BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Chief Executive Tim Cook has said that Apple Inc. will move some of its offshore manufacturing back into the U.S. This is good news for the local economies and will give Apple better control over its own products.

Some people think this is a bad idea for many reasons, not the least of which is a condemnation of the American workforce.

Yes, it’s true. Americans, who by all accounts are the most productive in the world, still would actually like to be paid actual money for their labor and effort. It’s beyond me why anyone would work 40-60 hours a week and not do it for free or for $25. But it is a fact that Apple AAPL, +2.69% has to deal with now.

On a visit to China around 1997 I was at a keyboard manufacturing plant where the weekly pay was exactly $25 (I have to assume that by now it has gone up to $26) and I learned a few things.

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First, I was not going to be shown any sort of sweat shop of the sort I saw years earlier in Hong Kong before the PRC took over the place and did not allow such snooping. And I suspect that the best of the sweat shops were long since moved to the mainland so Hong Kong could be turned into a Zurich-like banking center.

Anyway, I did learn that the Chinese can operate spotless operations at a low price if they want to. But it was the plant manager who gave me some insight. He actually complained about the $25 workers. “We want to replace the people with robots,” he said. “China is filled with cheap labor, but they make mistakes all the time. Robots don’t.”

In fact, much of the Chinese manufacturing is heavy with robots. They still have lots of people, but many just tend to the robots. When this fellow told me about turning to robots I immediately thought to myself, “We can do the same thing in the U.S. if that’s the way things are going to go.” We have robots too.

Yes, there is a different kind of overhead in America, such as a ridiculous 35% corporate tax that Americans have been taught to think is OK. It’s the highest in the world and responsible for much of the outsourcing to begin with. There are local regulations, unlike in China, where people jump off the roofs of Foxconn. But despite these handicaps, Apple may well re-ignite manufacturing in the USA.

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It’s a good thing overall. And it looks as if the outsourcing experiment has been played out. The big flop in outsourcing was the Boeing 787 which was jobbed out all over the place the way Ford builds its cars with pieces from here and there. Unfortunately for Boeing it meant the plane was delayed three years.

Tim Cook is more of a manufacturing strategist than anything else and he knows about the Boeing fiasco. What happens to sales of the iPhone 5 if there is a worker revolt and factories in China are burned to the ground? This would not be good.

So it’s time to rethink outsourcing, and Apple may as well lead the way with some new thinking.

Cook says they want to make Macs at the new facility and final assembly of the Macintosh would seem like the easiest thing to do. And iPads should be something that could be made in the USA — by robots. Many of these newer products are dependent on Corning glass, much of it made here anyway.

It’s hard to say where this is headed, but it may start a trend. Let’s hope it does.