It’s Independence Day here in the USA. Also known as the Fourth of July, it’s a day when Americans drive their Japanese cars powered with Arab gas to go celebrate the end of British tyranny with Chinese made explosives. Which makes me wonder, where was your computer made?

Your PC or Macintosh could have been assembled in the United States. Well, that or Australia or Britain, or France, or wherever you hail from. But the components used inside the console probably all came from Asia.

My Lenovo laptops? Obviously they’re made in China. It says so, once on the laptop case and again on the laptop’s battery.

Yes, you counter, but Lenovo is now a Chinese company. Didn’t IBM sell it to the Chinese?

Yes, they did. But my old IBM Thinkpad, which has the letters IBM right on the case, says that it too was made in China. It says it once in English and again in Chinese, just in case.

中国制造

The MacBook Air? It’s assembled in China, but the box says that it’s Designed (of course) by Apple in California. Well, that’s cool. I mean, we can design stuff here and make the Asians assemble it. Thank God for boats.

I’ve no issues with employing Asians to build technological stuff. I understand that it’s nothing new; PC clones from the 1980s were all made in Taiwan or made using components fabricated in Asia. But up until just recently, Apple once made its own computers right there in Fremont, California. They could do it again just as easily, but not as cheaply. Sometimes true independence comes at a price.