That’s a really beautiful example of spinning the story of what’s going on.
The conventional view is that Apple pays no tax, Ive seen that asserted on HN many times, but it's just flat out not true. If you wan to say the above isn't enough, sure, fine that's an opinion you're entitled to hold. I don't even necessarily disagree, I think there's a reasonable case to be made that we are excessively incentivising the concentration of capital but that's a question for voters and politicians not individual companies.
they do however collect it
this is the entire principle behind VAT
A company collects VAT from customers when they purchase. But it also buys from suppliers at a lower value. It pays the difference in the two VAT numbers (from customer-to supplier) to the VAT authority.
This lawyer also has one of the worst success records in these types of cases.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-to-pay-38-billion-in-repa...
> A provision allows for a one-time repatriation of corporate cash held abroad at a lower tax rate than what would have been paid under the previous tax plan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/technology/apple-tax-bill...
You're free to argue that 15% is not a high enough corporate tax rate, but it is factually incorrect to say Apple did not pay US tax on the money they earned overseas.
No, that is decidedly not what we are talking about. The claim was that holding all your money away from the US does not matter because the tax will be paid eventually. As we see, no it wasn't and the tax rate was not lowered because "taxes change over time" but because otherwise companies will just not ever repatriate their money.
It is factually correct to say that apple did not pay the full US tax rate on the money they earned overseas. You are free to argue that this is fine and they at least still paid some, lower tax rate, but this is the whole topic we are talking about. Apple pays very low tax rates and the EU, Ireland and the US are arguing whether this is unfair (state aid) and should change.
A temporary change in the tax rate during 2018 is, by definition, the tax rate changing over time. If a product normally sells for $50 and I wait until it's on sale for $25 to buy it, did I pay the "wrong" price? No, I paid the price the vendor set at the time of purchase.
these taxes are not taxes on apple (the company). They do not count towards a company's taxes paid.
The reason we don't see as much of this in full-size desktops is because density is clearly not the objective and it would mean sacrificing the modularity and flexibility of established standards.
Or in other words, more expensive with no real gain besides aesthetics, which aren't worthless but I'd bet they aren't worth _much_ for a box which spends most of its time under a desk concealing its insides.