7 comments

  • rantingdemon 3 minutes ago
    This seems to be paying lip service to creating a supply chain in the USA. These are not anything like Apple Silicon ARM chips, they are not even Wifi chips?
  • Isamu 1 hour ago
    >Broadcom will produce advanced radio frequency components — including FBAR filters

    Thin-film bulk acoustic resonator

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-film_bulk_acoustic_resona...

    >Trends to utilize RF spectrum more efficiently with higher frequencies than roughly 1.5–2.5 GHz and in some cases also simultaneously with increasing RF output power have supported FBAR technology to become one of the key enabling technologies in telecommunication realisations. FBAR technology complements and in some cases competes with surface acoustic wave (SAW) technology and FBAR resonators can replace crystals in crystal oscillators and crystal filters at frequencies more than 100 MHz.

    • MrBuddyCasino 39 minutes ago
      Fascinating. I suppose they can be smaller than quartz crystals?
      • drum55 31 minutes ago
        Very little uses crystal oscillators, they’re gigantic compared with electronics today and have very wonky performance over temperature and shock.
  • inigyou 46 minutes ago
    When did we start using the wording "increase spend"?
    • naveen99 2 minutes ago
      Increase the increase ?
    • mpalmer 42 minutes ago
      Marketing departments everywhere have been letting internal corpspeak just leak out lately. OAI's announcement shutting down Sora was similar:

      > To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you

      "built community"?

      • tensegrist 29 minutes ago
        "created with", à la "built with"
  • ruperthair 1 hour ago
    As much as I hate the source of the tariff policies, from an uneducated outsider PoV, they do seem to be causing fewer dollars to leave the country in imports.

    How does it feel from an insider perspective? Are the increased costs on imported items and dependent services worth it for a bit more local investment?

    • joshstrange 42 minutes ago
      No company can plan based on the tariffs. There is zero guarantee that then next government won't revoked them or that the current one won't flip-flop. Local manufacturing doesn't swing on a 2-4 (or 6 or 8) year timescale. There needs to be consistency.

      The company that moves (or starts) manufacturing here today might get run out of business when/if tariffs are repealed and their competitor already has production lines in other countries ready to go. Heck, the factory might not even open before the winds shift.

      No one can accurately plan with the uncertainty.

      All the big names like Apple are just paying lip service to this. They are throwing, quite literally, pocket change or funds from the government (like CHIPS, which was less ham-fisted than the tariffs IMHO but still not something that's going to change the landscape overnight) at these endeavours to appease the current admin in favor of reduced/removed tariffs on _their_ products and good PR.

      If congress wanted to actually do their jobs instead of both them and the judiciary abdicating their responsibility to the executive branch then _maybe_ we'd have a chance in hell. Until then you can look forward to more flip-flopping as the government changes and the smaller companies continuing to be ground under the heel of large corporations who can weather (or bribe) their way out of the tariffs.

    • AbrahamParangi 25 minutes ago
      The tariffs have been highly destructive to local manufacturing because in the US we mostly build complex things made out of simpler parts which we import. The cost of everything we build simply increased and as a result many businesses selling relatively higher margin, higher complexity products had to scale back or shut down.

      More to the point, the notion that dollars leaving the country is a real problem is really a kind of primitive understanding of money. Dollars are something we control. If dollars leave the country, that means there is demand for dollars. We control the supply of dollars. We literally can’t lose, so long as people are still using the USD, which they’re less inclined to when we’re tariffing their exports.

    • cherryteastain 7 minutes ago
      Putting aside the lack of evidence that tariffs meaningfully reduced the US trade deficit as other posts here remarked, reduction of the deficit would be catastrophic for the USD based global financial system anyway so it's bad for the US and bad for the world.

      Dollars can only be created in the US by the Federal Reserve or US banks. Since the USD is the currency in which most global trade is conducted, the US MUST provide USD liquidity to the rest of the world that they can exchange between one another and the US (cf. Triffin Dilemma). If the rest of the world has no dollars, e.g. an Indonesian company cannot sell goods to an Ecuadorian company settled in USD.

      The benefits of this system to the US are enormous (cf. Exorbitant Privilege) since US can print dollars out of thin air and 'give away' these bytes in a database and receive real goods in exchange. Real goods that people spent energy and expended labor for, in exchange for bytes in a DB.

      If the US stopped supplying dollars to the rest of the world, it'd first spark a massive financial crisis as companies that owe USD to one another default in a chain reaction. Afterwards, an alternate to the USD would emerge as 'hard money that everyone accepts'. Candidates for this currently are limited in the space of fiat, Europe and China are net exporters so they cannot supply EUR/CNY to the rest of the world in net just like a US with trade surpluses cannot. Possibly there could be a return to precious metal backed currencies. But in any case, in such an environment, US could no longer receive goods 'for free' in exchange for bytes in a database and its life standards would greatly suffer.

    • hilariously 1 hour ago
      It's adding a huge amount of economic turmoil, businesses are not investing because there's no certainty, and there's no more "local investment" except in newspaper articles.
    • deeg 30 minutes ago
      The tariffs haven't made any difference in the trade deficit. There was a large peak just before the tariffs went into effect but since then the deficit has been largely the same as it was before the tariffs.

      https://www.bea.gov/news/2026/us-international-trade-goods-a...

    • sanderjd 12 minutes ago
      The biggest problem with the tariff policy is not the cost or even the uncertainty, it's the corruption. A single person should not have the power to dictate the terms of trade, because the rational play in such a system is for businesses that rely on trade to pander to that person, and that's corrupt.
    • spamizbad 53 minutes ago
      This is more about the CHIPS act than the tariffs.
      • spiderfarmer 40 minutes ago
        If Trump sat on his hands for four years, he'd have been the best President ever.
        • dboreham 35 minutes ago
          More usually expressed as "if he only played golf".
    • riddlemethat 53 minutes ago
      If it had been done with coordinated investment/lending from the government to spur domestic production it’d be a very good move. The economy is stalling (outside of tech) because there is no money for increased production domestically.
    • pjc50 28 minutes ago
      > they do seem to be causing fewer dollars to leave the country in imports

      Have you accounted for the dollars that are no longer re-entering the country due to boycotts or retaliatory trade policies?

    • sneak 5 minutes ago
      This is about Taiwan, not tariffs.
    • close04 54 minutes ago
      > causing fewer dollars to leave the country

      Might cause fewer dollars to enter the country too. Closed doors block both directions. Other countries are watching and responding in kind. Maybe not that much at first out of fear of retaliation but builds up momentum.

    • spiderfarmer 42 minutes ago
      Please provide sources for your feelings, as the facts all seem to indicate that the deficit is rising. As well as inflation. And the national debt.

      https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/balance-of-trade

      None of his promises ever come to fruition. Stop hoping.

      • ruperthair 24 minutes ago
        It's just from articles like this and what I read on the DIY solar forums, so it's interesting to see the real numbers, thanks.
  • tiffanyh 53 minutes ago
    Could this simply be to provide chips for the products that still haven’t transitioned yet over to Apples in-house C chip.

    Like: Apple Watch, most models of iPads, Pro model of phones, etc.

    Because without this deal, Apple would have had to transition all products by end-of-year.

    • pwarner 39 minutes ago
      This sounds like specialized analog components. Not the modem.
  • khalic 31 minutes ago
    30B investment for "hundreds" of US jobs seems like a weird number to brag about