Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Depression.

The US is a great place to have your headquarters and a terrible place to have your not-so-cheap labor.

Their actions will drive prices higher and, indirectly, wage higher. Businesses without a war chest will not be able to keep going and fold, the labor market will collapse.

The rest of the world will trade amongst each other and I suspect to save themselves, some big tech companies will relocate their headquarters.



As an ex Apple engineer, i think you're overlooking that a huge fraction of labor is robotic, and has been for at least 15 years.

(even in the famous contract manufacturers used by Apple and Dell, etc.)

The point is that what you counted as not cheap labor probably is largely capex.


I think you’re overlooking that the robots require maintenance and facilities which are costlier due to labour costs which will ultimately be passed on to customers.

The US market demand is already depressed. Prices go up, demand will fall further.

Try to impose those prices elsewhere in the world and people will move off of apple products. Apple profits will fall, it will lead to a negative feedback loop.


I'm not overlooking any of that.

> The US market demand is already depressed. Prices go up, demand will fall further.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/01/apple-reports-first-q...

TLDR from a few weeks ago:

“Today Apple is reporting our best quarter ever, with revenue of $124.3 billion, up 4 percent from a year ago,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.


Labor is only costly when humans do the work.

But that will be less and less the case.

Waymo is doing 150,000 autonomous rides per week now.


That could also lead to a depression. I haven't heard a lot of politicians here (Andrew Yang in 2020? does he even count as "a politician"?) with good plans for what to do when automation hits jobs even harder.


A failed politician is still a politician.


In three cities with good weather and they don’t do highways.


And a year ago they did less than 15,000!

That is not even one tenth!

They clearly will not get anywhere with this.


Yes, just like every startup pitch deck.

“We grew from 10 customers to 100 customers in a year. At this rate we will have 20% of the world’s population in a decade!!!”

The first cohort of customers of any company is always the easiest to obtain with the lowest acquisition cost. You solve the easiest problems first.

This is Cohort Analysis 101. Not to mention Waymo still hasn’t shown to be able to operate in less than ideal weather conditions or proven that the unit economics will make sense or be economical especially taking into account maintenance, or utilization ratios.


It’s been operating safely in each market they’re in. The AI keeps getting better. They have no competition (please don’t bother mentioning Tesla vapor ware). Path to high growth seems pretty sure at this point.


And the markets they are in are low hanging fruit with good weather. I’m not saying Waymo is less safe than human drivers. I am saying that it will only take one fatal accident by any self driving car for people to lose confidence, investigations to start, rollouts to be paused etc. I’m also not saying that is a logical response.


> I am saying that it will only take one fatal accident by any self driving car for people to lose confidence, investigations to start, rollouts to be paused etc.

Uber and Cruise are both great examples of this, but it seems like the effect is mostly localized to the company itself that has the issue.

Uber hit and killed a jaywalking pedestrian, resulting in their self driving tech being sold to Aurora. [0]

Cruise hit a pedestrian that was flung into the cars path that a human driver hit previously. This resulted in GM completely abandoning Cruise and their future seems foggy at best. [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_(autonomous_vehicle)#Su...


Which is very very few markets, and all of them share weather patterns that are very similar.

When Waymo can demonstrate reliably going from Chicago to Ann Harbor in the middle of a snow storm thats when we can start talking about how its good enough.


It reminds me of the advanced ED209 robot in Robocop that was taken out by an inability to go down a flight of stairs

https://youtu.be/_MS4sLlBvbE


If robots can bring everyone to and from work it would be over for manual driving. People dont buy cars to drive in extreme weather in remote areas.


But they do buy cars that they can drive to work in the rain, snow, etc.


Neither area I referenced is remote.


Put it another way, would you buy a car if you cannot use it for daily work commute? I think for a lot of people the answer is obviously no.


Sure wouldn’t, and for what it’s worth that’s why the scenario is a great litmus test. If it can do that, it should be able to handle anything else thrown at it


Except we already do have that technology, its not a fancy robot, but trains. I wouldn't consider buying a car in Tokyo.


    we will have 20% of the world’s population in a decade
That is roughly what happened with Facebook, Google, the iPhone ...

None of these products were as good when they started as when they had a billion users.


https://www.scribbr.com/research-bias/survivorship-bias/#:~:...

Is that really what you want to argue in front of investors? That you are going to be the next Facebook, Google or Apple?

There was also MySpace, Friendster, Altavista, InfoSeek, RIM, Nokia…


Facebook was the next Facebook with Instagram.

Apple was the next Apple with the iMac. Then with the iPod. Then with the iPhone.

Google was the next Google with Android. With Chrome. With Gmail. With Google Maps. With YouTube.

Google becoming the next Google with Waymo would not be a black swan event.


Google also had literally hundreds of failures and Android is not an amazing financial success by any means and Google still ends up paying Apple over $20 billion a year because people with money buy iPhones.

Google is not exactly known for its success rate getting products out of the door that aren’t ad related.


Give stuff for free, ???, profit. It's kinda worked for them, but not as well as Apple's strategy.


You can’t give hardware away for free profitably.

You also have hundreds of failures

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Including Google Fiber.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...

Google Stadia was disaster.

In the phone market. The Motorola acquisition was a major failure and Pixels aren’t taking the world by storm.

The entire “Other bets” haven’t led to any major successes.

There are only two tech companies that have shown any ability to do hardware at scale as mass consumer products in the last 25 years - Apple and Tesla.


This is all intended policy to benefit Trumps super donors. They can then scoop up marketshare and competition for pennies, then lobby to get the tariffs lowered or removed, but the higher prices - that we will be used to paying at the point this all comes together - will not go down.


All else being equal, companies are going to use the source of labor that results in the cheapest product they can produce. No one is forcing companies to move this kind of manufacturing to the United States. A 10% (let me reiterate that: TEN PERCENT) tariff on incoming goods is inflationary, but by very little, and quickly absorbed by companies and consumers. No one is moving their labor supply from China to the US to avoid a ten percent tariff; US labor is more expensive than that, and there are fifty other places around the planet you could find cheap low-skill labor that aren't on Trump's shitlist.

But you won't believe any of that, because you want all this to happen. You're a doomer; doomers and preppers secretly want the doom they predict to happen, even if they won't admit it to themselves.


For now they are going with the tide, because they don’t want to relocate head office.

If trump’s terrible plans are rolled back there’s no harm.

If they aren’t rolled back they will undergo the costly move to relocate.

The world is a bigger market than USA and just about every other country has cheaper labor and no tariffs.

It’s just logic, I have no emotion tied to this.


> The world is a bigger market than USA and just about every other country has cheaper labor and no tariffs.

"no tariffs" -> "heavy tariffs".


Your "logic" (masking) conveniently avoids the point I raised: That these tariffs are being enforced to the tune of 10%. That isn't enough to alone justify this level of investment, or relocation of significant production capacity. Obviously, Apple agrees with this, because the investments they're making aren't as far as I can tell a relocation of capacity from China to the United States, but rather greenfield investment in high-skill research and development. Apple has also made significant investment into advanced silicon manufacturing in the United States; something they also did not rely on China for previously.

> The world is a bigger market than USA and just about every other country has cheaper labor and no tariffs.

Have you done zero research into this? The EU imposes a tariff on Chinese EVs. India imposes insane tariffs on all imported electronics. China tariffs Australian wine. Russia tariffs agricultural products from the EU. Brazil tariffs all imported automobiles. The list goes on. Tariffs are everywhere, everyone uses them for something.


I guess we have the benefit of seeing it play out.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: