News Palmer Luckey considering entering laptop market with fully US-made model, wants to know if you'd spend 20% more for an American-made PC

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Like the poster above, if a laptop were fully and easily repairable, we're made out of durable maerials like aluminum, had great specs as to ensure it would be relevant for at least 5 years, and didn't ship full of garbage like so many models, then yes I'd pay 20% more, especially if they had an Apple like trade in program so you could recover a decent part of your investment. This goes double if it were also upgradeable.

Now if it were the same plastic body with meh specs and basically zero repairibily like we see in Chinese made models, then absolutely not.
 
Not sure how they could even produce a true "Made in the U.S.A." product considering most PC hardware is produced in Asia. Assembled in the U.S.A. is one thing but actually having all the components produced in the U.S.A. is highly unlikely.

That being said there would need to be some value to justify the 20% upcharge. Few suppliers want PC hardware to last more than a couple years. They want consumers to purchase new products every couple years or sooner.
 
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I would also advise Palmer to not get caught up into the ideology that it has to be made just like existing laptops, which requires lots of labor to assemble. That kind of thinking is how businesses went hog wild into outsourcing (such as Apple, HP, etc.). Oh, and business schools pushed outsourcing! No kidding.

If you hire the right people to lead and the right individuals do the design with the right targets, you can aim a design to dramatically change the labor needs for manufacturing. Just like the auto industry started using robots, and other Lean Manufacturing/ 6 Sigma ideals. Even in Germany with a high labor cost, there are products manufactured there - they got the labor requirements out of the products and used more automation. Another very visible use of this is Amazon. The warehousing systems use way less labor. Same idea, but drive that into the assembly processes.

This is how Henry Ford blew away the world with such as cheap automobile. He came up with a paradigm shift to stop making each part by hand as one-off custom parts, and instead to mass produce the same parts over and over. If Palmer comes up with the right paradigm shift, he will eat everyone's' lunch - without needing a cost increase.
 
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Nope. I'll buy what's within budget and meets most of my needs and expectations, and from companies with some history of consistent production quality. Basically, if it's a decent Made in China, Taiwan, S.Korea, or Japan one cheaper even after tariffs, I'll buy that.

If I want a fancy laptop, it'll be a large Framework one. But I'm sure as hell not paying 20% more just for a Made in America tag when it's not at least 40% better than a cheaper foreign-made one.
 
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I'd like to see a detailed rundown of how this is even possible.

Let's say you start with a Raptor Lake laptop SoC and set out to make some bare bones model. The other major components you need to source are:
  • RAM
  • SSD
  • battery
  • screen

Right now, I think even Micron is making all their RAM and NAND abroad. I haven't tracked any announcements they made for US-based fabs since CHIPS (or after), but it's conceivable they're working on building US-based production lines for these.

The battery is probably doable, since it's the least complex of these components and I know there are people at least trying to build batteries in the US.

What about screens? I think this part would require a big display manufacturer to set up production here. I think people aren't going to pay Apple + 20% prices for a laptop with 10-year-old screen tech, so it'd have to be fairly current.

I guess it's probably more feasible than I first thought, but I'd be surprised if it could happen before like 2028. At that point Raptor Lake is going to be hopelessly obsolete, so he's really counting on Intel and/or TSMC to deliver on their plans, or else the CPU is going to be majority-made abroad (most likely in Taiwan).

To answer the question, I'm more concerned about tech products that avoid China than I am ones with predominantly US-based components. A few years ago, I seem to recall HP (?) announced plans to eliminate China from its supply chain by like 2027, so it looks like that would be an option. But, I don't really mind if some components are made in allied countries like Japan, South Korea, or a free Taiwan (maybe Thailand, but adding Vietnam to that list would be quite a stretch). More US-based content would be a nice-to-have, but a bit tough to swallow, if it's coming at the expense of significantly worse specs.

Finally, as others have said, I like Framework's approach. I think that would create a pathway towards more onshoring, while not having to wait until everything can be on-shored before first delivery. It also means that customers will always have a choice between US and foreign parts, so the US parts will have to compete on specs, even if they can't compete on price. I think very few people would pay significantly more for parts or products with significantly worse specs.
 
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I would buy it if he went so far as to create a standardized format around it and it ushered in the era of the fully build-your-own laptop.

If not, 20% more for roughly the same stuff isn't worth it.

I should be able to buy a laptop case from InWin, a laptop battery from NinjaBatt, a laptop motherboard from Asus, a laptop OLED or LCD panel from Samsung, a laptop power charger from SilverStone, a laptop keyboard from Logitech, and a laptop touch pad from Corsair. Or 50 other manufacturers randomly chosen, and it will all snap in together and seamlessly work because the screws, the port placement battery placement keyboard placement etc; the internal cables and connectors are all generally speaking standardized.

This is how desktops are today. Exactly this. The ATX standard needed to be extended to laptops two decades ago. I can settle for the standard being extended to laptops today as a second-best alternative.
 
Last edited:
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ezst036 said:
I should be able to buy a laptop case from InWin, a laptop battery from NinjaBatt, a laptop motherboard from Asus, a laptop OLED or LCD panel from Samsung, a laptop power charger from SilverStone, a laptop keyboard from Logitech, and a laptop touch pad from Corsair. Or 50 other manufacturers randomly chosen, and it will all snap in together and seamlessly work because the screws, the port placement battery placement keyboard placement etc; the internal cables and connectors are all generally speaking standardized.
Click to expand...
Yes, we'd all like that.

However....4 decades of laptop sales have not made that happen. Unlike ATX and PCs.
Don't see that changing anytime soon.
 
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chaz_music said:
I would also advise Palmer to not get caught up into the ideology that it has to be made just like existing laptops, which requires lots of labor to assemble. That kind of thinking is how businesses went hog wild into outsourcing (such as Apple, HP, etc.). Oh, and business schools pushed outsourcing! No kidding.

If you hire the right people to lead and the right individuals do the design with the right targets, you can aim a design to dramatically change the labor needs for manufacturing. Just like the auto industry started using robots, and other Lean Manufacturing/ 6 Sigma ideals. Even in Germany with a high labor cost, there are products manufactured there - they got the labor requirements out of the products and used more automation. Another very visible use of this is Amazon. The warehousing systems use way less labor. Same idea, but drive that into the assembly processes.

This is how Henry Ford blew away the world with such as cheap automobile. He came up with a paradigm shift to stop making each part by hand as one-off custom parts, and instead to mass produce the same parts over and over. If Palmer comes up with the right paradigm shift, he will eat everyone's' lunch - without needing a cost increase.
Click to expand...
Every manufacturer is already doing this and Toyota were the ones everyone started copying in 2001.

Factories in Asia are some of the the most advanced in the world and TSMC had to bring in Taiwanese staff to build their plant in Arizona.
 
framework cost at least +50% to comparable clevo-based laptop, still sells well.
So if this laptop can offer something distinguishing him from crowd, it will sell
 
They lost me when they made the comparison to Apple. I think Apple has been over priced since the first Mac came out, or really even before the IIGS. Fully made in America products will be more competitively priced when AI and robots do most of the labor. Humans in the developed world stuffing their faces with ultra-processed foods, demanding health insurance to keep them on their feet another day, benefits, and top end wages so they can afford Starbucks in order to make it to work can't compete with less developed countries labor rates.
 
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lmcnabney said:
the GPU will come from Taiwan.
Click to expand...
RDNA4 and Blackwell (client) are both capable of being manufactured in TSMC's Arizona plant, although I forget whether either of them are.

TSMC has announced plans to accelerate deployment of advanced nodes, in the US. Depending on the timeframe we're talking about, it would be feasible to get newer CPUs that are produced here. I'm not saying it's going to happen, but we can dismiss the possibility of it, without more information.

lmcnabney said:
The board will come from Taiwan or China.
Click to expand...
The PCB is the easiest part to make, aside from the case and maybe some of the surface-mount components.
 
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