All these are made by one company called Hon Hai Precision, Foxconn, and they've got factories all over China, factories that employ 300,000 people. The total number of employees of the manufacturing firm is over one million. It takes five days to make an iPad, I read. Manual labor, five days. I don't know what it is for an iPhone. One of the reasons the manufacturer says the iPhone's late or tough to get is because its design is so intricate.
It's the thinnest and the lightest and it just takes a long time to put one of these things together, and it is really hard because it's so miniaturized. It's so technically advanced. The way manufacturing and union jobs are in this country, those jobs would never exist here. Nobody could afford an iPhone manufactured in this country. But just as an aside, I'm not capable of understanding how it's done anyway.
I don't know how a million people spread out over factories throughout China -- there's even a couple in Brazil now -- turn these things out in the quantity they do. All handmade. Now, the components are not handmade. Some of those are precision made, but the assembly is all done by hand. And the volume, the number of devices! They've got a new miniature iPad that they're gonna be announcing in a week, and they're not gonna have enough of those.
I frankly don't know how they get all these things made. I can't conceive it. I'd have to go to China, see one of these factories, and see how it's done. I can't conceive it. But that's just an aside. The bottom line is that those jobs were never here. We didn't lose those jobs. And the jobs that are related to all those products are real, and they are American jobs, and the intellectual content -- the stuff that makes those iPhones valuable -- is all made and designed here.
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RUSH: I don't know where to stop when talking about Apple. Look at the people that make accessories for all their products: the cases, the external batteries, the chargers. It really represents total economic ignorance to sit here and wring your hands and worry about the fact that the iPhone, the iPad, whatever, is not made in the United States. The economic activity associated with the assembly of those products over there by the ChiComs is incalculable.
Well, you could calculate it, but it would stun you.
