microkernel can still beat NT in some situations (like not having filters slowing filesystem down to a crawl), but it lags significantly behind the investment in Linux performance over the years by every other major company.
helsinkiandrew
I believe the intention is to use their own M-Series CPUs - to get what they call "Private Cloud Compute". The cpu on your phone will encrypt data and a request, send it over the network to am M-series CPU which will decrypt and process/send back an encrypted response.
The idea being there's no VMware, kernel or piece of hardware that can have backdoors built into unless someone files off the top of the chip and somehow probes the silicon
> Apple said that it, together with Foxconn Technology Group, will later this year begin producing the servers that power the cloud component of Apple Intelligence — a system called Private Cloud Compute — in Houston. That marks a relocation, at least for some production, from overseas. Next year, it says a 250,000-square-foot facility for such manufacturing will open in the city.
> The Private Cloud Compute servers use advanced M-series chips already found in the company’s Mac computers. Those chips themselves, however, continue to be produced in Taiwan.
chippiewill
I don't think it's AI servers for Apple silicon. I think it's just regular x86 Linux servers to power Apple's AI cloud services. It's a commitment to internal investment rather than a product.
cube2222
FWIW, Apple’s AI “private cloud compute” is Apple Silicon-based, and it’s a core part of some of the security guarantees offered. See [0].
bayindirh
I'll honestly love to see an Apple Silicon based XServe and comeback of "macOS $VERSION Server" add-on, and maybe an XSAN box.
Doing a Mac Mini sized version for SOHO would be great, too.
One can dream, I guess...
1970-01-01
This is an insane amount of cash to throw at any problem. They could have Apple rockets mining asteroids with $500,000,000,000. There is no way all this cash goes into AI. What will actually happen is they will take 1/10th this cash to an over-valued startup and acquire them.
alphabetting
Good to see but brings to mind the deal they cut with China in 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29482351
KeplerBoy
Do we think Apple will once again sell servers to customers?
I guess they could sell servers to customers who want to run the latest Apple Intelligence models on-prem, even though that probably wouldn't make much of a difference, since you probably still have to trust Apple.
h0l0cube
I'm pretty sure this is for their own infra. FTA:
> Apple said that it, together with Foxconn Technology Group, will later this year begin producing the servers that power the cloud component of Apple Intelligence — a system called Private Cloud Compute — in Houston. That marks a relocation, at least for some production, from overseas. Next year, it says a 250,000-square-foot facility for such manufacturing will open in the city.
[...]
> Apple will also expand data center capacity in Arizona, Oregon, Iowa, Nevada and North Carolina, all states with existing Apple capacity. The company confirmed that mass production of chips started at a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. facility in Arizona last month. Bloomberg News recently reported that plant is building chips for some Apple Watches and iPads.
willtemperley
I think they might build a cloud offering. Something like Cloudflare workers but AI centric, perhaps running Swift on the Apple equivalent of V8 isolates.
Makes sense from a business perspective - there's significant growth potential for them as their presence in web tech is approximately nil.
badlibrarian
The Apple TV box (2021) is $129 with 3 GB RAM and 8 GB flash. Not hard to see where that could go.
newsclues
1u boxes or Mac Mini "servers"?
simondotau
It would make sense for Apple to fork their next highest-end Mac Studio motherboard, make relatively minor changes to it (e.g. add a higher bandwidth NIC and strip out unnecessary I/O) then wrap multiples of those into a rack mount chassis, with commodity-grade cooling and power supply solutions appropriate for the context.
Combined with a properly headless fork of their OS stack (think Darwin, not OS X Server) they could spin up a highly competitive solution using entirely "B-team" resources.
rickdeckard
...then it would be piped through their design-council, run through 5 more iterations to get a unique unibody case for it, accompanied by an optional proprietary Apple rack and a price-tag triple of the competition.
That's along the lines of how it usually rolls whenever Apple tries to make something purely utilitarian, it's usually the most considerate and "fresh" product, designed to be used and then disposed when finished.
A purely utilitarian IT-appliance without a individual end-user doesn't seem to be possible in their product pipeline, you usually end up with something "Prosumer": Impressive on its own, yet of degraded maintainability and scalability.
It's like asking Bugatti to design a public transport bus. It would surely be an impressive bus, but not one you would want to maintain over years at a scale of hundreds.
newsclues
Lots of interesting things Apple could do with their resources.
A modern version of the Xserve RAID for high speed flash storage could be very interesting.
The Mac Mini could be used as small blades.
or they could do something really wild, like take the Oxide rack scale approach and make something big for DCs.
But they might also want to get a piece of the prosumer homelab market that Ubiquiti is in?
jasdi
:) its like the dot com boom. How many around here remember those days?
comrade1234
Oh god. Hopefully they’re lighter than the old xserves. We had one still running up until a few years ago when we finally removed it. You could break a toe if it dropped while pulling it out of the rack. People are still selling them on eBay.
ChrisMarshallNY
I suspect that was the RAID drive bay (ridiculous item). That was a 3-4U monster.
The Xserve, itself, was a 1U unit that was pretty much the same (or lighter than) any other 1U server (we also had HP and Dell servers that were heavy). The weight distribution could be weird.
That stupid drive bay was a proprietary nightmare. The disks cost a fortune.
However, from what I can see, this will be for "internal-use" servers. I don't think they will be selling iron; just services run on the iron.
chippiewill
I don't think it's AI servers for Apple to sell. I think it's just regular x86 Linux servers to power Apple's AI cloud services. It's a commitment to internal investment rather than a product.
hhh
They have hiring positions for running a Darwin-based server OS, and their private cloud compute is on Apple Silicon. I doubt it's going to be swaths of x86.
michelb
I'm curious what they will look like, given that these are not for anyone else to buy. Maybe Apple made a different form factor/configuration that suits their datacenters better?
nottorp
Hey quality stuff is heavy!
The desktop case for my 286, I could stand on it and it would not bend!
Going to be watching closely - but cynically, a promise of investment (for avoidance of tariffs) only needs to last one news cycle until tariffs are no longer top of mind. Then it can be walked back without tariffs being imposed.
Maybe instead of saying the t-word tariff, US gov can charge Apple a special fee on each iPhone. They can call it something catchy, like say, a Core Technology Fee.