Apple Readies US Move For Mac Mini Production

Apple is reportedly close to moving the production of some of its product portfolio back to the United States.

A report from the Taiwanese tech publication DigiTimes, quoting sources in the upstream supply chain, said Apple is set to move its Mac Mini production lines back to America.

US Production

“Currently, Foxconn has about 15 operating bases in the US, and the company reportedly plans to start recruiting workers in 2013 for new automated production lines,” the report said.

Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing company that makes the iPhone handset, among other Apple components, would be responsible for handling the establishment of production, DigiTimes reported. The Mac Mini offers third-generation Intel Core processors, an integrated memory controller that connects 1,600MHz memory directly to the processor, Intel HD Graphics 4000, either a 500GB or 1TB 5,400rpm hard drive and up to 256GB of flash storage in a solid-state drive instead of a traditional hard drive.

According to a DigiTimes research report, Apple’s Mac Mini shipments are projected to rise 30 percent to 1.8 million units in 2013, up from 1.4 million units in 2012. Apple upgraded the Mac Mini in October, which now includes four USB 3.0 ports in addition to its Thunderbolt, High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), Secure Digital Extended Capacity (SDXC), Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire 800 ports.

The Mac Mini is available with a 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.1GHz, 4GB of memory and a 500GB hard drive for $599 (£371); a 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.3GHz, 4GB of memory and a 1TB hard drive for $799 (£496); and a 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.3GHz, OS X Server, 4GB of memory and two 1TB hard drives for $999 (£620).

Job Creation

Earlier this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook told NBC news anchor Brian Williams that Apple will, in fact, be moving the production of one of its Mac lines to America, a move that will cost the company approximately $100 million (£62m).

In the interview, Cook’s first since he took the helm as CEO in mid-2011, he also said the company plans to build a data centre in Texas, in addition to existing data centres in North Carolina, Nevada and Oregon. Cook declined to state specifically where the computers would be made, however.

“We’ve been working for years on doing more and more in the United States,” Cook told Williams. “When you back up and look at Apple’s effect on job creation in the United States, we estimate that we’ve created more than 600,000 jobs now.”

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Originally published on eWeek.