Is it because you are a user of apple products and hope that you will continue to do so in the future because you are dependent on them?
Is it because you believe that apple is a good company and you hope for the best for them?
Why should we hope for the best for a company that has made hundreds of billions off of offshoring jobs to an authoritarian country with little regard for investing in manufacturing in America?
The way I see it is that if China decides to squeeze Apple by restricting their production it will be a fair comeuppance for a company that has seen fit to extract billions in wealth from developers through their app store and has sought to turn their commodity hardware into status symbols to extract even more wealth from middle class people who want to feel like they're more than middle class.
If the executives at Apple had any foresight and any interest beyond self interest they would have encouraged domestic production a decade or more ago. Instead we have a situation where people are crying for poor Apple, a company who that has more money than god and who could have used that to create their own supply chain domestically which would have had tremendous benefits for America and the American people.
Instead they have chose to consort and ultimately enable an authoritarian country into a situation where they now pose a legitimate threat both militarily and culturally to America, the albeit flawed but last best hope for freedom in the world.
Think different indeed.
I too have qualms with what is going on in China, but like everything that happens in this life, I’m flipping petrified of how much damage some reactionary american screed might do.
> I too have qualms with what is going on in China, but like everything that happens in this life, I’m flipping petrified of how much damage some reactionary american screed might do.
You make a moral statement about the activities of China, and then you say you're scared of the repercussions of taking any action.
You state "they absolutely have the money to run these capabilities in America." Apple's published margin on hardware is 30%, so if manufacturing in America increases costs by 30%, Apple no longer makes a profit selling hardware. If manufacturing increases costs by more than 30%, Apple starts losing money selling hardware.
Big numbers are big because Apple is selling many, many, many phones. That also means that adding to the cost of manufacturing by even a small amount per unit immediately chews up a lot of those outrageous profits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement
https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/united-states-cons...
Publicly held companies will rarely choose the good of the public over the good of their stockholders unless given fiscal incentives through tax increases or tax decreases.
Unless they become as wealthy as Bill Gates and make a non-profit with their enormous wealth.
Consumers have chosen their priorities, and they’re only able/willing to spend a little bit extra for a better product. They’re not going to spend that much more for more expensive labor too.
That is absurd. Consumers have absolutely no choice in the matter other than the most unpractical "avoid using modern electronics"
Apple could have simply raised their prices to account for differences in domestic manufacturing costs or swallowed the cost with decreased profit margins.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-elec-china/samsun...
By moving from one communist dictatorship to another communist dictatorship.
This doesn’t make sense - App Store is a voluntary program no one is forced to develop apps for iPhone, or even android
Apple, as other nominally American "multi-national" corporations, was and remains subject to government policy and plans.
Which institutions, centers of power, and influential individuals determined that the de-industrialization of United States was such a hot idea and pushed that to its extremes in the 90s?
Apple simply operated in the stated and promoted policy regime. They are not alone.
(Also cross your fingers regarding your "last hopes". Patriot Act. Secret courts. Permanent state of "national emergency" with attendant curtailment of our Natural Rights, "Surveillance Capitalism", ...)
It’s worth remembering that in the 90s, Francis Fukuyama was the hottest philosopher around and there was a general belief that economic liberalisation would inevitably lead a country towards Western style democracy and all that entailed. No one, certainly no one as prominent as Fukuyama ever predicted the opposite would in fact occur.
Not that this excuses Apple or anyone else. Once it became apparent they should have acted urgently. Because it meant that all their basic assumptions about how the world works need to be re-evaluated.
He has since renounced his 90s work, to be fair.
p.s.: https://www.newsbud.com/2018/02/09/the-rockefellers-and-roth...
(No, this news is not "fit to print" in The New York Times.)
Even though there are kinks in their regime, for the most part they’ve lifted hundreds or millions out of poverty. Imagine if the U.S. had a massive foreign power prodding it during the early years of slavery, manifest destiny (the justification for eradicating the Native Americans), racism, drug war, Vietnam, and mass incarceration.
Yes, they have a big brother-style regime, but they are also capable of sorting out their own political issues. And if not, they’ll reap the consequences without you having to do it form them.
If you really believe in democracy, then trying to influence their politics from afar is ultimately going to be far-less democratic than they influencing their own politics. I understand they don't have directly elections or a multi-party system, but that does not mean there is not opinion sharing in policy decisions, or intra-party elections. In a representative form of government direct-elections are not really a thing anyways.
If you truly support democracy, the last thing you would do is to try to influence the policies of another people. That would be robbing them of their self-determinacy, even if it is to prevent them from robbing themselves of it.
>they’ve lifted hundreds or millions out of poverty
And they did, by first and foremost down to joining WTO.
Once this government starts ( and has already done so ) influence or force Rest of the world to cooperate or kowtowing to their own self interest, which fundamentally undermines everyone else basic value and principles, then it is no longer their own policy and issues.
And that is about as civilised as I can put it.
Yes because this is a Mainland issue. So only Mainland opinions are legitimate. They enact their policies with their best interests in mind, however misguided it may be because a foreigner can only enact policies with their own interests in mind, however well-guided they may be. A white person probably shouldn’t go into a black community to tell them how they should run things for their best interests.
The issue isn’t that they are doing something right or wrong—all governments will enact policies that are disagreeable... the US included (in the case of Edward Snowden). The issue is that to the Chinese they will never take the protests of foreigners seriously because foreigners will have their own interests in mind, not to mention are generally poorly educated about Chinese policy decisions in general.
Trying to influence policy from afar is simply a form of taxation without representation. A foreigner really should have no say in the policy decisions of afar because 1) they do not have to suffer the consequences of the policies, 2) they cannot understand the experiences leading to such policy decisions and 3) as a result of 1 and 2 they will always have their own interests in mind rather than those or their constituents. Imagine a product manager in the US trying to manage a product built by a team of engineers in China for the Chinese market. He’ll sure fail because he will have no grasp pf the product in practice being used over there, and for that reason anyone that detached from something should not be trying to exert influence for their own interests.
A poor inner city black family may have a whole different set of daily problems than a rich white suburban family. Imagine if the white family admonishes the black family because their kids are failing school or dealing drugs. In absolute terms dealing drugs is wrong, illegal, and failing school may be a sign of bad parenting, but in reality the needs and priorities of the black family are on a completely different level from the white family.
Disenfranchising the Chineses’ right to self-govern because of your limited frame of reference that they are doing it wrong is myopic. Waging political and ideological war against them because they do things differently is the true crime. You should criticize their bad policies by pointing out why they are bad, not by disenfranchising and belittling the voice of the rest of the population.
That’s what this is about: tyranny versus freedom. It’s disingenuous and frankly racist to compare this struggle to what a poor family lives through, and then conflating that with their skin color. I’m sure there are legitimate concerns with regards to the justice for minorities, but your argument is that that’s only the concern of black people? No. Your argument is a very typical CCP stance that the West best keep out of their dealings. No, I say, let’s stand for freedom and democracy when it is truly being attacked.
Are the lives of the Han more valuable than other ethnicities?
This is the same argument that “they made the trains run on time”.
So like what the CCP is doing to Hongkong? In spite of having agreed not to?
Giving them money buying their products _is_ influencing, preferring them to hire manufacturers there _is_ influencing, influencing is just not just the opinions you dislike people giving on the internet about the situation there, in reality such comments are near nothing compared to the influence actual money and American (and world-wide) business exert politically by doing business there.
> for the most part they’ve lifted hundreds or millions out of poverty
The genocide or religious groups[0] is a price far far superior than anything any sensible human being would pay to get their country out of poverty, btw are you counting the people living in cages[1] a 'out of poverty'? And are you counting those who died living in extremely toxic conditions near factories as 'out of poverty'?
[0] http://theconversation.com/despite-chinas-denials-its-treatm...
They did that by stop screwing up the economy and let capitalism do its things from the 80s on. Giving them a win for a policy of “stop meddling” I guess makes sense, but only from a perverse point of view. The best decisions the CPC made were to stop doing things.
Granted, it’s small production numbers, but have to start somewhere.
Sure, I want my products to be cheap, but there might be some hidden costs that will eventually show up at a very inconvenient time.
Sure, Apple can do CKD assembly of their products everywhere, the manufacture of custom parts is the tricky part.
And worse, even this is still a very optimistic projection given that it might be impossible at all. Samsung was lucky in that they were still producing majority of their semiconductors in South Korea, of course, which makes them still important enough to China. I don't know if Apple holds any thing comparable as a negotiation card.