>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.
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?
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The company that moves (or starts) manufacturing here today might get run out of business when/if tariffs are repealed and their competitor already has production lines in other countries ready to go.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.
That isn't 100% true, maybe 99% though. Anyone paying attention to politics for the last 40 years would have seen that there has always been an undercurrent of people unhappy with imports. This is the most power those people have had, but they have always been there and got significant political attention. There have thus been signs to be aware of, and those signs are things a smart company will take into consideration - they may or may not act, but they should know and consider them.
I distinctly remember Apple having produced a video showing off an automated assembly line for PCB production for the original Mac. It's not like they didn't try it.
Easy to imagine - phones would be 1.5x more expensive than they are now, from get go. The cheap electronics (and goods in large part) have been hallmark of "quality of life in USA" for decades; I still get iPhone and Lenovo laptops 40% cheaper than family members living in Europe.
However, it seems that Americans are so tired of growing prices that they are getting used to paying them. Just yesterday there was an article that summarized oil price drop 40% from when the war cooled down, but prize at the pump went down only 12%. The big oil explains this that people will buy gas anyways, so why lowering the price? I think we will see the same happening with electronics - Apple breaking news on $500B factory spending in USA is mostly because they believe Apple owners will keep buying Apple regardless of the price. They may be right... will see.
Apple invested 3x that because they got 30x in return from the savings versus US manufacturing.
>Imagine if they'd spent that on the US instead.
Then iPhones would either have to be 10x more exsolve to keep the same profit margins or Apple would be broke trying to compete with Chinese made goods using US manufacturing.
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.
Who is "we"? Trade deficit dollars are recycled into assets, which compete with exports in the balance of payments. If you have a big house and fat brokerage account, you win big. If you have a job building shit, you lose big. If you have a job building tradeable shit and a low net worth, may god have mercy on your soul.
If you want the full economist version, "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis
...and then whoever sold us the goods turns around and uses those dollars to bid up US assets. Next time you are bidding for a house, take some time to appreciate just how expensive those bit flips have made things.
It did make it easy to raise capital, though, which is nice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is useful for the president to have emergency powers. However he should have been impeached for abusing emergency powers in a non-emergency. Same for his invasion of Iran - Iran has been building long enough that he had plenty of time to go to Congress for permission if he thought attacks were needed.
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.
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.
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?
I figure supply chain migration is an incremental process and any progress is a win. In my mind some of the tech needs genuinely experienced staff and that must be seeded somehow.
Note I am talking out of my ass but this is how I see the picture. I have no experience in supply chain or manufacturing :)
I have 15 years experience working in high tech electronics manufacturing (for a global firm with factories around the world, including in the US and China) and can tell you the most difficult thing to manage is the supply chain. For time as much as cost, but if you have to ship a $.10 component 6000 miles to get it to a factory, it's pretty dang inefficient.
That said, you're right about cultivating new experience in younger generations. It's probably not surprising to hear that the majority of factory workers in the US are GenX or older.
>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.
Fascinating. I suppose they can be smaller than quartz crystals?
Very little uses crystal oscillators, they’re gigantic compared with electronics today and have very wonky performance over temperature and shock.
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?
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.
That isn't 100% true, maybe 99% though. Anyone paying attention to politics for the last 40 years would have seen that there has always been an undercurrent of people unhappy with imports. This is the most power those people have had, but they have always been there and got significant political attention. There have thus been signs to be aware of, and those signs are things a smart company will take into consideration - they may or may not act, but they should know and consider them.
Apple invested 3x the Marshall Plan into China. Imagine if they'd spent that on the US instead.
I distinctly remember Apple having produced a video showing off an automated assembly line for PCB production for the original Mac. It's not like they didn't try it.
Then all this 3x amount would have had no ROI, China would have outdid the US comparatively.
Probably not much. The US doesn’t have the capacity for high volume manufacturing. We cost too much.
Easy to imagine - phones would be 1.5x more expensive than they are now, from get go. The cheap electronics (and goods in large part) have been hallmark of "quality of life in USA" for decades; I still get iPhone and Lenovo laptops 40% cheaper than family members living in Europe.
However, it seems that Americans are so tired of growing prices that they are getting used to paying them. Just yesterday there was an article that summarized oil price drop 40% from when the war cooled down, but prize at the pump went down only 12%. The big oil explains this that people will buy gas anyways, so why lowering the price? I think we will see the same happening with electronics - Apple breaking news on $500B factory spending in USA is mostly because they believe Apple owners will keep buying Apple regardless of the price. They may be right... will see.
>Apple invested 3x the Marshall Plan into China.
Apple invested 3x that because they got 30x in return from the savings versus US manufacturing.
>Imagine if they'd spent that on the US instead.
Then iPhones would either have to be 10x more exsolve to keep the same profit margins or Apple would be broke trying to compete with Chinese made goods using US manufacturing.
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.
> We literally can't lose
Who is "we"? Trade deficit dollars are recycled into assets, which compete with exports in the balance of payments. If you have a big house and fat brokerage account, you win big. If you have a job building shit, you lose big. If you have a job building tradeable shit and a low net worth, may god have mercy on your soul.
If you want the full economist version, "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis
We is the country. Yeah, not everyone gets to win the same amount at the same time. The alternative is just maga communism (pathetic).
Also, by definition, if dollars left the country then stuff came in. We literally traded bit flips in a database for tangible stuff.
...and then whoever sold us the goods turns around and uses those dollars to bid up US assets. Next time you are bidding for a house, take some time to appreciate just how expensive those bit flips have made things.
It did make it easy to raise capital, though, which is nice.
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.
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.
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...
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.
It is useful for the president to have emergency powers. However he should have been impeached for abusing emergency powers in a non-emergency. Same for his invasion of Iran - Iran has been building long enough that he had plenty of time to go to Congress for permission if he thought attacks were needed.
> 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?
This is more about the CHIPS act than the tariffs.
If Trump sat on his hands for four years, he'd have been the best President ever.
More usually expressed as "if he only played golf".
We are losing a lot more manufacturing due to the new tariffs on industrial parts than we are gaining from tariffs on finished products
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.
Chips are specifically excluded from the tarrifs.
> 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.
This is about Taiwan, not tariffs.
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.
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.
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?
I figure supply chain migration is an incremental process and any progress is a win. In my mind some of the tech needs genuinely experienced staff and that must be seeded somehow.
Note I am talking out of my ass but this is how I see the picture. I have no experience in supply chain or manufacturing :)
I have 15 years experience working in high tech electronics manufacturing (for a global firm with factories around the world, including in the US and China) and can tell you the most difficult thing to manage is the supply chain. For time as much as cost, but if you have to ship a $.10 component 6000 miles to get it to a factory, it's pretty dang inefficient.
That said, you're right about cultivating new experience in younger generations. It's probably not surprising to hear that the majority of factory workers in the US are GenX or older.
Not just experienced staff but an entire ecosystem of supporting startups, industry, talent, and infrastructure around the main fabs.
When did we start using the wording "increase spend"?
Increase the increase ?
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"?
"created with", à la "built with"
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.
This sounds like specialized analog components. Not the modem.
30B investment for "hundreds" of US jobs seems like a weird number to brag about