Hey all, Ernie here with a refreshed piece from 2019. Currently, the Internet Archive has been down for days, having suffered a serious hack,

How Outsourcing Led Gateway 2000 Astray

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2024-10-14 00:00:03

Hey all, Ernie here with a refreshed piece from 2019. Currently, the Internet Archive has been down for days, having suffered a serious hack, with no sign that it’s coming back up anytime soon. (Let’s hope that’s not a preview of anything.) I will note that we’re big fans of the Internet Archvie over here, and while we may not have an archive like theirs, we do have an archive. Here’s one quality piece from it. Today in Tedium: Whatever your opinion of the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China, and the way tariffs often get used as a cudgel in that battle, the fact of the matter is, it represents something of a proxy battle over the United States’ place in the world of manufacturing. And computers are, quite often, in the line of fire. Earlier this year, there was a freak-out moment when it looked like Chinese-made semiconductors (including GPUs) were about to see a huge tariff hike, though that was delayed for a while. Companies that play both sides, like Apple, have had to do gladhanding to keep their tariffs low—apparently Tim Cook personally gave Donald Trump a $6,000 Mac Pro in exchange for lower tariffs on that computer’s fancy parts. We closely associate modern computing with Chinese production apparatuses, to the point where it makes no logistical sense to slap a “made in the USA” sticker on the box. But just a few decades ago, a lot more computers were assembled in the U.S. Why did that change? Perhaps the fate of a company whose boxes literally screamed Americana has a lot of the answers. Today’s Tedium considers how globalization changed Gateway 2000. — Ernie @ Tedium