I was interested in seeing the kind of job opportunities this would create. Especially after reading Chip War [1] which goes into the history of the offshoring and globalization of Fab processes.
Here are a few of the openings Broadcom's openings at the Fort Collins, CO site [2]:
- Material handler, Manufacturing operator: 12.25 hour shifts, 3-4 day work weeks, ~$19-25/hr. Night shift in higher demand
- General Mechanical Technician: $20-37/hr, alarm response a big component of role
- ASIC Digital Design Engineer, Fab Quality Engineer, R&D Software Engineer, Cleanroom facilities project manager: $78-150k + equity, BS/MS + related experience requirements
These are in Fort Collins, CO. It's the 151st largest metro area in the US, so it's not really a tech jobs hub. Getting up to $150K plus equity and benefits wouldn't be a great salary in San Jose or Seattle, but it's not out of line with a lot of tech jobs in less populated metro areas.
Even in New York and Boston there are a lot of programmers and other midlevel ICs making making ~$150k. Not everyone is lucky enough to work at Google.
>> "Many high-tech companies have relocated to Fort Collins because of the resources of Colorado State University and its research facilities. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, Broadcom, Beckman Coulter, Microsoft, Rubicon Water and Pelco all have offices in Fort Collins. Other industries include clean energy, bioscience, and agri-tech businesses."
Maybe not a hub yet, but it's headed that way. It's also only an hour away from Denver.
Fort Collins is not near a San Jose or Seattle level of tech employment but then, neither is anywhere else in the USA. Any tech worker who ends up there won't be hurting for employment opportunities, especially if they are willing to commute to Denver or Boulder.
Just don't be surprised when the cost-of-living ends up higher then one might expect. Housing is still a good deal by Bay Area or NYC standards, though.
Keep in mind the posted salary is negotiable. It's a rookie mistake to assume that if you are offered the job, your only option is to take the offer at the amount listed in the public job offer.
Negotiating salary well is an important career skill.
Median house price is still $590k there, which is $4200 a month plus taxes and PMI. $150k is $8800 a month take home pay after taxes (including CO state). Making $150k and still spending more than half your post-tax income (after taxes/PMI/repairs/HOA) on housing is wild.
It's not unfair to say Fort Collins isn't a tech hub, but it's also not too bad. Trivia: One of the first non-CA Hewlett-Packard plants is down the road in Loveland. They also have a big campus in Fort Collins, which is where the Broadcom site is now.
I am from Colorado and went to school in Fort Collins. It maybe be small nationally, but it’s probably the 4th biggest tech area in CO after Denver, DTC, and Colorado Springs. Cost of living is surprisingly high unless you live in student housing.
General Mechanical Technician is another name for mechanical maintenance. in my experience, if "alarm response" is a big part of the gig then run for the hills because this company intends to run their equipment until its literally a pile of flaming grease and beeping melted plastic.
alarm response means you as a mech tech/mechanical maintenance have failed proactive or preventative work and will spend the rest of your career working mandatory overtime to fix what aint fixable anymore. the reason for this failure is nearly always management pushing for higher uptime and output. alarm response should never constitute a new factories big ticket issues.
Yeah, I remember meeting someone who designed ASICs back in 2000 or 2001 and he made ~$260k/year ($1000/work day) as a salaried employee for a certain large printer company.
I hate the fact that I agree - feeling cynical myself.
At this point when I read about $megacorp moving production to the US, I see an indication of globalization-level exploitation and profits being applied to the US labor market.
I've got to admit I was pretty surprised when I learned about the pay + hard work setup for semi engineers at TSMC in Taiwan. I'd be curious if anyone has any first hand experience with it.
That may be true for highly labor intensive roles but a fully automated operation is _more_ profitable when the few jobs that are required are staffed by trained personnel.
That is one of the reasons this factory isn't located in a poorer area. It's in Ft. Collins _because_ the profitability projections assume they can operate at somewhere better than 97% uptime.
12 hour shifts are 13+ hours of actually being there because of lunch / breaks. For example Genentech in SF / Vacaville are "12 hours paid shifts" with 1 hour mandatory lunch. So no it is not required for an overlap because there i already a required by law break (lunch) that forces overlap (assuming this applies to more states than just CA).
Apple is basically building redundancy into its supply chain here. Just in case they are cut off from China, they will be able to set up final assembly elsewhere and will already have supply of the critical parts.
Mexico is becoming the new China for manufacturing. Even many Chinese companies are building factories there. Also recently Mexico is offering work visas for workers from central America. Check out this Wendover video on it.
they are just using Mexico as a way to get around tariffs and other trade restrictions. On paper it might say "Mexico" is the biggest trade partner for the US, but the reality all the stuff is still coming from China with an extra hop to do final assembly in Mexico. China is doing the same thing with manufacturing in Vietnam, all the money still flows back to China in the end
Mexico has none of the actual infrastructure or skilled workforce needed to be an actual manufacturing powerhouse that makes things from scratch
With Biden repeatedly threatening to invade China and destroy the factories in Taiwan, it's clear Apple is just making sure they have a good fallback plan.
I always knew Broadcom as "that company that makes WiFi+BT chipsets that are a pain to use under Linux", vs Qualcomm "the company that dominates the Android ARM SoC market".
Android ARM SoCs are a tiny part of Qualcomm. What you should actually know Qualcomm as is: "The company that developed or acquired all of modern wireless comms tech, and thus gets paid very high license fees for everything that includes anything that talks to anything else over the air."
Although I think they are building up the ARM SoC business because some of their key patents are about to expire?
The current Broadcom is actually a spin-off from HP. This spin-off (Avago) has been on a massive mergers and acquisitions spree over the last decade. This culminated with Avago buying Broadcom and renaming itself to Broadcom.
Some of the crappy Wifi+BT chipsets that were sold under broadcom were actually sold off to another company, Cypress Semiconductor.
Oh, well this deal will definitely help with the openness issue!
(I like a lot of things about Apple but their lack of interest in documenting hardware is one of this things I don’t. It’s ironic given that without Burrell Smith and his doc there would have been no Macintosh).
Is that still true? My home built router and my server are both running Broadcom 10G ethernet cards I didn't have do so anything outside of enabling with ifconfig.
For the record, the OS's I tried this on were ClearOS and Nixos, but I have no reason to think it wouldn't work with other Linuxes.
yep. i will forever get a sick feeling at any mention of broadcom. they could cure a disease or something and i’d still be like “grumblegrumblegrumblebroadcomsucksgrumblegrumble”.
i sometimes wonder if my great grandchildren will have inherited some dna trait to hate broadcom lol.
i just can’t ever forgive them for the way them and their products treated linux.
And for what it's worth today's Broadcom is actually Avago - which got its start as HP's semiconductor division - after having acquired Broadcom and adopting its name.
However both are fabless design companies. By "manufacturing" in the US they don't mean building their own fabs etc but rather contracting with a US based company vs Chinese, South Korean or Taiwanese.
No. Go on any other site with this story and read the comments and it's full of "Apple's crawling back to Broadcom with it's tail between it's legs, because it couldn't design it's own LTE chips", referring to it's relationship with another company, Qualcomm.
I might be a bit of an idiot, but Realtek and Broadcom seem to occupy basically the same spot in my brain. They're two companies that do nominally similar things and I'm not smart enough to always differentiate them.
I could totally see someone hearing a vaguely similar name working on vaguely similar products and getting them confused.
So, Apple decides to make their own 5G cellular modem. Now, apart from Baseband, some of the RF in the cellular is hard (modulators with low power consumption, Envelope trackers, diplexers, duplexers). Some of these were designed by Qualcomm and some from Avago (Broadcom got acquired by Avago and renamed to Broadcom), Skyworks, Analog Devices, etc. So it is not surprising that Apple wants Broadcom's help for next few years until when Apple decides to again vertically integrate and make those components as well ( but they may decide it is not that cost competitive to do do).
The hardest part was Qualcomm's cost and paying them FOB royalties (which got capped at some point by DOJ/FTC involvement).
Lots of companies are cutting ties with China, Apple is obligated to do so. But the more companies cutting ties with China, make it easier for both China and US to have Military conflict on Taiwan. Replicating TSMC is in the making by intel but It will take Years, and would have been nice if APPLE, AMD and Nvidia would Start a Fab Together in the US as a part of the Chips ACT.
The whole point of bringing countries like China into the world economic system is to make sure that they realize that aggressive action is counterproductive and they refrain from doing so.
Unfortunately that hasn't really worked with China, which is why the world is starting to decouple from China; the CPP still prioritizes its institutional needs over "The People", which is ironic since they're supposed to be working for "The People."
That's probably why the CPP is scared of the people and tries to control them.
The world is really decoupling with China because it is so unpredictable. Xi made himself forever leader only 10 years ago and it's been a unpredictable rollercoaster of policy since then.
Stability is the foundation of every working relationship. Everyone wants to latch onto you when you are stable. You can even work with an adversary as long as they are stable. China had it for a while before Xi.
Most countries have yet to achieve long-term stability. Stability is super difficult to achieve.
> the more companies cutting ties with China, make it easier for both China and US to have Military conflict on Taiwan
The coefficient of trade and belligerence is about 0.2, i.e. "a doubling of trade on average leads to a 20% diminution of belligerence" [1]. And trade with China continues to grow [2]. I wouldn't read the semiconductor re-shoring as materially changing the odds of a war per se.
I listened to an interview with the former CEO (and now chairman) of Microchip the other day. Microchip actually turned down money beyond $150MM from the chips act because it had too many strings attached to make building a fab with it worthwhile.
>Lots of companies are cutting ties with China, Apple is obligated to do so.
Not only is Apple not obligated to do so, they literally double down their investment as recently as 2021. In 2022 their total Chinese Suppliers were still rising. And that is excluding some suppliers slotted into other countries via different HQ strategy.
To see how many people believe Apple is doing the right thing just shows another master piece of Apple's PR.
Presumably because they care so much about privacy being a human right, and every day This Page[0] exists it breaks their heart. Breaking ties with China would be a great way to start getting tough on autocratic privacy overreach.
As a third party, it's kinda sad that the US is so invested in going to war and seeking even more conflict.
All this energy could be invested in cooperating and building together. Instead, it's being wasted in preparing for yet another pointless armed conflict. It's not like we don't have enough problems already.
I mean you can stick your fingers into all your various sensory orifices and ignore the growing turmoil between Taiwan and China all you want, but the reality is that there is nothing the US can or will do that will prevent China from doing what they please with regards to Taiwan.
Just wondering what your thoughts are on China's self determination in deciding to invade or not? Why are you acting like the US is the one invading another nation?
> As a third party, it's kinda sad that China is so invested in going to war and seeking even more conflict.
FTFY. China is the actively belligerent party when it comes to Taiwan. The US doesn't want to invade either one. Don't forget the ongoing Uighur genocide in Xinjiang.
Complete nonsense. Cooperating with Putin lead to the invasion of Ukraine. Cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party can only lead to the invasion of Taiwan.
> The idea that the world will isolate China on behalf of Washington
Countries are doing it because of economic coercion.
China has banned Australian products from import (in violation of WTO rules) because of its position on Taiwan, Quad, Chinese foreign investment etc. Similarly for Sweden.
Which is one reason why EU has not been keen on a comprehensive FTA with China.
In East Asia, China-South Korea relations have turned rocky over the past ten years, due to frustration on the part of China over South Korea's continued military alliance with the U.S. (e.g. the THAAD radar issue in 2017 that ended by ruining the burgeoning Korean Lotte network of shopping centers across China). Samsung used to be huge in China, but now it's largely domestic brands Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo et al. Samsung had a massive phone assembly plant in Tianjin, but moved to northern Vietnam.
From a Korea perspective, the proprietorial attitude of many Chinese ("Korea used be part of China" Xi Jinping told Donald Trump), and the penumbra of nationalism in the PRC have resulted in a major shift in public opinion from 2000. Now some 80% of South Korean youth view China unfavorably, and that seems unlikely to improve in the near future.
> The multi-year agreement with Broadcom will see Apple use 5G radio frequency and wireless connectivity components, including FBAR filters, that are designed and manufactured in the U.S.
I don't think it means that. It seems to say that Apple will buy components for RF, not necessarily modems and antennas.
I'd be very surprised if Apple gave up on their internal modems. Not sure about whether the plan was ever to make antennas or just to have IP protection for option value. But there are a ton of other parts in the RF stack.
>- Paid $4.5B to Qualcomm to settle the lawsuit & gain modem/radio patents
They gain access to modem / radio patents. They settled with Qualcomm so they can continue to do business with Qualcomm and purchase modem as well as paying patents to use it.
This news means they are going ahead with their own modem. And judging by this announcement date it will be iPhone 16 at the earliest before their Modem ship.
If I'm not wrong, I believe Apple in the late 80s and 90s manufactured in the US, and again in the 2010s with the Mac Pro. I remember reading somewhere that they lost a ton of money because of it.
Steve was fanatical about automated factories for the original Mac and NeXT cubes. He kept bragging that their factories were the most advanced in the world, better than Japanese, etc.
Cook went the other direction, outsourcing to humans on other continents.
The "garbage can," model. I have one. It was double the price of the previous generation MacPro, 1/4 as upgradable and had some serious thermal issues. It is considered a flop, but I liked mine. I got it used.
Readit News
Here are a few of the openings Broadcom's openings at the Fort Collins, CO site [2]:
- Material handler, Manufacturing operator: 12.25 hour shifts, 3-4 day work weeks, ~$19-25/hr. Night shift in higher demand
- General Mechanical Technician: $20-37/hr, alarm response a big component of role
- ASIC Digital Design Engineer, Fab Quality Engineer, R&D Software Engineer, Cleanroom facilities project manager: $78-150k + equity, BS/MS + related experience requirements
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Chip-War-Worlds-Critical-Technology/d... [2] https://broadcom.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career?locat...
>> "Many high-tech companies have relocated to Fort Collins because of the resources of Colorado State University and its research facilities. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, Broadcom, Beckman Coulter, Microsoft, Rubicon Water and Pelco all have offices in Fort Collins. Other industries include clean energy, bioscience, and agri-tech businesses."
Maybe not a hub yet, but it's headed that way. It's also only an hour away from Denver.
Just don't be surprised when the cost-of-living ends up higher then one might expect. Housing is still a good deal by Bay Area or NYC standards, though.
Negotiating salary well is an important career skill.
alarm response means you as a mech tech/mechanical maintenance have failed proactive or preventative work and will spend the rest of your career working mandatory overtime to fix what aint fixable anymore. the reason for this failure is nearly always management pushing for higher uptime and output. alarm response should never constitute a new factories big ticket issues.
- Automation can't easily justify higher salaries, as it is highly automated to begin with.
- The product's pricing has to be cheap too, which is going to be difficult.
I hate the fact that I agree - feeling cynical myself.
At this point when I read about $megacorp moving production to the US, I see an indication of globalization-level exploitation and profits being applied to the US labor market.
- better wages
- US jobs
- lower price
That is one of the reasons this factory isn't located in a poorer area. It's in Ft. Collins _because_ the profitability projections assume they can operate at somewhere better than 97% uptime.
And don't replace your iPhone every year, because now it costs 50% more.
Of course, walking back on the race to the bottom will be difficult. So I don't know how it plays out in the real world.
I've never seen this. Is that a required 15 overlap for shift change?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXT46osICdY
Mexico has none of the actual infrastructure or skilled workforce needed to be an actual manufacturing powerhouse that makes things from scratch
And then suddenly, as if overnight, everything moved to China.
Yes, people claimed that during the era of the maquiladoras... it has not materialized 30 years after.
Has he actually said invade China?
The most the US has said was when China invades Taiwan, the US will defend them.
Qualcomm manufactures cellular components for mobile platforms. Broadcom is a different company.
Although I think they are building up the ARM SoC business because some of their key patents are about to expire?
Some of the crappy Wifi+BT chipsets that were sold under broadcom were actually sold off to another company, Cypress Semiconductor.
(I like a lot of things about Apple but their lack of interest in documenting hardware is one of this things I don’t. It’s ironic given that without Burrell Smith and his doc there would have been no Macintosh).
For the record, the OS's I tried this on were ClearOS and Nixos, but I have no reason to think it wouldn't work with other Linuxes.
i sometimes wonder if my great grandchildren will have inherited some dna trait to hate broadcom lol.
i just can’t ever forgive them for the way them and their products treated linux.
I could totally see someone hearing a vaguely similar name working on vaguely similar products and getting them confused.
The hardest part was Qualcomm's cost and paying them FOB royalties (which got capped at some point by DOJ/FTC involvement).
The royalties were always capped both in theory and in practice. Before or After any Apple's lawsuit involvement.
Unfortunately that hasn't really worked with China, which is why the world is starting to decouple from China; the CPP still prioritizes its institutional needs over "The People", which is ironic since they're supposed to be working for "The People."
That's probably why the CPP is scared of the people and tries to control them.
Stability is the foundation of every working relationship. Everyone wants to latch onto you when you are stable. You can even work with an adversary as long as they are stable. China had it for a while before Xi.
Most countries have yet to achieve long-term stability. Stability is super difficult to achieve.
The coefficient of trade and belligerence is about 0.2, i.e. "a doubling of trade on average leads to a 20% diminution of belligerence" [1]. And trade with China continues to grow [2]. I wouldn't read the semiconductor re-shoring as materially changing the odds of a war per se.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Solomon-Polachek/public...
[2] https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html
And it's kind of stupid because Microchip is still having 52+ week delivery issues. ST has gained three customers that I know of becuase of this.
Not only is Apple not obligated to do so, they literally double down their investment as recently as 2021. In 2022 their total Chinese Suppliers were still rising. And that is excluding some suppliers slotted into other countries via different HQ strategy.
To see how many people believe Apple is doing the right thing just shows another master piece of Apple's PR.
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/decoupling-is-just-going-to-ha...
All this energy could be invested in cooperating and building together. Instead, it's being wasted in preparing for yet another pointless armed conflict. It's not like we don't have enough problems already.
FTFY. China is the actively belligerent party when it comes to Taiwan. The US doesn't want to invade either one. Don't forget the ongoing Uighur genocide in Xinjiang.
Do you have anything to back this up, preferably not cherry-picking pandemic data?
Last I checked Apple had 90% of their manufacturing done in China and lost an Indian supplier this week.
Bing apparently just became the #1 search engine in China among desktop users (whatever that means).
China just came out of nowhere as the #1 car exporter.
The idea that the world will isolate China on behalf of Washington is a unipolar pipe dream.
Countries are doing it because of economic coercion.
China has banned Australian products from import (in violation of WTO rules) because of its position on Taiwan, Quad, Chinese foreign investment etc. Similarly for Sweden.
Which is one reason why EU has not been keen on a comprehensive FTA with China.
From a Korea perspective, the proprietorial attitude of many Chinese ("Korea used be part of China" Xi Jinping told Donald Trump), and the penumbra of nationalism in the PRC have resulted in a major shift in public opinion from 2000. Now some 80% of South Korean youth view China unfavorably, and that seems unlikely to improve in the near future.
> The multi-year agreement with Broadcom will see Apple use 5G radio frequency and wireless connectivity components, including FBAR filters, that are designed and manufactured in the U.S.
Various regulators probably wouldn't let Apple use 5G components produced outside of a [TBD democratic ally of the US]
Reminder, Apple:
- Paid $4.5B to Qualcomm to settle the lawsuit & gain modem/radio patents
- Paid $1B to Intel to acquire their radio division
All under the plan to build their own SoC modem/radio.
This would be a significant course change in Apple's plans if this means they have given up on this plan and will instead use Broadcom.
I'd be very surprised if Apple gave up on their internal modems. Not sure about whether the plan was ever to make antennas or just to have IP protection for option value. But there are a ton of other parts in the RF stack.
They gain access to modem / radio patents. They settled with Qualcomm so they can continue to do business with Qualcomm and purchase modem as well as paying patents to use it.
This news means they are going ahead with their own modem. And judging by this announcement date it will be iPhone 16 at the earliest before their Modem ship.
Cook went the other direction, outsourcing to humans on other continents.
https://support.apple.com/kb/sp697?locale=en_US