this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Sure that's not automated yet?
Everything's computer!
Nope, I've long worked in designing for North American electronics manufacturing, it's still manual. We just outsource as many of those sub assemblies as possible to cheaper countries and design things with as few fasteners as possible.
That really is the least of the worries, there just isn't the manufacturing infrastructure for all the raw material and individual parts, manufacturing those parts just isn't feasible to do at a reasonable cost or schedule outside of Asia. China is still popular not due to cost, they are no longer cheapest, but because they have the infrastructure in place.
Apparently jobs like that, which require fine motor skills, are extremely difficult to automate.
Use the same cameras and AI that Musk said were gonna fully automate Tesla
I don’t want my iPhone to get the build quality of a motorized dumpster
Musk has quite famously admitted that robots can't do everything, and humans are extremely good at problem solving.
Weird. Not like pcb fabs haven't been doing that for ages. And not necessarily the solder flood type chip mounts either.
Pick and place machines are one thing, but plugging in tiny connectors, screws that need a little wiggle to go in the hole, things like that are a different story.
Probably also a factor is that you would be spinning up a whole production line and automation systems for phones that will only be in production for 12 to 18 months, after which you'd have to adapt or redo everything for the new model.