Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
"Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan, appear large even when users zoomed out from them. Chinese regulators also threatened to withhold approval of the first Apple Watch, scheduled for release in 2015, if Apple didn’t comply with the unusual request, according to internal documents.
Some members of the team back at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., initially balked at the demand. But the Maps app had become a priority for Apple, so eventually the company complied. The Diaoyu Islands, when viewed in Apple Maps in mainland China, continue to appear on a larger scale than surrounding territories."
Apple has, and will, fold to government pressure faster than a lawn chair.
1. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/12/08/the-information...
Apple has a business to run. They abide by all sorts of requests in various countries in which they operate. Of course there has to be a line somewhere, I'm just not sure this is it.
It's better to figure out an exit (imo) than continue to capitulate on these kinds of things, particularly in a country that is hostile to foreign companies and IP (and particularly if one of your company values is the privacy of your users).
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>>Peter Thiel: Well I think, again those aren’t the only two possibilities, I don’t think they created very much, I think a lot of it was just handed over from the west so it wasn’t even stolen.
You know, I criticized Google a few years ago for refusing to work on its AI technology on Project Maven with the U.S. military, but working with Chinese universities and Chinese researchers. And since everything in China is a civilian- military fusion, Google was effectively working with the Chinese military, not with the American military. And there was sort of this question, “Why Google was doing this?” And one of the things that I was sort of told by some of the insiders at Google was they figured they might as well give the technology out through the front door, because if they didn’t give it – it would get stolen anyway.
>>Peter Thiel: I had a set of conversations with some of the Google people in the deep mind AI technology, “is your AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?” and “Well, We don’t know and don’t ask any questions.” You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending that everything is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation. And you make the world better. And it’s some combination of wishful thinking. It’s useful idiots, you know, it’s CCP fifth columnist collaborators. So it’s some super position of all these things. But I think if you think of it ideologically or in terms of human rights or something like that, I’m tempted to say it’s just profoundly racist. It’s like saying that because they look different, they’re not white people, they don’t have the same rights. It’s something super wrong. But I don’t quite know how you unlock that.
https://nixonseminar.com/2021/04/the-nixon-seminar-april-6-2...
It’s Google leadership capitulating to the (imo naive) politics of its workforce to not work with the USG, while continuing to support the governments of adversaries (because largely American politics ignores the plight of people in places like KSA and China under a weak kind of moral relativism).
Thiel hasn't even done that. His position seems to be that American companies should work with the US Military, but shouldn't work with the Chinese military. Such a position is certainly partisan, but it isn't hypocritical.
Try patriotic, or more cynically nationalistic.
1. An adherent to a party or faction. 2. A fervent, sometimes militant, supporter or proponent of a party, cause, faction, person, or idea.
Maybe that word isn't judgemental enough for you, but it fits and I used it carefully.
If you genuinely believe that, then putting ever more powerful intelligence gathering tools in the hands of western governments, even at some risk of threats to freedoms in the west, might seem reasonable.
That’s especially true if you have good confidence in the checks and balances in the free west to prevent the worst abuses of such tools, and that the threats are truly dire.
As much as I dislike Thiel, he does have a point there: Russia is actively funding misinformation campaigns with the aim of splintering Europe (e.g. by funding far-right political parties like the AfD in Germany or the Brexiteers in the UK), and China is a threat on a geo-political level (New Belt Road) as well as a military threat (e.g. Taiwan), not to mention their Third Reich-inspired genocide against the Uyghurs and Tibetans.
The world is in a "war of cultures" indeed - the remnants of the Western democracies versus strong authoritarian governments. And we haven't found a way to counter Russian or Chinese political ambitions yet.
> That’s especially true if you have good confidence in the checks and balances in the free west to prevent the worst abuses of such tools, and that the threats are truly dire.
Under normal circumstances, that confidence would be valid. Unfortunately, we have our own actors who have an interest in tearing down these "checks and balances" for their own gains (e.g. the Republicans systematically destroying trust in public institutions, from elections to the integrity of the FBI, or Poland and Hungary where the rulers want to stay in power and enrich themselves and their friends)... which means we as Western nations are in a "lose-lose" situation. We can't combat propaganda effectively for a variety of reasons, and as a result of that the propaganda tears down our societies.
I believe such a struggle exists as well. But I have my doubts whether one would find him fighting AGAINST the authoritarians.
Otherwise more attacks will happen and the reflexive response will be an increase in authoritarianism at the expense of western ideals.
I don’t personally agree with his support of trump (I see it as a partisan blind spot because of his Cato institute Republican identity) to me trump increases authoritarian risk in the US. Otherwise I agree with a lot of Thiel’s positions, even where I disagree it’s rare that his position is not thoughtful.
He's just pro-Western civilization and pro-US.
If China (and similar repressive regimes) wants these sorts of products with onerous restrictions built in, they should have to build them themselves.
Of course, I do recognize that this is perhaps somewhat hypocritical: the OFAC list in the US comes to mind (which makes it illegal for US entities to do business with entities in certain "bad" countries). I'm reminded of GitHub's fight to allow people from Iran to use GitHub. I get the purpose of sanctions on Iran, but hurting regular Iranian citizens with these sorts of bans does nothing to punish or put pressure on the people who are actually the targets of sanctions.
I'll spin up a British Virgin Islands company or buy another passport first in response to any legislation aimed at preventing business with those whales
Others are already 5 steps ahead of me
Alternatively, US citizenship doesn't guarantee any beneficiary of national security or evacuation from another place when shit hits the fan.
So before I answer your question, what did you mean specifically?
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...
I'd also like to add that they are, for the most part, already building our products quite literally. Being on the bad side of China might've a farther reach than just missing out on a few customers.
Yeah it's hard, but if they aren't willing to do it, maybe we as a society should enact laws to force their hand? It's not like it's an impossible task.
The only worry is if that's also the point where their products will also be more advanced and thus more appealing regardless of the price.
The maps analogy is that it's one thing for the Chinese government to tell Apple to implement a mapping app from scratch so that it can be used to display bogus mapping data. It's quite another for the Chinese government to tell Apple to modify its existing Maps app data.
In light of the inherent amorality of companies that you are pointing out, the people working in these companies should be smart enough not to go out of their way to place themselves in situations with such moral hazards. Apple shouldn't be building weapons.
There is no novel technology in this. It’s very basic stuff doing a specific thing. It’s in no way a meaningful stepping stone to doing anything else.
If you’re against Apple scanning images uploaded to iCloud for CSAM that’s fine, say that, but it’s no stepping stone. If you’re not against Apple scanning CSAM uploaded to their servers, as they are actually required to do by law, then it’s a non-issue.
No, that's not how any of it works. Apple scans and matches your photos, on your device, against a list of hashes that represent government provided images that Apple has no knowledge of. The stipulation that images are only scanned when uploaded to Apple servers is a courtesy, not a technical limitation. The exact courtesy that would be rescinded by pressure from the Chinese government.
> If you’re not against Apple scanning CSAM uploaded to their servers, as they are actually required to do by law, then it’s a non-issue.
The law explicitly stipulates that Apple is _not_ required to scan photos for CSAM. The text of the law [1] explicitly protects people's privacy in the section titled "Protection of Privacy".
The scan is performed in the code that does the uploading, so it is a hard limitation of the implementation. They can't push a button to make it scan other photos, they would have to make significant code changes. Not hard code changes, none of this is hard or a major technology achievement, but the current implementation does one specific thing and that thing only.
On the legal requirement, huh, it looks like you're quite right. They are choosing to scan for CSMA loaded into their service. Good for them.
There's nothing to stop the Chinese government requiring Apple to make whatever code changes they require anyway.
The CSAM issue was mostly misunderstood by HN imo.
You just agree with the complaint that yes apple was scanning people's devices in certain circumstances.
The intention of the implementation is that if a user asks Apple to upload CSAM to iCloud, that Apple has the ability to check it and stop that CSAM landing on their servers. They don't want it there, and feel they have a right to check for it in advance so their servers are clear of CSAM and it stays on the user's phone. Frankly I think that's a reasonable attitude to take to CSAM.
Ok, and thats the problem. Because the scan is on the user's device. No, I don't think they should have the right to use someone else's device, that the individual owns, like that.
And then people rightly condemn them for it. Because not getting a pass even when the pressure is strong -- especially when the pressure is strong -- is the only incentive we can give them to even try to resist that pressure.
That sucks for them. It puts them between a rock and a hard place.
Too bad.
Because the alternative is that nobody fights against wrong.
Also, too bad because they are hardly orphan children caught on a battlefield. They are among the most power actors out there. I'd say, 'deal with it', but they don't complain.
It would be interesting to talk about what organizations like Apple can and cannot do; what is effective and what isn't. Is there any research?
Apple should not be deceiving people outside China with CCP propaganda, which is what the maps are.
... And a a shareholder, I was also kept in the dark -- Which is actually also pretty problematic and deceptive.
Would you expect a big pop "WARNING: THIS CONTENT IS SHOWN DIFFERENTLY IN MAINLAND CHINA DUE TO REGULATIONS!"? Also, this will mostly yield a well-duh response. The only "appropriate" option in scale would be to put it somewhere in the fine print (IMO), but this is so close to not mentioning it at all that they might as well not.
Also, I don't think there's a general expectation for website to be the same everywhere. If you open google.com from Germany, would you be suprised to see Google in German? Project Gutenberg also was unavailable in Germany for quite some time; I don't think they informed every non-German reader about it.
> ... And a[s] a shareholder, I was also kept in the dark -- Which is actually also pretty problematic and deceptive.
I'm pretty sure they don't inform shareholders over standard legal requests. They probably didn't ping you about FCC restricted radio frequencies either.
It's not that I generally agree with censoring, but I don't think Apple acted unreasonably here.
As for being a shareholder kept in the dark, that’s absurd. I am a shareholder too, and almost no operational details about apple are available to us, which is totally normal.
I must have misunderstood. Thanks for pointing that out.
We can find other examples, however. For example, Apple avoiding movies, etc. on Apple TV that challenge the CCP.
Companies do moral things all the time, being run by people and being, like people, tied to a community that they care about (often, to a degree) and which greatly affects the company. Without enlightened self-interest, and some broader self-interest, the society that provides customers, investors, employees, roads, security, markets, etc. - it collapses. The Middle Ages weren't good for business.
There are some additional rules for public companies, but in general, businesses can have whatever purpose "members of the company" (it's actually a legal term in many jurisdictions) agree on.
Until Apple has a redundant supply and manufacturing chain, it’s absurd to expect them to resist the CCP.
I hope they are building it.
If you want to control what maps Apple shows in China, then ask the government to do it. Assuming you can convince Congress to do anything at all, they still wouldn't take any meaningful action against China because they aren't going to voluntarily widen our trade deficit. We barely have enough economic leverage to pressure them to be slightly better at enforcing IP. We aren't going to spare any for meaningless virtue signaling.
> It would be interesting to talk about what organizations like Apple can and cannot do; what is effective and what isn't. Is there any research?
It took extreme sanctions and the most sophisticated cyberattack in history to get Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program (until Trump decided to reject the agreement). China has a much stronger economy and more allies.
Isn't that exactly what Apple did by moving factories to China?
> Assuming you can convince Congress to do anything at all, they still wouldn't take any meaningful action against China because they aren't going to voluntarily widen our trade deficit.
Clearly Congress (and the Executive Branch, which is responsible for foreign policy) does plenty that is meaningful.
Lots of moral on the Internet, but then when it touches getting the next gadget, or saving some bucks...
"Apple" is not some abstract entity. There are people behind Apple (the shareholders, the managers, the employees). Real people, with real morals and values. I don't think that the only thing all of them care about is "running a business" and that all of them feel it absolves them from acting humanly. It's more complicated than that. (having said that, of course, greed is always strong).
That fiduciary responsibility meme needs to die already. The flimsiest business justification is enough to cover company leadership's ass. Instead of "We refuse to do business with China because it's immoral" they need merely say "because we believe it's in the long term strategic interests of the company."
When pressed about the financial prudence of prioritizing environmental outcomes Tim Cook snapped: "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI." It was also not limited to accessibility, but applicable to many areas Apple desires to lead.
The conclusion is that Apple is explicitly not interested in prioritizing individual liberty.
Again, stop it. The companies you want exist, they just go insolvent before you ever notice them. If you want to change the way the companies operate, you have to change the system, you can't just expect companies to "do the right thing" in an environment that penalizes them for that.
You can't have the free market cake and eat the ideological high ground at the same time.
Regardless, nothing you said refutes me. "Fiduciary responsibility" does not legally compel Apple to do business in China. If anything, such misconceptions about fiduciary duty are espoused by libertarians online, not rebuked by them.
And even if we go down that rabbit hole, we just become more like China with some kind of state mandated moral code that can be easily perverted...maybe we can't really win on this.
Lots of companies are able to exist without giving in to completely silly demands like "increase the size of these islands".
> If you want change
Actually, customers are able to cause lots of economic damages to companies, or their employees.
There is more that one way to Target Apple employees than what you suggested.
Target them personally, make them personally responsible for the actions that they did while thinking that they were some faceless entity in the machine, and make them toxic entities to hire or work with.
Sure, the company itself might be able to insulate itself from consequences, but not the individuals themselves. It would make people think twice about the actual negative effects of their actions, if they knew it would put them on blacklists.
Companies are run by people. It is not some faceless AI. Instead, decisions are made by individuals. And individuals are vulnerable.
Must they be pure or completely evil?
Companies have many focuses, including profit, of course, and also morality. Look at the behaviors of the world's leading companies. They need to survive and operate in society, not a Darwinian cleanroom, and they will lose a lot of customers, employees, investors, sympathetic elected officials, and more if they act like objectivists.
I think that is precisely why this has been leaked. Some people inside Apple obviously are fed up with what Apple is doing. I would imagine especially those working in operation and supply chain.
There were lots of signs this was happening since 2016 if you are watching Apple supply chain over the years. But it is the first time we got some sort of evidence.
I just have a problem with Apple suggesting they are doing "good" with X, promising "good" with Y, with a big smile on its face in marketing, pumping up PR to the maximum. But every time you scrutinize the details they just dont hold up.
BTW people may want to look at Samsung's market share in China. Hint: it is a single digit number.
Local investment requests however aren't novel - India have made similar requests which Apple have also fulfilled. China is only notable here because they have consistent human rights abuse issues, and with that there is a certain idealism that any kind of interaction with such a country is a form of consent.
While Apple's situation here isn't particularly noteworthy, it's a good proxy for a wider question about US companies reliance on China.
Also those with a keen eye would notice that China hasn't given Apple much here - they are still regularly admonished by the state-run press and Apple have only a handful of their most basic services available in the country.
Great point. Some movements are so anxious to minimize (or undermine) goverment that people get carried away, and forget all the things democracies can do and have done. We simply have to decide to do things as a people. China, for sure, is happy to see us divided.
They don't need and shouldn't make any difference at all. They could actually leave the Chinese market and make a difference for the rest of the world. They don't have and shouldn't have this responsibility anyway.
And they have the money, market share, and power to ignore China and not only survive it but continue to generate a lot of wealth for the shareholders.
https://china.usc.edu/statement-president-clinton-most-favor...
These megacorps have a big influence on the fabric of society.
They must be held to a higher standard.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
Your comment implies a singular chilling thing, while his does not.
There's a big gap between a private individual looking around, and lots of private individuals coordinating to look at everything all the time.
Modern technology is making that gap larger year after year.
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-...
Detailed (<1:2500000) topographic maps were automatically classified as a state secret, and restricted on a "need to know" basis outside of the military until 1989.
A detailed article on this explaining how and why they went about it: http://www.hundzor.org/lj/10postnikov.pdf
'Where the streets go' is strategically valuable information.
Imagine a country that prevents its citizens from recording a song they hear and sharing it with their friends. Oh, wait, US more or less does that and forces other countries to implement policies that prevent it or they will ban trade with those countries.
False analogy. No-one claims copy-write on the physical world. Well, not except the CCP.
Eg the lights on that tower in france
Building designs are man-made and in any case this is about taking photographs and not replicating man-made designs.
I think the analogy is perfectly valid anyway. You're just trying to find an excuse to compensate a dissonance. But all rules are arbitrary.
Not to mention that the US government gets any data it wants from banks, telcos, social media, google, etc., which is called metadata surveillance here in the US but it is used to formulate a variety of social "scores" such as one's likelihood to commit "terrorism", etc.
The US GPS system had the signals obfuscated for years so that precise geo coordinates were only available for non-civilian uses. Why bother altering the maps if you can alter the GPS signals. This was rolled back only because hacks were found to work around it.
Apparently, the resolution was to create political POV versions, although the default seems to lean toward a "Western-centric" direction.
Google Search for example was heavily modified for the Chinese market.
Do you mean something other than Project Dragonfly, which was terminated?
(And yes, the "old" Google of the Brin area is gone. I also don't think Steve Jobs would kowtow to the CCP and compromise Apple like Cook is doing. The post 2010-era is now run on bean-counter ethics)
[0] https://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2018/12/13/large-fire-erup...
If by ‘works’ you mean it allows searches that China finds acceptable.
Full disclosure I work at Google.
What happens in Google Earth?
What does it look like in google earth when you look at the islands?
from OUTSIDE china... Are these same islands 'cencored' in these apps outside china as well in the same manner? (specifically in SATELLITE view)
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Senkaku+Islands+%2F+Dioyud...
E.g. If you view the map of India while in India, it'll appear different than if you viewed it in China.
> .. the obfuscated coordinate system for geo-aligning maps ..
https://goo.gl/maps/Qr2QRB7aB2jrg9Rk7
Roads are not aligned to the satellite imagery for example.
can't remote-boom-boom if you can't know where they are
hm that means 2 things there...
Not defending what I see as childish China the slightest, but one should be aware that even the best democracies don't necessarily publish entirely correct maps, and it is on purpose ;-)
Interesting. Was that really true? Why did they need to change the value?
Do you mean you are reporting these sites?
China has over a billion people. That one middle manager in the maps department is personally offended by territory appearing smaller, has zero relation to the rest of the country and shouldn't affect your opinion.
Many bureaucrats in the USA draw stupid lines in sand that nobody cares about, yet the USA is a strong superpower nonetheless.
In foreign affairs, Beijing is sovereign - including anything related to the Senkaku / Diaoyu islands which are presently owned by Japan. So in this respect you are right.
For local matters, there is considerable flexibility and internal conflict. Currently, Beijing encourages citizens to find fault and report administrative issues at local levels, but will brook no dissent of its own management. In domestic administration China is less coherent than your claim.
All of the above could be equally true in a non-authoritarian form of government. I would argue that China's authoritarian politics are largely orthogonal to its degree of federation.
Your social credit score will go down if you do.
OTOH I don't have much confidence in the middle manager theory, either.
If one candidate in a district gets 100,000 votes and another 85,000 votes, both would go to congress and each would get that many vote-points. Rather than number of representative votes, voting outcomes would be determined by who has more vote-points. That way if you have three similarly sized districts, District X and District Y where 40% want party A and 60% want party B, and then district Z where you have 90% want party A and only 10% want party B, you'd still end up with .4/3+.4/3+.9/3 (56%) votes for party A rather than 67% for party B, regardless of how you redistrict. Plus you'd have asymmetric interests where opposing parties would represent the same districts so they would be incentivized to work together, and also some representation for minority regional parties who may align with one party on some issues and another on others.
To limit budgets, I guess there would have to be a maximum number of candidates per district, maybe filtering out anyone who does not have at least 10% of the vote (or some other number determined by some reasonable formula), an option for candidates who don't meet the threshold to reallocate their vote-points to someone who did (or a ranked choice voting system that keeps going until everyone remaining has the minimum vote threshold), and maybe no matter what you'd at least send two candidates unless literally only one candidate had votes.
This would also have a side effect of incentivizing more people to vote and allow people to vote with a bit less strategy and more earnestness.
Edit: It was this - http://www.redistrictinggame.org/game.php
It looks like someone has made one here though: http://gametheorytest.com/gerry/game/
But those maps do describe reality.
You absolutely can and must. That is, in fact, one of the prerogatives of a superpower.
[USA did a similar oversizing trick with WMD and the belief that Irak was the 4th biggest army in the world]
[calm down, USA patriots, all the countries do use the same tricks.]
It feels silly but there are manipulative reasons to do this.
A consequence of the projection chosen, applied uniformly (e.g. Mercator, which also makes Greenland and Alaska ludicrously large)? Or do you mean maps that enlarged Europe specifically? Mercator is dumb (for anything other than navigation), but there is a significant difference here. China is doing the latter.
Can you provide information or citations for this?
> China says "X must be visible at zoom level Y instead of at Y-5".
That's not the claim made in the thread above: "Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan, appear large even when users zoomed out from them." Can you provide any citation to the contrary?
Expanding on this; Mercator is useful for navigation because it's conformal, i.e. it preserves angles. When you're plotting the course of a ship, this is very convenient.
Only when maps were used for other purposes was there any reason to develop other projections.
> It displays how messed up China is more than anything else.
Eh, the USSR was made bigger on maps for decades because of US "4-year-old level lies". This is not even in the same ballpark.
I'm not supporting China territorial claims, but I don't expect anything different from their government. I did however expected better from the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_w...
So will any company, when threatened by China. And, btw, so will most countries.
Yes, Apple has a lot of money, but they're in no position to resist a powerful country. I don't think it's fair to expect that of them.
Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitch, Dropbox, Medium, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo?
China is more than capable to clone and/or make its own version of these companies. And these companies will do as the government says. So, I think that's an excellent example to show that tech "boycotting" China does nothing to change them.
Separately, you should also keep in mind that a bunch of these companies didn't even have a choice, since they were considered a threat to national security by the state.
There are many large examples that just didn't, and they exited the market.
There are also many large examples that struck varying bargains. I'm sure the CCP didn't get everything they wanted from the referenced Apple deal, and there were hardliners who were pissed about it.
And then there are probably a ton of examples that don't even care to bargain and just say yes to whatever is asked.
So, complicated spectrum.
Side note, if I'm doing my quick math right, Apple's worldwide revenue is equivalent to 1.6% of China's GDP. Which is pretty impressive.
It is very material though. If your business is not special/unique in some important way, then you don't have a lot of bargaining power when the CCP officials come to negotiate the terms. Then your choices boil down to -- accept whatever is offered or exit completely. While some exited completely, I very much doubt they did so on ethical grounds, as you seem to be implying. Rather, the terms were unsatisfiable.
Trying to get some sort of an acceptable to you deal is the only thing that makes sense from a business perspective. The alternative is losing access the world's biggest market and watching the state prop up a powerful new competitor that may well compete outside the borders of China too.
If you want American companies to be able to resist Chinese govt pressure, then you need to have significant intervention from the US government and hope that they will be able to broker some sort of a deal. Failing that, it's a joke to think that any company has any actual bargaining power in a negotiation with the Chinese govt.
I'm still of the opinion it's better to operate with concessions because there is a chance of influencing the local population over time. Otherwise we end up with a completely siloed environment like has happened with parts of China's tech scene.
You can replace may with will for sure.
Thinking about this other than things like existing social media, satellites... I've recently seen ads where it's like "get paid to take pictures of your neighborhood". Was wondering about that as a means to export out high res images of locations through an app.
It does seem awfully unfair looking at a map though, basically China's claim comes without 10 miles of other country land borders. Nobody but the Chinese would think these claims are fair.
It doesn’t really make sense that the Chinese government would be pressuring Apple directly to make political changes to the map provided by AutoNavi. If they wanted the map drawn differently they could just pass a law requiring it or go straight to AutoNavi with the request.
Of course the story could still be true (I have no idea), but not mentioning AutoNavi kind of strains its credibility.
As a publicly-traded, trillion dollar company, where profits are at stake, this would seem to make sense.
What does not seem to make sense is why anyone would believe Apple might ignore its own financial interests and those of its shareholders and deliberately sacrifice a major opportunity^1 in order to resist government pressure based on some political issue. Why would anyone hold such an assumption. There is nothing to support it^2 and it does not seem to make any sense.
1. That includes the opportunity for Chinese customers to purchase the Apple Watch, albeit with a disproportional size representation of some geographical aspect in the Maps application
2. NB. If resisting government pressure resulted in an increase or no change in profits then that is a different situation. In that case, resisting, or even appearing to resist governmental pressure, would seem to make sense.
To put it another way, no one should be surprised by decisions like this one, whereas some of us should be surprised if we ever learn that a publicly-traded company with the market cap of Apple deliberately sacrificed an opportunity like selling to the Chinese market^3 because of a political issue. It is doubtful we would ever learn about such a decision, for various reasons.
3. Or using Chinese manufacturing facilities
"But the Maps app had become a priority for Apple..."
Apple acts in its own interests. It seems strange that anyone would believe that it acts in someone else's. Unless it increases profits, that would not make any sense.
Generally, large companies do not protect citizens from abuses of government. It is supposed to the the other way around. Governments are supposed to protect citizens from abuses of large corporations.
There should be laws that US companies can only cowtoe to the US government WRT free speech.
In this case - it appears to only be happening in China - which I guess is fair game.
But the line should be drawn at China being able to use its market to force US companies to censor people outside of China.
I'd say that depends on whether the subsidiary in China is financially independent from the mothership. If Apple in US profits from censorship in China or subsidizes it, it's not unreasonable for US to interfere with that.
I guess with tech companies - "operate in" is a little unclear. Someone in China can visit your website (assuming it's not blocked by TGF) - and it might be very difficult for you to know (they could be using some Proxy or VPN).
In Apple's case - they literally have stores selling phones in China. AFAIK, that's how most people get their iPhones in China.
In the US - you have to pass all kind of FTC obstacles to sell a device. In China & other countries - it's the same way.
It seems like an overstep for the US to say - "We get to say what devices are available in every country." It also seems like an overstep for the US to say China can't have a Great Firewall and Censorship even if that's extremely "un-American". Us having free speech is extremely "un-CCP" - but for the time being - we've still got it [=
More abstractly, corporations are artificial legal entities that are created by governments in the first place. So why can't governments restrict what those artificial entities can and cannot do?
Completely agree.
China could give a s*t what American laws are.
They are pressuring Apple to take some actions, if Apple doesn't want to take those actions, for whatever reason including 'American law forbids them' - then they're out of the market.
Those are the terms presented to them, and the CCP is not bluffing.
As far as 'censoring people outside China' that is actually a line that Apple can probably actually hold.
If that starts happening - American companies need to be FORCED to exit the Chinese market and keep free speech. Otherwise, it's a simple P&L calculation - and China will win. Apple is not going to lose 20% of their global sales because they block some Wikipedia articles about Tiananmen Square. But if China cuts off their sales because they won't - they would lose 20% of their sales. If we allow companies to go down this path - the entire world will end up censored pretty quickly.
Just as China does not care about American law - US companies don't give a shit about human rights. They just give a shit about P&L.
So again, that 'feels right' - but this is not a 'moral' issue, it's a 'power' issue.
That it's 'unreasonable' that China should be able to censor outside of it's borders is kind of besides the point.
What matters is the materiality of their power.
In China, they can basically dictate terms and that's it.
China could feasibly threaten to block Apple in China unless some 'foreign censorship' is done on their behalf, the reason US companies should not concede, is because they don't have to.
For a couple of small things, they might get away with it but on the whole, it's something Apple can push back on ... because they can, not because they have some kind of moral high ground.
The social/moral posturing will be used as part of negotiation, but it's just superficial dressing on the underlying power.
US, Can, Aus, Europe need to get on the same page with respect to China.
I feel deja vu from the beginning of WWII - Germany growing and gaining power and becoming more aggressive while nearby countries (and further-away ones - US+CA+AU) are ignoring the threat, or trying to pacify them with small concessions and sacrifices...
The weird thing about your viewpoint is that it gives the perception of capitalism without actually understanding anything about how businesses function. It is like the pro-capitalist government employee's understanding of capitalism. It accepts capitalism but also accepts that capitalism is evil...it is a very weird viewpoint (you also see this in the ESG departments of large fund managers...people who hate capitalism, view it as inherently unfair...but work at a fund manager, it is very 2020s).
But to spell it out: if you do not respect stakeholders other than shareholders, your business will die because no-one needs you. Your shareholders needing you is not why a business exists. A business exists because it creates value for other people. One of the biggest problems today is that corporate leaders do not understand this, and they end up losing shareholders massive amounts of money. But it is important to be very clear: Tim Cook is a wage worker, executives are wage workers, they are not business owners, they do not act like business owners, their aim is not to maximise shareholder value, their aim is to maximise their wealth. If there is ownership, it is a dual share class dictatorship, it isn't an alignment of interests.
The big problem with China is that, whether you sign deals with the govt or not, the govt needs to have direct control over businesses in order to maintain political control. We are talking about a country where large businesses have CCP officials inside the business, the red phone to the CCP in the CEO's office...business is politics, AAPL doing this deal means they are part of the CCP. The CCP don't care about your shareholders, they don't care about your employees or customers, their aim is to stay in govt and die at an old age in their bed, not violently hanging from a lamppost. That is why the govt heavily favours large businesses, that is why they have done deals with large US tech companies (MSFT is the other one, MSFT are neck deep in Chinese politics now) but it won't work.
I actually know people who are very familiar with the thinking on this at AAPL. They do not understand Chinese politics at all. They think China is just a better version of the US, more meritocratic (seriously), less political instability (again, seriously), and more accommodating to special interests (...seriously). I think the assumption people make is: AAPL understand what is going on...they do not, the reason they are doing things like this is because they don't understand (AAPL is one of the worst for this kind of thing, their executives are extremely aggressive in everything they do, they take home far more than they are worth, and they understand almost nothing outside of their business...if you look at GOOGL or AMZN, it is quite different).
https://nypost.com/2021/08/26/apples-tim-cook-gets-750m-payo...
He is purely out for his own wealth. He is one of the most absurdly overpaid execs in the US. How anyone can become a billionaire as an employee is utterly beyond me. Taking no risk, getting all the reward.
You are thinking of all employees as fungible replaceable units, but employees are capitalistic units that can get monopoly power or economic rents.
An employee can provide a function that can’t be replaced, and that employee can capture a lot of the business profits, well beyond their actual “value” to the business. For example, Tim Cook’s personal relationship with Chinese officials might be very hard to replace.
Alternatively there is a kind of blackmail value, where losing a prominent employee can have high costs to the business, and the employee can get paid more than they are “worth” due to that. For example, perhaps Tim Cook leaving would cause more than a few billion damage in profits or valuation due to perceptions.
Again, it is important to realise too...there are probably no other CEOs that have made as much as Tim Cook. Even amongst execs, he is wildly wildly wildly overpaid. Corporate governance at AAPL is basically non-existent.
The obvious relevant example of replacing a CEO with a ham sandwich is John Sculley, which the organisation probably still has some fear about. The other relevant example is Paul Allen, a lost decade for Microsoft.
Because that is what Tim Cook Apple's marketing and PR suggest Apple does. The force of good. Social Responsibility and Justice. Standing up against the government. ( They didn't explicitly say this but the message is something fairly similar )
Instead of creating "insanely" great product for our customers, friends and family. It is now about product that "enrich" people's lives.
Like you said, Apple has to act on its own interest. Most of these wouldn't be problem for many had Apple not paint itself as so righteous.
Do corporations have so much better a record of living up to feel-good marketing & PR, that a experienced and competent adult would actually take them at their word?
Just like you and me, then, and the rest of humanity. But we also have good in us, don't we?
People should note that just because someone is aiming for an ethical ideal doesn’t mean that the way there is bound to be perfect—those who are quick to point out other people’s hypocrisies always rest on this fallacy. Apple isn’t perfect, but it seems to be the only big tech company making great strides towards being zero-carbon and pushing for user privacy in democratic countries, and when they were called out about parts of their supply chain using oppressed Uighur Muslim labor, they corrected it.
- pointed out China is confusing its politics with business
- thrown this out to a shareholder vote
- tried to see what customers outside of China thought
- threatened to pull all manufacturing out of China
- required China concede control elsewhere: Apple can operate in China without CP mucking around and could own 51% of more of everything it runs
Goodness gracious serious companies understand there's more going on in international business that top-line numbers.
Directors must use their powers in “the best interests of the company.” but "business judgment rule gives directors nearly absolute protection from judicial second-guessing about how to best serve the company and its shareholders."
> Goodness gracious serious companies understand there's more going on
That's what you get when your management is exclusively MBAs that never set foot outside of their bubbles and STEM-graduates that are naive in history/geopolitics/economy, etc
1) 'Pointing out to China it's confusing politics with business' implies a total misunderstanding of their posture, their view of governance, and would probably be antagonistically insulting. It also assumes they are operating in 'good faith', which they are not.
'Politics is Business' to them, they know exactly what they are doing and they have most of the leverage so you risk only ire with that tact.
2) 'Thrown this to a shareholder vote' - so this is definitely not the type of things shareholders vote on, nor do they want to, moreover, the 'transparency' and news cycle this would create would be damaging. This is a 'secret agreement' for a good reason. Shareholders do not care about censorship, they generally just want to see performance.
3) What customers outside of China think is completely irrelevant to China.
4) Threatened to pull all manufacturing out. You definitely do not want to threaten your largest market with anything, but yes, you could hint that it might be best elsewhere. That said, it's a magnanimous threat for something relatively small.
5) There is absolutely no way the CCP is going to 'concede' on any of their red line issues. They are dictating the terms of leverage and oversight to Apple and everyone else. Apple has very little room to manoeuvre here.
The only choice cook had was to play friendly on a personal level, kiss ass, make sure that they felt Apple's interest were aligned with China, and to promise to do a bunch of things they were asking, and then hope they go away.
The issue with China's hyper nationalist economic strategy has to be dealt with at a higher level, i.e. US and European political leaders and industry leaders working together on one page.
You write like China has a lock on this ... like it's the perfect lobby. There's only one perfect lobby: and that's the NRA in Doonesbury cartoons.
This is why it's important for the public in stronger democracies to know about these deals and terms.
Compare the NBA reaction to Daryl Morey tweet about HK protests, and the WTA reaction to Peng Shui situation. Tides are shifting.
But, the appeal of such a large consumerist market (funny, since it's supposedly "communist") like China is not going to become any easier to ignore going forward.
Here is cherry on the cake from the Australian PM:
"The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia."
Notice the FBI doesn’t whine about iPhones anymore.
Instead everything remains unencrypted.
Frankly it makes me doubt the veracity of some of the activists who go off the handle when these types of controversies pop up.
Literally every online storage service is analyzing user content for various reasons, but I don’t see any hue and cry over it. The Apple approach was a novel take imo.
Another recent one was the Covid bluetooth exposure notifications that were cleverly designed in a way that preserved privacy. People on HN with no understanding of how it worked freaked out and as a result instead of that smart privacy preserving approach governments just bought location data or implemented other centralized information systems that are much worse for privacy.
If I worked in policy it'd be hard not to roll eyes at the privacy people and just ignore them - which is definitely not what we want.
There’s functionally no difference, except one offers a future path to encryption on iCloud servers.
If this was about on device scanning without iCloud backup enabled then I’d agree with you, but it’s not.
Since the 90s, there has always been a mainstream private option. Be it Nextel, BlackBerry PIN, prepaid phones, iMessage, FaceTime, etc. Now that’s gone, and fringe stuff like Signal isn’t a replacement.
Apple / Google maps were so bare, even the proverbial crickets were missing from the maps.
When looked from my desk, Seoul's map is as detailed as any other big city now, I wonder whether it was geofenced or something. I installed a suite of apps made by local software houses to be able to navigate the city.
See Kashmir and Askai Chin.
See also: http://expatalachians.com/biplanes-over-blair-calling-in-the...
I’m confused as to why people think this is an $insightfulComment.
Would you rather have countries wall off their economic activity from each other so governments have to bomb each other to acquire resources by force?
Any economic intertwining of Chinese and American interests is a good thing, no matter how evil you think the Chinese are. Because the inevitable alternative is war (re: all of human history).
Historically, the only thing that prevents tribes of human animals from blowing each other up is mutually beneficial economic cooperation.
That's correct, until someone thinks that he is being screwed and does not see mutual benefit. Mostly what Lenin explained in "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"
From a recent interview[2] with Tim Cook:
>"World peace through world trade," Cook said, adding that operating in foreign countries means Apple has to "acknowledge that there are different laws in other markets."
0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/apple-and-google...
1: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50573069
2: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-china-tim-cook-respons...
And here I was under the impression that most everyone - everyone important enough at least - understood that Fukuyama was (very) wrong. Perhaps his definition of "world peace" is different.
(Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_peace)
>In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[4] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.
While China is indeed an important and huge market for sales... approximately 100% of Apple's products are manufactured in China (save some tiny fraction that are assembled in India or Texas).
Every iPhone sold everywhere worldwide (except the few assembled in India) comes from China.
Apple cannot exist without China. Full stop.
They make something like 200 million iPhones per year.
If you think that can be moved "just fine" then we will have to agree to disagree.
Producing something of the iPhone's quality, at the scale of a half million per day, every single day (that's 23,000 per hour, every hour, 24/7, for an entire year) is not something one can just pick up and move, even with Apple's resources.
It would take several years, if indeed it is possible at all. There are dozens or hundreds of managing workers at Foxconn who have been designing and producing iPhone manufacturing lines for a decade+, and I doubt China would give them and their families all exit visas to move to some other country to assist Foxconn and Apple in divesting themselves of the CCP's prerogatives.
This ain't Factorio.
Then let's agree to disagree, as Samsung, with it's 253 million shipments[1] does exactly that having explicitly moved out of China[2]. It is not impossible.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... [2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-elec-china/samsun...
If something has potential, then it will happen. The higher the potential, the faster it will happen. And laws, contrary to what many believe, only has limited potential.
So if leaving China has potential, then it will happen. Tariffs have already made the potential higher, but unfortunately it doesn't seem like it's breaking even just yet.
Apple is still doing China because it wants to, not because it has to. At their size they have the time and money to invest in multiple locations and spread their risks.
So perhaps it is "approximately 95%"?
It would be really interesting to know the actual number, wouldn't it?
https://stratechery.com/2021/the-information-on-apple-in-chi...
Companies manufacture complex electronics products in China because everyone manufactures there. The skills are there, factories are there - but most importantly, the supply chains are there. You can drive a truck from factory to factory to pick up all the pieces you need. Then drop the truck off at Foxconn. They'll make the products and you can put them back into the truck and drop them off at the port or rail yard.
That's not something you can just replace overnight.
I'm very skeptical that China is the only place Apple can make their products. Sure, Apple doesn't actually "manufacture" anything -- the company outsourced it to Taiwnese CM's like Foxconn, Wistron, and others who have cleary demonstrated that they have no competence, experience, or even desire to build things outside China (see Foxconn's misadventures in Brazil, Wisconsin US). But that shouldnt' be surprising considering that their business model entirely depends on ginormous state subsidies and seemingly unlimited supply of young, unskilled laborers from rural China. Also consider the fact that most critical, high-value components come from not China, but South Korea, Japan, the US (some via TSMC in Taiwan) -- China still makes less than 5% of all chips produced globally (as of 2019 according to US SIA). Of course, they are all assembled/packaged there, but China's contribution to this whole process still accounts for less than 4% of overall value.
I just don't buy the argument that China as the world's electronic supply-chain can't be replaced.
I'm skeptical as well since Foxconn also open a factory in India for Apple.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Foxconn-set-to-m...
China can as the electronics supply-chain can absolutely be replaced - at a cost.
I always cringed at Tim Apple's deceptive rambling on the industry's dependence and necessity of supply-chain in China and feared that he was cooking up something more sinister behind the curtain. I recall as far back as 2012 when Tim defended their oversea outsourcing practices on CBS by claiming that "Apple iPhone engines were made in America," even as they were working to offshore that to TSMC in Taiwan shortly afterward.
I assume part of the massive china/apple deal was a promise to stay in china (and act as a passive marketing prop for chinese manufacturing).
No one is really interested in taking the hit in creating in country supply chains for all of the low value stuff. Vietnam is too small to support that, SE Asia as a whole might work (or maybe India), but both are still politically and economically unstable to do much in this area yet. China has scale and stability.
I see final assembly moving to different countries, but the supply chains will remain plumbed through China for a while.
??? Vietnam has nearly twice South Korea's population (and less than Japan's) and of course, it also has scale, as South Korean businesses in Vietnam have shown repeatedly.
To boot, Vietnam has no immediate internal political threats (eg, compared against China's separatist movements by ethnic minorities in Tibet, Uigher, Inner Mongolia) or no potential regional geopolitical/territorial conflicts with neighbors (eg, Phillippines, Japan, India, etc), other than China. And, most importantly, despite having fought a war half-century ago, America's diplomatic and trade relationship with Vietnam is far less hostile -- it's in fact quite amicable -- than with China.
>> ... but the supply chains will remain plumbed through China for a while.
That's inevitable only b/c of Apple's political clout and relentless lobbying here in the US. I was hoping, while I was no fan of Trump, Trump's trade policy would at least partly address this, but oh boy, how quickly he caved in before Apple and dished out tariff exemptions.
> That's only inevitable b/c of Apple's political clout and relentless lobbying in here.
Apple is like .1% of the political clout and lobbying being brought to bear. Their only notability in this is that they are the only FAANG that has significant business in China.
Sure, as Tim Apple testified before Congress, Apple pays the most tax in the US and is also the most valuable company in the world. I'm pretty sure there is nothing going on between Apple and American/Chinese gov't. /s
Interesting, how much, what percentage is that of Apple revenue and what percentage of total federal tax income?
Vietnam's plus are its cheap labour and proximity/good relations with China. As labour is growing costly in China, assembling of things is moving to Vietnam. Many components are still manufactured in China and exported to Vietnam.
Of course it can. Manufacturing moved there over the last 30 years for the low regulation and particularly the low wages that keep manufacturing cheap and allow the bosses/owners to make more money. So, all you need is to accept less profit, which the controlling powers won't do without keeping wages/costs down to soften the blow - Western regulations on safety and workers rights means that's hard so prices will have to rise.
You might do it in a decade, but it'll hurt profits. Hence, USA politicians wading in with 'China can't be trusted all our allies must now buy electronics from us' ... which also helps y'all to spy on us too. Double win for USA.
And no, the US isn't interested in bringing the whole supply-chain back home, it just doesn't want a politically or economically unreliable partner.
https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/made-in-...
And yet, the Apple products I bought for my wife this Christmas state "Made in Vietnam" on the box. And other electronics I've purchased for her recently were similarly not made in China.
China hasn't been the "only" place to manufacture tech for several years now. It's an outdated cliché.
China has never been the only place to manufacture tech ever South Korea, Japan, even Germany/France/USA for us in the UK (LG has grown phenomenally well the last couple of years, Japan in the 80s-90s was the place for UK electronics).
But China seems to have been the principal place for affordable consumer electronics [chips/circuits] for at least the last decade.
for the past years but China's wages is increasing and Chinese crack down on tech company like Alibaba, Tencent, DiDi...etc. would it extend to foreign company? Not to mention the rise of Chinese domestic tech company like Xiaomi.
it look like Apple is not making their money back in China with this deal.
"To placate Beijing, though, some capital may have served more like donations to state enterprises and local governments. The company generated $249 billion of sales in Greater China over the last five years, less than the pledged amount."
https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/apples-ugly-china-deal...
This would nearly completely cripple the world's tech economy for a decade, but that is far better then becoming vassals to CCP tyranny.
If anything, continuing to manufacture in China is likely required for that market expansion. Otherwise I feel they would have started to diversify to other, less politically tenuous markets.
> Mr. Cook has watched China's middle class grow to four hundred million while watching the domestic middle class shrink. Like GM, which sells more cars in China than the USA, Apple knows where the market opportunities reside.
America needs growth again, whether that's immigration, childbirth and childcare subsidies, or seeking to merge with other democratic nations (Australia, Korea, Japan, Taiwan).
America needs to onshore manufacturing of critical chemicals and components. Steel. Electronics.
America needs education that is equitable, but it also needs to let academically or extracurricularly gifted students advance to special placement.
I want America to be #1. Free speech, being critical of government, and even having the ability to run for president are rights that every person should have.
edit: [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/rb2774/comment/...
Source?
If that's true, that's disgusting.
Context: The bill they're talking about is unusually porcine, to the point of overwhelming even cynics. Relevant example: Subsidies of $12,500 for electric vehicles, but only if they're made by a union. Because auto unions are major campaign donors.
Everybody always talks about "oh the government spends so much money on pork all the time, deficits are so big etc." but this is another level:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
Federal spending as percent of GDP last year: More than triple the level present during the New Deal. >50% increase year over year.
It's unprecedented in peacetime. The only time it has ever been more as a percent of GDP is WWII, and in dollars (even per capita and adjusted for inflation) it's already more than WWII.
This year's proposals are a significant increase from that level.
The claim that to oppose the bill is to "promote divestment from the USA" is pretty bold.
There are of course criticism in the details. For example, a majority of the funds went to the top 10% which isn't great. How the funds were deployed was far, far from ideal. It lead to asset price inflation because of this. So there are problems with it, but the alternative, not investing, would have been much worse.
The criticism of the details is the point. Spending half as much money by cutting out the portion that went to the top 10% is only the most obvious of the better alternatives.
This doesn't mean anything without the details:
> Government deficits are an investment.
The government can borrow a trillion dollars and give it to Mark Zuckerberg or whoever else donates the most to their campaigns. That's not an investment, it's corruption. It represents a net loss to the American people, because they lose the money, have to pay interest on the debt forever, and get nothing in return.
To be an investment you actually have to invest in something. But during an economic crisis, the best thing to invest in is people. If you're going to borrow money, just send out the checks. Everybody gets the same amount. It helps the people who are in trouble, it stimulates demand, and it isn't susceptible to corruption or regulatory capture.
And if you did that, you wouldn't have to borrow as much, because the same money would be more effective and the same benefit could be achieved with less of it.
But that's not what's happening.
So long as you're not Muslim.
Per capita GDP is similarly ranked.
And there are 56 minorities groups in China, they were all have specific aid program, like preferential treatment in national college exams.
What's the basis of such a wishwash statement on China and the people? Are you suggesting Chinese people are practicing racial segregation? Or what exactly are you suggesting?
Lol. Are concentration camps segregation? Because if so, then yeah that is what most people (outside of china) suggest is happening.
when you say "invested more in their people"? what do you mean?
if we are talking about education. both country offer free education to its people. College education are not compulsory and free in both countries
I'll argue, you don't need a lot of techies. you need people with vision like Steve Jobs, Jack Ma...etc. they don't have tech background and yet created giant tech company.
And you now changed it to "College education are not compulsory and free in both countries" which is even more wrong..
thank for clarify
>And you now changed it to "College education are not compulsory and free in both countries"
i never change my statement to OP and what's wrong? both countries doesn't offer free College education. one is cheaper doesn't mean its free.
Education in China is also only compulsory through the 8th grade. Only 60% go on to high school.
Every person? Including convicted criminals?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
I'm all for countries having local manufacturing capabilities. Not just the US. I was also pretty vocal about Argentina having them when I lived there and I'd love the US to have more accessible local manufacturing now that I'm here.
Thing is, as much as I can want that as an engineer with a somewhat cozy desk job it's true that on-plant jobs require skill and determination that I don't have so I feel a bit of like a hypocrite for suggesting that. Are there people in the US that want factory jobs? Because when looking for talent in California for stuff like manufacturing engineering, supplier development... or when trying to find small shops that will prototype I kinda feel that no one wants to do that. Salaries are kinda okish for those positions, but to actually rebuild the talent and the collective energy and willpower to work those jobs is going to take a while.
Honestly can't blame the Bay Area for not wanting to work in plant considering public transport sucks and everything closes early. You need someone at the house or with flexible schedule to be able to take a job on plant.
The only way to make manufacturing at home competitive with overseas is full-scale automation. It won't create jobs to bring it back onshore - nor should it for exactly the reasons you specify. Instead, it would be a strategic investment.
The biggest impediments are political. China will subsidize anything they're not already leading in. To counteract that, you either need tariffs or your own subsidies. But corporations will fight against tariffs (they've already invested in manufacturing in China) and labor unions will fight against subsidies for automation, so here we are.
For now. The trajectory is pretty clear, and the goal would be to shoot for where the puck is going, not where it was.
If they're expecting lifetime security on the assembly line with enough money for two cars in the garage and a pension with a gold watch at the end, it's not going to happen. That's not how the world works anymore.
That presumes that other countries want to be part of America. I suspect strongly you'll find that's not the case. Merger then has a more "1812" feeling to it.
The only folks tripping over their shoelaces to be US states are Puerto Rico and DC.
> America needs to onshore manufacturing of critical chemicals and components. Steel. Electronics.
While these are strategically sensible decisions, that won't bring back Apple any time soon. Everyone manufactures in China because there's a critical mass of manufacturing in China. All your components are made there, by everyone, and the best-in-class assembly folks are all there. Supply chain and logistics are all there.
China's investments in ports, roads, railways are paying dividends. Including their one belt one road initiative offering overland rail links to the UK.
It's not sufficient to just say "let's make stuff at home" - it requires real, long-term, strategic thinking, huge investments and optimizing for the group. These are not America's strengths right now.
I feel like if there was a referendum, the UK's population would happily dump their monarchy in exchange for US statehood. There's a lot of commonality with their democracy, language, skepticism of foreign immigration, embrace of capitalism, etc.
It would also be a pretty solid strategic move to bring the US closer to Europe as a hedge against the Russian ambitions laid out in their Foundations of Geopolitics playbook.
This is obviously my idle speculation, and I think the UK voters would never be allowed to vote on such an opportunity anyway. Still, I think if it happened it'd be great for everyone.
Importing massive amounts of unskilled labor only depresses wages and, combined with NIMBY, creates a massive housing bubble thanks to artificial shortages.
In Australia's case, it also suffers from a disproportionate brain drain of highly educated professionals since local firms simply won't compete for talent.
edit: I think the "quality" argument is overrated. Not all immigrants do ground-breaking research or start billion-dollar companies. When it comes to economic activity, quantity has a quality of its own (apologies to J. Stalin). A city/state/country with the economic activity of an extra 20% population of mediocre, healthy, tax-paying, car-buying, mortgage-paying, burger-eating blue and white-collar immigrants is better off than one without.
Except for categories where there's an extremely high burden of proof for extraordinary abilities, it's simply someone's ability to get a job no American is qualified to take (and be so in demand that it commands a salary in the top percentiles for the profession).
So the market takes care of the selection.
Not exactly, its someone's ability to get a job that their employer cannot find a more qualified candidate after advertising the job in the local newspaper for 6 months including at least two separate Sundays.
That's inaccurate, repeated votes for statehood in PR have failed.
Ironically, the hardest challenge for the British during the war was to keep their soldiers from deserting to the US. Since there was no way a young British male could legally come to America from the UK, joining the army then crossing into America was their only hope.
Ironically today, the countries named by the GP (Australia, Korea, Japan, Taiwan) all have a net inflow of people to trying to get into the US, mirroring what happened in 1812. The political elites might laugh at the idea of a merger (considering they have a vested interest in keeping power) but it seems to make sense for a lot of their highly educated citizens who decided to make it happen here in America!
That's not the same thing as wanting to abandon independence. Folks go to work in other countries not because they want their home country to be America. Those smart highly-educated workers aren't moving to America so much as the Bay Area to work at tech companies and make money - based on my personal experience and that of every other immigrant I know. Even those that went on to become US citizens wouldn't begin to entertain the idea of folding in their home countries.
I've lived in America for years but I certainly have zero interest in "merging" in Canada. I couldn't want anything less, tbh.
They're both unique and interesting countries in their own rights, with quite different peoples and values.
Meanwhile, there are now universities where 85% of the graduating class immediately moves to the US upon graduation [1]. And the numbers have actually increased during the Trump administration, despite the narrative that the US would stop attracting international talent.
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/3567893/justin-trudeau-jealous-im...
That’s fine on an individual level but that doesn’t mean they want to merge their home countries into Canada!
Someone from Italy may move to the US but that is totally disjoint from them wanting to make Italy the 51st state. If they retain a strong positive association with the attributes of their home country, they want to retain independence to preserve them. If they have a negative association with their home country they have no interest in merging them either as they've actively distanced themselves from the negative attributes of their home state.
Someone moving from California to New York doesn't want to see CA and NY merge into one bi-coastal superstate any more than someone moving from India to Canada wants to see a bi-continental megastate.
> Meanwhile, there are now universities where 85% of the graduating class immediately moves to the US upon graduation [1]. And the numbers have actually increased during the Trump administration, despite the narrative that the US would stop attracting international talent.
The number of people who desired to stay after college went up, but visa issuance was suspended so they were precluded. They can want to stay all day long, they're not being allowed to. And that will have an effect in time. Meanwhile... [1]
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/b663ef33-2b6c-42ea-8952-bee9673f6...
What I posted is people who moved to the US, not people that had a desire to move.
> Meanwhile... [1]
It's interesting, because in these stories Canada is never the first choice. Seems like every story starts with someone being unable to qualify for US immigration using Canada as a back up plan.
Yes, because these are economic migrants and economic migrants are going to try for the most active and lucrative market first. If they can't get a visa, they'll certainly take their second pick. They'll then build up that market over time. This is why we have Shopify in Canada. The ecosystem builds on itself and it one day won't be quite so distant a second choice.
The first part of this statement is inaccurate and the second part is accurate. No, all of the components in your iPhone are not made in China. Yes, they have the logistics and capability to assemble efficiently. No, they do not make everything in an iPhone or Mac—not even close. Examples of major components often not made in China:
- Microprocessor (Taiwan)
- Memory (South Korea)
- Screen glass (USA)
- Audio, Wifi Chips (USA)
- Gyroscope (Switzerland)
- Accelerometer (Germany)
- Display (Japan)
- Camera (Japan)
The batteries tend to be made in China, but many of the raw materials that go into the batteries are not. Also, Apple has successfully had iPhones assembled in India, so there's no reason to believe if they chose to, they couldn't (at very significant cost and ramping up and effort) move assembly. iPhone prices might go up then though.
See more here: https://www.lifewire.com/where-is-the-iphone-made-1999503
Or checkout the book The One Device https://amzn.to/3pDolNW
In principle I agree with you, but in practicality something maybe isn't working as expected? If those things mattered so much, why would the Chinese middle class have grown so much while the American middle class shrank? (assuming this is true, which I'm not sure)
At the end of the day, there's still a hierarchy of needs. If one country cannot offer its citizen those needs, reaching for higher level ones doesn't matter. Most people would rather be able to afford food, clothes, a home, electronic, entertainment, etc, than they would the ability to be critical.
On some other dimension, the best argument free democracies had used to be that the people of those countries were richer and had better lives, while totalitarian regimes, religious regimes, communist regimes delivered a worse outcome to its people. And while this is still mostly true, it seems that it's no longer as obvious which one delivers better value to its people.
Going through an industrial revolution has impressive growth effects that can cover up a lot of bad stuff.
We'll see what happens when that growth starts to slow - I don't think it'll be good.
The Chinese 'middle class' standard of medical care ( on average, a lot cheaper but it's also a very basic level of care), financial security, air / water / consumer good safety, access to meaningful education, and freedom of worship / speech / congregation of all types is well under what is typical for a middle class citizen in a western democracy, even including the united states. At around $20,000 USD per year (approx boundary of China's upper middle class) you're in the same general territory as Russia.
When you have observed a colossal material improvement in your life, and you have hope for the future, you can overlook a lot of problems with governance.
[1] Yes, yes, Moscow is not an active disaster zone. Russia does not begin and end in Moscow, though.
It has been long believed to work the other way: Poor people don't have the education or resources to deal with governmance; they are trying to survive, working three jobs (if they can get them), etc. When the middle class expands is typically when democracy blooms.
Russia's 'middle class' expanded massively since the economic disaster of the 90s, but I would not describe it as being more democratic today than it was in 1995.
A rising middle class isn't why communism fell apart in the 80s, either. It fell apart because the country lost any faith that the system will bring future prosperity.
It's not meaningful: Middle class in China would be poor in the US, and developing countries can expand their economies much more quickly.
I am happy for the middle class people in China.
> the best argument free democracies had used to be that the people of those countries were richer and had better lives
You skip the main reason they have better lives, which is freedom. All those Americans (and others) worked and sacrificed for freedom. Wealth is barely mentioned in the founding documents; the Gettysburg Address, FDR, MLK, etc., didn't mention it much (though the latter two did address poverty).
Apple dominates the US market, and will continue to do so. So why bother to invest more in a market you already own? The US domestic market hasn't shrunk for iPhones. I think this is reading way too much into this. China is a new growing market largely untapped by Apple, and one that is significantly larger just due to population sizes. It's as simple as that.
Even when you have one ultimate goal, there are a thousand different ways to go about it, including to behave in ways I find admirable in order to secure my business going forward. It's fairly irrelevant to me why you're behaving the way you are, so long as you are.
Wrong, it is survival bias. Not every company is motivated by profits, but the ones that survive long enough for you to notice are. If the company isn't motivated by profits, is simply doesn't last long enough to be a major player.
I don't actually think it's survivorship bias, my local coffee shop is good to me for little other reason than the owner and I get on well, and they're not likely to go out of business any time soon. I just didn't specify my point well enough.
I find your description distastefully cynical, but more importantly not particularly in line with my experience of how people behave.
I’d argue Zuckerberg did this in his Georgetown speech [0]. Recently the head of the woman’s tennis association did too when pulling out of China. Palantir is also principled about this (read their S1) - though incentives are more aligned there.
Add in the South Park writers too.
It is possible to do the right thing in difficult contexts - and that should be the goal.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb...
Anyone can have “principles” when it’s also easy to have them. Someone should mention that to Ray Dalio.
The secrecy around it doesn't bode well, but to be frank the list above seems pretty innocuous. If it were the other way around or any other county I doubt many would care.
The recent trend of countries toward isolationism scares me. The type of economic integration described above is healthy for world peace and how you avoid wars.
I think the US had a much stronger effect toward global stability when it did a better job exemplifying the best of democracy and worked to spread its culture through economic and other ties.
While I want apple to keep its dignity as much as you do, I cannot change our government (we don’t get to vote, so we literally cannot). Given this situation, if apple don’t do these kind of things, worse case scenario, it get banned in china just like google and many others. As a user, apple products are still the most privacy protecting products I can buy and use in china. (For example, do you know that Chinese government forbids end to end encryption? But iMessage is an exception). Business aside, I think apple protected the human rights in china the best way it could.
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/what...
I find it exceptionally hard to believe that, with iCloud datacenters located in homeland China. An easier explanation is that Apple's marketing, long revered as one of the best in the world, was able to convince people that they were secure while giving data to the CCP hand-over-fist behind the curtain. Until their system is transparent enough to say for sure, I'd err on the side of caution.
That simply not true. Millions sacrificed their lives so they countries could be free. You just don't want to fight and you are happy with expansion of communism. The West is not going to fight for you, you have to do it yourself. Don't be cowards.
It might as well be true, but then you should also expect other countries to start dealing with Apple as a part of the US gov. and not a purely private party.
That is exactly what happened and that's why they approached Tim Cook.
Right now Apple is an international consumer company at its core, which makes its positioning a lot different than defense contractors or power producers for instance.
Also, yes, Lockheed Martin does operate in different countries (Ireland included) and most likely does negotiate quite heavily with factories around the world.
Or a threat. An entity with a trillion dollars in reserves and devices in billions of people's hands, including hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of government employees. That's a lot of leverage.
National security issue, though? The US government has no desire to call Apple on security or privacy. Doing so would be a pure disadvantage for them.
What do you mean? They certainly answer to China.
* - not sure if this info is already public, I am NDA bound to disclose more.
> One is even completely obsoleting a line of products that was previously being manufactured at TSMC
That sounds a bit odd. AMD/Qualcomm products basically obsolete themselves very quickly. People generally aren't looking to buy a Snapdragon 855 from 2019. They'll either be buying the 888 or one of Qualcomm's cheaper lines (like the 700 or 600 series). It seems weird to prematurely obsolete something given that it's likely on a process that you already have enough TSMC capacity for. I mean, clearly I could be wrong. Maybe Samsung offered them something to do that and move things over faster.
On May 16, 2016 - China blocked Apple iTunes, Movies, etc [0].
On the same date, Apple invested $1B in Didi (Chinese “Uber”) [1] and magically China unblock Apple.
So what’s new in this story?
[0] https://amp.scmp.com/tech/leaders-founders/article/1945616/a...
A lot more.
In the 80s it was Russia, and in the 2020s it’s China.
Of course it doesn’t make sense when looking at it rationally. Because it’s about emotion.
I’m waiting for the 2040s after China’s population decline really gets going—-maybe India or Indonesia becomes the new boogie man. Fun!
'The agreement included a pledge from Apple to help Chinese manufacturers develop "the most advanced manufacturing technologies," "support the training of high-quality Chinese talents," use more components from Chinese suppliers, sign deals with Chinese software firms, collaborate with research in Chinese universities, and directly invest in Chinese tech companies, as well as assistance with around a dozen Chinese government causes. If there were no objections from either side, the deal would be automatically be extended for an additional year until May 2022, according to the agreement.'
'Apple vowed to invest "many billions of dollars more" than its current expenditure in China, including on new retail stores, research and development facilities, and renewable energy projects. Other internal documents reportedly showed that Apple's pledge amounted to more than $275 billion in spending over a period of five years.'
what do American citizens have to do to get this sort of treatment? Seems like a broken record at this point, but we truly have been sold at the absolute highest level. It's one thing to make these deals with a foreign hostile country - it's another to ask yourself: When's the last CEO I heard making these same promises to America? Or to any friendly country for that matter? As if the streets are paved with gold everywhere else?
It aches my heart to be a young man in this country and see this be our so-called 'leaders'. I'm confident the tides have already turned against all this nonsense, though, and I look forward to rebuilding industries of the world with good-hearted men & women
How is this not the biggest blow to Apple in terms of its relationship with China?
For those who want to go to source: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine...
Does anyone have subscription? Would love to read Archive.is copy. Thank you.
That's not true. IMHO, this is part of a larger story (Apple's obsequious compromises with China), and the NY Times has previously reported on other parts: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce....
It's seems The Information broke this story, but I doubt it will be very long before other outlets catch up.
Explain those "political reasons," please.
No, I suspect you have things wrong in this case, but you're being so vague it's difficult to figure out where the error is.
> NYT is extremely predictable - both in its choice of what to inform its viewers as well as what will fit their political stance (globalists).
Even if that's true, it's no reason to assume they wouldn't publish this story for some ideological reason, especially given they've published very similar things in the past.
This?
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/apple-tim-cook-secret-de...
It's just a "The Information reported..." rehash. Everything about this except the original story that I've seen so far has been like that.
Thank you for saying this. I don't live in the US, but yes it's shocking.
My (unpopular) view is that we humans have the ability to focus only on a limited set of issues simultaneously, and we should pick the important ones first. It is appalling that news about secretive 200+ billion deals with Xi's CCP (the greatest threat to freedom since the Brezhnev era) has to compete for attention.
I like to imagine those corporations as a machine with irs unique objective being profit. Every single thing that comes out of their mouths and every single action they perform is done with the expectation that it will sooner or later result in more profit. In this case, the equation came out as "the profit that Apple will earn as a result of this deal will compensate any loss of revenue that could be ever generated because of the public's reaction to it". And that's how it always works, period.
That's a common ideological outlook now, but IIRC it wasn't always so and it doesn't have to be so in the future.
Simplistic free market greed-sacks like you describe should be pariahs, and treated as such by society and the government to the point that they find it very hard to make profits.
Perhaps he expected his government to incentivize/compel them to look at more than just profits? You know, like China is successfully doing. While shady when it comes to foreign influence, it is an absolutely legitimate approach for domestic companies, instead of allowing them to sell out their home country for short-term gain in the name of free markets, that the West was duped into believing is the only moral policy.
When's the last CEO I heard making these same promises to America?
On Apple’s spending in the USA:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/business/apple-spending-u...
“The company said its overall spending would reach $430 billion in the United States over the next five years.”
I just got finished reading a book about the pre-war climate of 1930s Europe and man this comment sounds scary and nationalist.
I’m worried that so many people like you buy into the media positioning of China vs. America. It ratchets up tensions for the purpose of selling clicks.
Do you not see how American companies making deals with other countries is beneficial for everyone, including you? The economy is not a zero-sum game. You can create value without destroying it elsewhere. Nobody has to suffer in order for you to thrive.
When deals like this are made, it makes it less likely China will do things to piss off the US, and vice-versa. The last thing we need are more tensions.
Do you really want to hold people in other countries back from ever achieving the standards of living that you enjoy?
Eh, no. That's sounds like a version of the "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree#G...), and it's bunk. China's leaders are nationalists, and it's likely they're looking to strengthen themselves to the point where they can do what they want without caring if the US is pissed off or not, and their actual behavior supports this view. They've actually shown themselves to be quite adept at exploiting sentiments like yours while they play a different game.
> Do you really want to hold people in other countries back from ever achieving the standards of living that you enjoy?
It's not that simple, obviously. Do you want knock people in your own country down (and have them stay down) so that can happen? We're not just talking about standards of living, either. How do you feel about assisting the ascent of an ideologically-incompatible competitor regime (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...)?
I think the author's own response is fitting to the sentiment in your comment:
I was both amazed and amused by how much the Golden Arches Theory had gotten around and how intensely certain people wanted to prove it wrong. They...insisted that politics, and the never-ending struggle between nation-states, were the immutable defining feature of international affairs, and they were professionally and psychologically threatened by the idea that globalization and economic integration might actually influence geopolitics in some very new and fundamental ways.
The link you posted at the end is a great example of what I'm talking about. The NYT has an incentive to scare you into thinking China is going to take over the US and destroy your way of life and imprison you in some dystopian hellscape. And so we must oppose them at all costs to protect our way of life, and subscribe to the NYT to read more about this growing conflict!
Sounds exactly like the scary bedtime stories Hollywood told us about the USSR during the Cold War. Or the stories Newsweek told us of how Japan was going to dominate and overtake American business in the 1980s. Oh no!
Not saying history will necessarily repeat and China will implode in a USSR-like manor, but, could it be that maybe those fears are just a little overblown?
China is an aging, shrinking population with still a long way to go towards industrializing. And a dictatorship isn't usually a great way to organize a government if your goal is stability.
Are you even willing to consider the possibility that maybe this deal was a mutually beneficial fair trade, with upside for both parties?
I think you misunderstand. I wasn't specifically referring to the Golden Arches Theory as bunk, but the more general one you describe. It's bunk because it makes assumptions about motivations and strategies that aren't necessarily true, not because of some specific counterexample to a jokey formulation.
In China's case, I don't think it's playing the same "economic cooperation" game you assume it is. If the "decreased conflict" result has any truth behind it, it's because if increased interdependency, but it's pretty clear (for them) that's not a desired end-state, but rather a transitory state on the way to more independence and greater strength.
Those I suppose you could still have "decreased conflict" even in that case, as long as other nations remain too dependent on them to be able to object or resist if they want to do something objectionable.
It's like patriotism, nationalism have become bad words in the USA. The USA and its values are really worth fighting for (am not even from the US), but this thing about "lets not be nationalistic", and if you criticize the CCP you hear "oh let's not be sinophobic" needs to stop.
All the 3rd world countries who got into the Belt and Road "co-operation" are really getting belted now.
And the US leaders are not?
> And the US leaders are not?
Way less so, as displayed in their commitments to free trade and globalization.
But the world kind of remembers your last 2 administration and knows that they can change just back next election.
And china seems to be focused on free global trade as well. Trade embargos are more known for the US.
Geopolitics is really not that simple.
All of them since the 80s at least (except for Trump, but he's not representative of the class "US leaders").
> And china seems to be focused on free global trade as well. Trade embargos are more known for the US.
What do embargos have to do with anything? Chinese leaders might be OK with free global trade, given the kinds of controls they have on domestic market access, they aren't really committed to "free trade" like the US has been.
He was the last elected US president and was almost elected a 2. time.
So like it or not, but to the world, he is a very strong current representative of a US leader. And yes, a very nationalistic one at that. Who can be back to power very soon, or someone like him.
> He was the last elected US president and was almost elected a 2. time.
1) "US leaders" encompasses more than the presidency, and 2) at this point Trump is an n=1 aberration and no one can say if any patterns have changed.
The overall US leadership class has internalized the dogma of free trade, to the point of openly and uncritically accepting the national-level negatives (de-industrialization, etc.). I'm extremely skeptical that any other Republican besides Trump would deploy protectionist policies like tariffs or bully business leaders into doing something that puts the nation in front of their shareholders.
I see, and this is why the US is enforcing so many global trade embargos?
And as for the collateral of them, here in eastern germany the economy suffered a lot by the embargos against russia - as did many other branches in europe. I doubt the US economy was hit by it in any significant way by comparison.
Or that the US was (and is) using massive pressure, so that germany abandones north stream (a pipeline to get russian gas directly) and rather buys cheap US fracking gas?
So sorry, but I can't really take the "free global trade" rhetoric much serious. The US is pro free trade for sure, but only as long as US interests are not hurt too much.
And all of this happens with or without Trump.
You're not getting it. Embargos are neither here nor there, what matters is how they treat the domestic economy. They've let important bits whither, get outsourced, or slip out of their control through foreign acquisitions (which are default-allow), all often with great negative effects for the actual citizens they represent. That shows you where their commitments are.
Who cares about speeches? It's policy that matters. Chinese leaders actually pursue nationalist economic policy, while the US leaders dress up globalization with nationalist rhetoric.
Most (all?) countries look after themselves, their borders, their people etc and don’t honestly care about others. Whether this is right or wrong - that is a different question. But let’s not pretend some political leaders are saints and others aren’t.
commitments to free trade and globalization.
Sure, because it helps their country and their economy. They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Global politics is not about right and wrong or love and friendship - it is about profit and loss, strength and weakness, convenience and opportunity…
Some level of pushback - manufacturing in this case - is the most reasonable, peaceful and rational recourse to the threat China poses to the world and its neighbors, while also creating a supply chain resiliency. I think narrative that you've spelled out is a grave danger to democracies around the world. If anything is ratcheting up that is taking an innocuous comment about globalist corporation's greed to an extreme and alarmist parallel to pre-world world nationalism which I find rather irresponsible.
Corporations extract concessions from US taxpayers. China extracts concessions from corporations. This is unfair. Why aren't US taxpayers getting the same deal as Chinese taxpayers?
Paraphrasing u/pembrook:
Something something nationalism. Whoa. Be careful. Corporations extracting wealth from US taxpayers is good for world prosperity. For reasons.
How can being disappointed in American leaders be considered 'scary' and 'nationalist'? It makes no sense. America is not in good shape. We can argue the statistics all day, but it's undeniable how far we've fallen in education & health most importantly, but of course other critical parts like infrastructure, manufacturing & technology. the kids are not alright
People in America don't feel supported right now, and they haven't for awhile. Between the endless wars, and the endless focus of moving all our capital and labor overseas, not a lot has come back to the people, and they feel it.
You can say whatever about nation-building, promoting living standards, etc., but I just don't think it's fair that the American citizens who worked, fought, and often funded (through subsidies) these companies, do not get anywhere NEAR the level of attention we give elsewhere. Obviously ton of people agreed with me on here, lol, and every single person I've talked to on this topic agrees.
They kind of are, though. Find somebody that is broadly world traveled over a multiple decade period and they will invariably have noticed the stark contrast in the way societies are inside and outside what could be broadly termed the modern western countries.
People that have been stuck in those countries their entire lives simply don't understand how badly they have been robbed.
Does anyone have specific info on these? Chinese government causes could be anything, ranging from benign to the truly despicable.
Apple is a mega corporation that in many ways is ruthless and efficient. They make solid hardware and are excellent at marketing.
Apple will do whatever is needed to keep the money flowing. It has no problem adjusting its “core” values to meet different government needs.
My two cents
If I was them looking to become top of the hill I'd be instructing people at Foxconn and wherever else to provide me with backdoors into most computers sold in the West.
Most Intel machines are not designed for it.
> Maybe one day he should think about resettling to China… just saying.
I mean yeah? Maybe? It's really not that hard to understand how to maintain high standing in multiple conflicting societies. Doing so in China is also not that difficult or bothersome, not any harder than maintaining good standing in a private platform like Youtube the analogy being that the arbitrary decisions follow unspoken rules but you can predict what those rules are and still have a great and endearing time. I get that we are raised not to respect that a government assumes that kind of role while tolerating private institutions that run our day to day lives operating the same way, but the assumption that day-to-day life is sooooo aggravating in China is just completely wrong.
Even with some of these it's still OK, but it can be aggravating quickly. I feel like there is always someone in every apartment block constantly renovating and the drills on the walls never cease. Also, try transferring money put of the country. Spent more time in banks in China than all other places I've lived combined. And I speak Chinese, so most things are easier.
>Cook's negotiations led to the successful signing of the multibillion-dollar agreement, quashing a number of regulatory actions against the company with exemptions and enabling access to the Chinese market, in return for significant investments, business deals, and worker training in the country.
Keyword is exemptions and access, aka what you expect from trillion dollar company lobbying governments.
I love how ignorant people can be about this biggest corporation US has.The labour it profits off is not ethical, and a simple search for "safety nets" should be enough to convince one of that.Then again most people don't give a sh1t when they want their new "3D face-unlocked emoji" feature.
That may be different than revenue for Apple. Does the pay wall article clarify this?
Note: I'm not defending Apple here. Assisting a regime like the PRC with technology that could be used to further violate human rights is something the US should be monitoring and cracked down on with significant force, whether it's $275B or $10k
I wonder- is this true, or is this article trying to do some indirect PR/reputation building for Cook?
Having said all that, he never had a choice to begin with. When Google decided to stand up to China, they didn't bet the farm but "only" a lower double digit percentage of their revenue (my hat's off to Google for that). Apple cannot produce their hardware anywhere else in the world at the scale and quality level that they are currently getting from China. I am saying this as someone who has a good amount of insight into how the Chinese production capability compares to other parts of the world.
His fiduciary responsibility was to do what's best for the company. If he stepped down, it would have taken no time to find the next guy who would have happily done what's best for the company (except less well). So really, it's entirely inevitable.
If you buy into the last sentence, you might want to ask yourself what the long-term future of a capitalist society looks like when it's economically attacked by a very capable totalitarian regime that can think strategically rather than being beholden to the capital markets.
Every country should be concerned that the money flying out to megacorps does not result in long term value for the country.
China, Russia, and the USA all work much the same way.
1. The American government is the government where Apple has its HQ and most of its employees and C level.
2. The American government is not as bad as the Chinese government.
This is the purpose of a national trade deal, so an American company has the weight of the US government for contract enforcement with foreign entities, regardless of size or influence, and so all American companies operate on a level playing field with regard to US law.
How different is this from the 1980's in the U.S., when Japanese auto makers decided that they needed to start building cars in America, and otherwise placating American politicians and voters with big piles of money?
Do you have information to the contrary? Or is your point merely to voice anger at China, the CCP, Apple, and/or Mr. Cook?
The phrase is also very commonly used to refer to money paid to government officials who are corrupt. One could still quibble over whether this is technically “corruption” since it might very well be totally legal and encouraged under Chinese law, but I think the usage of the phrase here is quite suitable.
Using power to gain unfair advantage.
So yes, this is protection money / bribe.
When the government of an established state violates human rights and international law (like the Geneva Convention), I don't think it's incorrect to call that government a criminal organization.
2. traded seemingly unrelated investments aka you can build your computers if you invest in our SAAS
3. technology transfer may be a violation of us export controls
Its really not obvious if the Chinese win because it's an extremely opaque way to choose winners and losers.
Was it? Reading the article, the only 'secret' component was the lobbying, which is obviously done behind closed doors. Everything else is public commitments and public statements - which makes sense, since they were trying to pour oil on troubled chinese waters.
FWIW, western media often suggests stuff is 'secret' in china, because they can't read chinese, and all those orientals are awfully mysterious.
this is stupid.
BBC Chinese (https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp) have many Chinese/people who can speak/read/write Chinese.
large Western Media have Chinese staffs just like any large Chinese Media in China, HK or Taiwan with people capable of speak/read/write English.
* i.e. to be a journalist you have to go through intense ideological screening; extreme prohibitions on foreign journalists operating in china; complete prior restraint on ALL media (and all education, all printing presses, communication technology, etc.)
What English speaking media should one read to see this for themselves?
*may be* a violation. or maybe not in violation.
Historians generally agree that Martina Navratilova was rightfully and lawfully detained for insulting the Republican party.
And that it was important for Toyota to comply with US lawful interception requirements for any communication in automobiles.
What incident? What insult? What historians?
That's as far as I got, I can't figure out what point the comment is trying to make.
A possible difference I was suggesting is that Apple is being required to do things such as storing data locally not only for business reasons related to local industry, as the parent post had suggested, but also to enable surveillance of political dissidents, suppression of criticism of the government, etc..
Perhaps I should have picked John McEnroe as he might be more recognizable, but as I understand it Navratilova was a women's tennis #1 in the 1980s who actually did criticize the Republican party (and the US government) so I thought it might be an interesting comparison.
Are you just stringing random words together to create sentences?
The most likely driving reason for requiring Apple to maintain iCloud data in local datacenters in mainland China rather than offshore (as it had done previously) is to facilitate data access by local investigative authorities.
Companies make investments in countries all the time for concessions on reduced taxes, streamlined approvals, etc... When Apple wanted to enter India's markets in a bigger way, they agreed to build a factory there. What is the difference? This is just how big business is done all over the world. I'm not making a judgement about whether this is good or bad, I just don't get all of the outrage and surprise over a process that is far from unusual.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59595952 https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/09/china/uyghur-tribunal-jud...
Steve built his company to dissent when Apple started to drift too far from those values it proudly puts on its front page, still. It’s fraud to have those up now, imo
Let’s put down the kool-aid for a sec and agree that enough is enough.
A coward dies a thousand deaths but a valiant man dies once.
Justifying any entity participating in blatant genocide is cowardice.
That is to say - unless you have a planet-wide blind spot, this title evokes the same emotional response as, say, "JD.com signed RMB 275B deal with US corporations in 2016".
Average? Average in billionaires? Etc etc.
Did not tip very well, what does that even mean.
For example, maybe he is just stopping by, haven't use much of the waiters time, and thought it's OK
Or maybe he thinks the service was poor
Or even you just misremembering the details...
What conditions are there outside of China?
Has Apple agreed to behave differently in the US, censoring apps or content or disadvantaging competitors?
Don't be so naive.
1. In order for US/international companies to survive in China/Russia/heavily censored countries or regions, they have to comply to local laws. Otherwise they are blocked or shutdown completely.
2. Despite having to comply, most of the times these large global companies have some power to fight back, negotiate and find middle grounds.
3. Having a presence is critical for the sake of the local people to seek information. Having Google censoring the search results would be 100x better than having Baidu willingly fake it. Having Apple fighting for all the information requests is 100x better than having local giants like Tencent and Huawei willingly building monitoring and censoring capabilities for all users.
Without the presence, the people in these regions and countries have no choice. They don't have ways to access even censored information or knowing about the censorship at all. They will be fed with much more twisted information. Companies like Apple are doing their best negotiating and fighting back. Maybe they have to comply with 10% of demands, but the local alternative will do 100% in a blink of eye. And ironically they are the target of blame in both China and the US. It is not fair to them.
Would you rather have someone fighting for the people, or would you want them to be like North Korea where nobody outside can get in?
I'm for the "we're for human rights above profits even if it means we don't do business at all in your totalitarian country" camp.
> or would you want them to be like North Korea where nobody outside can get in?
How many people are actually trying to or even want to get into NK? How many would like to leave?
2) FWIW, to reply to that anyway: while this article is not about this, Apple does go far out of their way to make themselves a bottleneck that would be subject to these laws in the first place.
As a trivial example of this, Apple blocks VPNs from being installed on end user phones by not hosting them in their store and additionally requiring a special entitlement that requires a paid developer account (so you can't code your own VPN and install it yourself).
Now, you can claim this is them "complying with local laws" (though I bet if you actually looked they are going well above and beyond the call of duty here), but that is frankly a "shit take" as it fails to explain how every Android phone sold in China DOES allow you to install VPN apps: sure, Google doesn't host them for you, but they let you sideload anything you want (including a VPN).
The reality is that Apple has uniquely decided to build a completely-centrally-controlled ecosystem where they CAN block you from installing a VPN on "your" phone, while Google did the morally-reasonable decision that happens to avoid them becoming a tool of authoritarian regimes.
2) This is not true. Apple used to allow VPN apps on the Chinese App Store up until one day several years ago that they couldn't fight it any more and were forced to take all of them down. It is not Apple going far beyond what was requested/needed to stay in business, they have zero incentive to do so unlike the local Chinese competitors who go all out on "precautious" censorship.
It is the same with Android - No VPN apps can be found from ANY app stores in China (Google Playstore is not even available in China). The only reason you can install an VPN app is via an .apk file and this is due to the technical design by Android vs. a closed ecosystem like Apple App Store. I don't think you can say a closed-source system is less morally reasonable at all. There are 10x or more malicious apps that steal user data on Android than Apple App Store due to lack of control and verification. It is just a consequence of two different technical design approaches.
Technically speaking, Chinese Android phone companies could just block 3rd-party apk installation anytime they want in the name of security (They already do that by default) and 99% users won't know how to circumvent it.
3) My entire post is actually trying to make a point that you, like most of the commenters in this thread, are idealists who vastly underestimate the value of being able to operate in these markets controlled by authoritarian regimes and reaching the end users.
Strategically, the most morally-reasonable way is to help the people in these countries by actually trying to be present even under severe pressures from the regimes to comply with their demands.
For example, Google's exit from China is actually a huge mistake. It is the best case scenario for the Chinese government and local Chinese competitors and worst case scenario for the Chinese people, Google and the rest of the free world. After the exit, Google handed their leading search engine market share to Baidu, which provides a much more proactively censored and twisted version of the search results, and the Chinese government gained complete control over the search engines. What used to take a lot of back and forth with Google to censor certain small things, is now a simple phone call to Baidu's Government Relations department to get the whole category wiped out.
Same thing happened with Android in China. You think the open-sourced model would bring any less censorship? Not at all. All of the Android App Stores in China are owned and controlled by local companies who comply 100% to government requests. And god knows how many malicious apps are in those app stores to eavesdrop users' private information. It is actually much harder to achieve the same effect with Apple's closed App Store and privacy features. You can buy 3rd party services to track the ID and location history of almost every Android phone sold in China, but this is not available for iPhone users.
So before you blame Apple for being a tool, in reality, they actually contribute much more to the freedom and privacy of the end users in these authoritarian markets. Without Apple, 100% phones would be tapped and there is little hurdle for these local governments to do whatever they want with the local companies.
Obviously, I understood this, right? This was the entire reason I can make a point I about how Apple decided to go down an immoral technical design with the goal of making more money than can be morally justified, because we know there were common alternative designs.
> Technically speaking, Chinese Android phone companies could just block 3rd-party apk installation anytime they want in the name of security (They already do that by default) and 99% users won't know how to circumvent it.
And yet, they don't.
I guess the big problem I have with your comment (the original one also) is that there is a certain scenario where you think you have a great point, and the idea that the other people arguing here or the article we are reading might not fit your enemy template is I guess so confusing or maybe frustrating that you are willing to just start smashing reality until it fits.
That you are pulling out theoretical futures here to fix your narrative is then telling: that Chinese companies could change something... well, a big part of my point is that they have not already changed something, and we can thereby use that to understand the boundary of what the law in China--not just the written ones but anything unwritten as well--are actually saying.
The reality is that, as far it seems both of us know, the only company with much marketshare--INCLUDING OF THE ONES IN CHINA--that outright block your ability to install VPNs on their phones is Apple. This is because Apple has gone to great lengths to design a system where all data and control over hardware is centrally managed by Apple, which causes problems the world over.
> Strategically, the most morally-reasonable way is to help the people in these countries by actually trying to be present even under severe pressures from the regimes to comply with their demands.
Google didn't even leave China over moral reasons: they did it because China was directly messing with their data centers. It is a move that comes off to me as purely defensive. It thereby isn't at all clear to either myself or many of the other people posting here that Google actually cares to take a stance against China due only to some ethical stance.
But like, you do realize I wasn't applauding such an action, anyway, right? While I am not sure I would be against such, I don't actively think Apple should leave China over their inability to host VPNs... I think they should allow people to install VPNs that they don't host, because apparently that's currently allowed in China and the only reason I see that changing is if Apple sets such a strong precedent that it is even possible or reasonable to control an ecosystem from top to bottom that we lose the practical ability--likely throughout the entire world--to even own general purpose computers anymore.
> And god knows how many malicious apps are in those app stores to eavesdrop users' private information.
As for this whole argument path, you seem to be arguing that people don't deserve freedoms because they are... I guess, dumb? If we don't believe people should have freedoms anyway, maybe we should just accept that authoritarian regimes are a force of good? I mean, the Chinese government is going to make tons of similar arguments about the good they are doing. Could it just be that you are pro-authoritarianism? :(
Regardless, you here claim that the possibility of malware people might accidentally install on these devices is somehow a 100% (a number you use later) guarantee of surveillance but ignore that Apple is just handing their centralized collection of user data to China anyway via stuff like iCloud (which is absolutely "in scope" if "users are dumb and will install malware is"... we can't make decisions based on the idea that elites running tech companies have the job of being smarter than the unwashed masses: down that road likes authoritarianism).
At this point I felt I should maybe dig into your comment history to try to better understand whatever your position here result is, and in the process of digging through a hunger of pro-censorship positions and defenses of Apple ( I came across something fascinating from a mere three months ago: you are against Apple's CSAM work (which I would expect you to be for, given your arguments here, as it is essentially the exact same scenario).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28230499
> This part is legit though: governments around the world could pressure Apple to add other forms of surveillance. Be it hashes of non-CSAM, or simply pressure NEMEC or other hash providers, or extending its capabilities to all messages or photos on device. > In my opinion, this is the biggest concern, not the technology. Before, Apple could simply refuse by saying we don't have the capabilities. But now, that excuse is gone. Apple's promise to human review content and only report CSAM is the weakest link.
^ This. This is you making my EXACT ARGUMENT for why having centrally managed software distribution is bad: that once you build such a mechanism, "governments around the world could pressure Apple to add other forms of surveillance" by using that mechanism you didn't have to build, and which all but a totalitarian regime (North Korea) would never force you to have built. "Before, Apple could simply refuse by saying we don't have the capabilities. But now, that excuse is gone. Apple's promise to human review content and only [block scams] is the weakest link."
Here is a talk I have at Mozilla Privacy Labs about centralization and the evils thereof, which attempts to link together a ton of these kinds of thoughts. Maybe it would be helpful to sit back and really consider your positions and whether they are at all consistent :(.