Update on Supply of iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max
apple.com
apple.com
Do we know what’s now changed?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/02/apple-iphone-assembly-plant-...
From different news outlets and youtube channels that cover china's zero covid policy I feel the statement above referring to the health and safety of the Foxconn workers is pure PR puff.
I really like this youtube channel call China Insights witch gives some decent information on this exact Foxconn issues and how the workers are fleeing the lock-down.
1. Workers only get food if they show up for their shift. If they are sick and don't work, there is no place to get food in the Foxconn campus. Due to the lockdown, the workers can't order food delivered online if sick.
2. When local governments force people to quarantine, they are supposed to provide basic meals. However, it seems most workers who were quarantined recently did not receive any food or water for days because the local government expected Foxconn to provide it instead.
3. Someone made a viral video suggesting everyone who was quarantined in a dormitory room died of a new deadly disease.
This is now just routine, very easy way to get views (courtesy government of some country that chose to hush the beginnings of a pandemic).
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/fearing-covid-workers-flee-f...
These sources include some dramatic video:
https://nypost.com/2022/10/31/chinese-workers-jump-fence-to-...
https://hongkongfp.com/2022/11/05/we-were-scared-workers-at-...
https://nitter.net/StephenMcDonell/status/158663367115021107...
It looks very disturbing to see them hauling their luggage (why do they have luggage at their place of employment?) out of something that I can only interpret to look like a prison.
Because it's also their place of residence.
I thought the concept of company towns was more financial and economic slavery, eg your company gives you a mortgage to a buy a house from the company, all near work so you can work long hours, and you're essentially an indentured servant.
But this is actual slavery, these people are literally locked in and can't leave except by crawling over barbed wire fences.
It was so crazy.
In other cities authorities literally welded doors and cut small windows: https://newtimes.kz/storage/news/news/2020/04/05/5e8973f787b...
Thankfully this hysteria did not last long.
The real question is why these factories are built in the middle of nowhere. There's no clear need for it; no reason they couldn't just be built in cities. They're not heavy industrial polluters or anything that would make people not want them in city limits.
Japanese companies also own worker housing, sometimes even owning the CEO’s house (as a way of making his wages look lower). Some of them are also abusive, doesn’t mean they all are.
- Foxconn workers have to walk on highways for hundreds of miles with their luggage to go back home
- Villagers nearby set up free food and water distribution stalls en route
- Some scoundrels steal all the food and water
- The thief are forcibly sent to quarantine because they are now classified as close contacts to COVID positives
For anyone wondering why: It it because they are labeled as COVID close contact by health code system, so they cannot take public transport system even they have enough money.
But someone within 10km of home is scarcely a 'migrant worker' - you could start in south Mumbai, walk 30km north, and still be in Mumbai :)
- Zhengzhou Foxconn Factory: 10,000+ workers flee covid lockdown/Apple iPhone Production Plunges (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9DXebls8Bc)
- Zhengzhou Foxconn workers keep on fleeing and now China locks down area around 'iPhone city' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hKBAeie5wY)
Are they twisting the truth? It is difficult to say without corroborated information that poses an alternate read of the facts.
Is it cherry picking information? Almost certainly.
If you trust the translation in the voice overs or subtitles and the sources of the videos themselves, there is still a lot of material there.
Spotlight on China is another that has news about China's economics / industry / politics for outside of China consumption that doesn't appear to be state media.
If it were that bad, Apple would have said something more in their press release.
If things get worse, there will be another press release.
Supply might be good for now but there's consequences in the near term.
Because Apple didn't upgrade the CPU in the non-pro this year the iPhone 13 Pro is still the better device.
An iPhone 14 plus barely fits 100% in some tighter pockets on jeans/trousers and gives significant restriction in movement and comfort. YMMV.
Mens' clothes have adapted significantly over the past 15 years to accommodate growing devices - it's just happened slowly enough that it's hard to notice.
Modern jeans are made with deeper front pockets; and a lot of sportswear has added/redesigned pockets. I have running clothes from 20 years ago with nothing but a space for some keys, and others with only shallow pockets with no button or zip - hardly suitable for carrying a $1000 phone! Modern running clothes often add a large, zipped, sweat-proof pocket specifically designed for carrying a phone.
People's experience of this will vary with their style preferences, naturally - nothing modern exceeds the pockets on a 1990s pair of cargo pants or JCNO jeans! And if you update your clothes regularly, your entire wardrobe might have gained large pockets without you noticing.
Yes, never understood them either. It's no issue to sit with a phone and wallet in the pocket/backpockets. This is more of a The Princess and the Pea-style issue than a real problem....
My iphone 7 fits ok-ish in my front pokets if I stand but I have to adjust it and pull it down when I want to sit. It's the main reason why I was looking at the 13 mini as opposed to the regular.
As for a coat/suit jacket I can always tell when someone has a large phone in their suit jacket pocket. If you care about that sort of thing it really ruins the line and drape of the jacket.
Based on FY22 total net sales[1], the entire Mac category accounted for 10.2%, whereas iPhone category accounted for 52.1%.
In other words, if iPhone production volume were reduced by just -10% of FY22 levels going into the holidays, that would be equivalent to half of Mac revenue!
The press release was making forward-looking statements so you may be correct, but this thought experiment suggests that even if they were experiencing Mac throughput issues, it's almost irrelevant if the same facility is being shared with iPhone production.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/0000320193220...
I imagine it's politically difficult. If they open the floodgates, it's going to be worse than for most other countries because they haven't had a chance to build natural immunity from exposure, only from vaccines. And any wave of infections is going to be seen as a failure of zero-covid, making the hardships of it meaningless; a failure of the party.
I'm not sure how they are going to get out of it without letting some heads roll. Maybe a wonder vaccine that will make all of China immune.
I think one problem in China is that old people have resisted being vaccinated because they don’t trust the authorities. And old people are obviously the most at risk of dying or being seriously ill. It’s a made in China problem, for sure.
It’s really quite amazing China hasn’t forced them to vaccinate.
Nada.
The first thing he after he arrived in the US was to get vaccinated.
Perhaps you have evidence that Sinovax works?
If they end zero-covid policy it's admitting they were wrong and that its failed.
On the flip side their covid vaccine has also being a failure.
I think this is the bigger one -- studies indicate it's not nearly as effective as the western (mRNA) Covid shots, but China refuses to use the western shots. If they open the floodgates and (to absolutely no one's surprise) death rates spike, it proves that the Chinese shot was indeed mostly useless.
Implementing strict hygiene precautions is still important - especially in dense populated regions and at work places with close contact. But this isolation at all costs and without taking proper care for the isolated, is just a disaster. Especially, if it can only slow down the spread, but no longer contain it.
Note that you can't get immunity from exposure without .. being exposed, which means you get the side effects of exposure.
More likely these are new developments and Apple just heard of them relatively recently, keeping in mind that it's already Monday morning in China.
This is also quite likely retaliation from China for Biden's latest trade war actions. Apple, is after all, one of two major US companies whose share price has not been turned into rubble. Doing this days before Midterms, knowing how desperate the Democrats are, is perfect timing. If Apple's share price falls drastically, it will be headline news and will likely also materially impact most indexes.
What's the other major US company whose share price hasn't been rubble-ized? Why Tesla of course. And their biggest and - most likely - only profitable factory is in China.
When companies want to bury the news, they release it on Friday. It's called "taking out the trash."
/Former journo
They didn't have one. OK, I asked -- did they know anyone who did? "No clue, you might want to call Apple Support."
Doing so revealed that there were none of these available anywhere, and the schedule on which they were projected to be available was early July.
Fortunately, I had two fallbacks:
(1) I was traveling in metro LA, which meant that I could check craigslist or FB marketplace or whatever and maybe a handful of 15mm Angelinos would have something up for sale.
(2) The MBP charged via USB-C so presumably I could find anything that could deliver 96W or thereabouts and use it.
Option #1 panned out, but it was still a flashbulb moment for me indicating that we're not exactly in familiar territory economically. It isn't just consumption goods that are sometimes scarce, this was a key piece of equipment the lack of which might have interrupted my productive capacity entirely or forced the cost/adaptation of entirely new substitutes.
Do macs let you trickle charge at lower power? If that works, you could limp along with any USB-C charger.
If you are curious about what works with what, there is a YouTube channel called ChargerLab that tests different devices plugged into different chargers.
Anker chargers work fairly reliably, are more easily available than Apple chargers (on Amazon etc.) and there are several options for 100W+ PD available.
Depending on the workload and model of computer, 96W can absolutely be required, and a lower wattage inadequate. The new PD spec allows for up to 240w, with special cables required.
96W of drain will use up the maximum-size laptop battery in a single hour. It's not necessary.
When I work in blender, especially in larger scenes, it's necessary. When I play games, it's necessary. When I run a long build in Unity, with a render pipeline stage, and the fans kick on, and I'm maxing out my laptop running 120w+, it's not even adequate.
There's a reason the new PD spec goes up to 240w (2.5x 96w), and it's not because they felt like it - playing games absolutely is a workload that requires it.
It's not necessary, for you. For those of us who do more than edit text files, it's extremely necessary.
An hour or so later I realized I was accidentally using my girlfriend's macbook air charging brick. It couldn't keep up, but it was supplying as much energy as it was able to
Since Apple has supported USB-C charging, I buy generic chargers with a cord-brick-cord arrangement, as these are much easier to hide in the cable tray of the desk. They're also about a third of the price, and have proper cable grommets so they last longer.
I had a similar experience.
I ordered a MacBook Pro charger August 2, and didn't receive it until October 13.
Luckily, I was just buying a spare, so I didn't need it urgently. But when shopping for anything these days, if I see it, I get it because it may not be available tomorrow, and may take weeks to arrive.
Heck, I ordered a Target gift card last week to give a a gift, and it's not expected to arrive until just before Thanksgiving. And it's just a gift card!
Charger $25: https://www.ebay.com/itm/353767632151
AC to 12VDC converter $6: https://www.ebay.com/itm/381560744533
I only need one power cord, one dock, one USB-C monitor, for all of them. It's great.
My phone uses Lightning but I don't really mind. I have so many Lightning cables and USB ports in my computers and docks and outlets and powerstrips...
I don't know what you do with your MBP, but for 15W charges up overnight and holds battery level or even slowly charges while being used. If you're transcoding something or gaming perhaps you could get it to slowly discharge.
The most sure fire way to kill the battery is fire up an IDE and do any sort of software development. Introspection, compilation, specs, etc all take up a bunch of battery.
With that being said, you certainly don't need 100W for a laptop. In fact, I'm not even sure my Mac can cool itself appropriately with high CPU usage and 50W of power.
Most people could get through a full day with a 15W charger. Laptop might be nearly dead at the end of the day, but 15W will fill it back up over night.
The other day I even accidentally left Factorio running because I got distracted getting my kid ready for school, and I hadn't noticed until a few hours later in a meeting when I heard the technology research sound. It was not plugged in the entire time, and I still had at least half the battery life.
https://www.ravpower.com/products/rp-pc151-100w-2-usb-c-port...
When I got it it was closer to $50, though, and not $70.
I use a Gigabyte M28U monitor, which has 16W of charge. Pathetically low, but as long as I'm not compiling anything or running any especially heavy processes, it keeps my battery from draining! Clamshell results in a slow charge.
Tried buying HVAC supplies recently? Flex duct has been very difficult to get for the past year, as have many other supplies and of course, the HVAC units themselves. I think Mitsubishi is still quoting next year for many of their products. Some areas even relaxed their energy codes (e.g. allowing R6 duct instead of R8) because of the shortages.
a lot of cities and towns are just not back, at all. they’re trying to have a bustling life but many local staples are closed, shuttered, resources strained. Opening hours just wrong and unknown, current existence of the place also unknown.
US, around Europe
kinda too bad. but yes unfamiliar territory economically
Every single thing I own and need to function on a daily basis (other than my immersion water boiler for otg-espresso) operates on USB. Preferably type-c, but plenty of things still need a USB-A-to-C in the mix because resistors are hard, I guess.
Also, open hardware hackers,, my trimmer and touthbrush are basically internally identical. An we please make these inter hangeable?
Using a "thin-client" laptop with cheap default -cafe alliances d chesap ones means I can live out of a bag, using redundant chargers - either a tiny 45w charger that literally fits in my bu^H^H pocket, or charge my laptop, phone and Ledger using a 100W charger that is barely more than double the physical-size of the smaller charger.
It completely surprised me that even the official store serving a city of millions had such a limited inventory. And it's not even like it's an esoteric product, the 30W comes standard with all new Air laptops!
(They did say they get shipments from the US daily and could have one delivered the following day if they happened to be out, but I wanted to avoid another hr+ trek that way if possible. I've heard of JIT inventory managememt, but to keep it THAT thin at such a major retail location really blew me away!)
^Some had lower wattage Apple chargers, but not a single one had 30W or above.
It’s not the color I wanted per se, but my old phone wasn’t working well for my needs and I figured continued supply chain issues would linger for awhile.
It’s only a matter a time before Apple starts making hardware closer to home en masse. Home, of course, being “not just in China.”
The era of de-globalization is upon us.
Once there's no real reason for them to play nice with the west, we're going to see more problems.
While extracting and exporting every ounce of oil the US has. The profit made goes into Nuclear and Renewable Energy.
Next we Annex Canada and Mexico to further build out US infrastructure. We will dub this the Nation of North America.
we are cool for awhile
The majority of their population is beyond the child bearing age so it's downhill from here no matter what policies they put in place, there's going to be a major population crash for them in the next 30 years.
Else...I'm sure Xi would've done it already.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101677/population-distr...
However this is just the beginning. After that, assuming worst case labour practices, you have another 10-15 years of supporting increasingly expensive unproductive citizens before they can even start to pay back the costs on society they incurred by being born. It's a long slow road...
(and yes Stephenson is a genius)
How the one child policy was allowed to happen is a mystery to me - surely someone saw this coming?
What's new? They're not playing nice since Xi took over.
Somewhat, but a lot is just diversifying away from China.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/09/30/apple-will-take-a...
Forecasts are that China wants to forcibly reclaim Taiwan much sooner than anticipated. And maybe they are confident that China wouldn't retaliate against them but surely that's not a risk worth taking.
Foxconn has been asked to ramp up production in India but not sure if you would call it a success or not.
Shenzen is like that. Everything you need for electronics manufacturing of nearly anything is located in the city. This means that if part of the supply chain is disrupted in normal times, you could go get the same part from somewhere else not far away.
Today, the United States auto manufacturing isn't that way... and frankly it isn't even fair to say "United States auto manufacturing" - https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.corvetteforum.com-vbulletin...
So, here's the problem that Anyone building an iPhone would have - where do you get the capacitors on the board from? how much lead time do you need to keep the supply going? What happens if the supplier isn't able to send them? How big of an industrial base do you need to make all the parts and how distributed is that industrial base?
If I'm running a PCB assembly line and my primary supplier of surface mount capacitors is the only guy within 50 miles, where do I get replacements from if something happens like there's a fire in his factory and it goes offline? In Shenzhen you go to the next guy down the street who's selling the exact same part.
So instead of being down for three days while finding a way to get an additional supplies airlifted in you can have probably have another supplier up and going before you run out of what's left in the lean manufacturing pipeline.
Before making the move to any labor market concerns like those have to be addressed or at least the risks mitigated. That takes time and costs serious money. As the SMT industry ramps up in more locations it'll be easier to diversify assembly locations.
Possibly because they've got a former CFO running the company which causes a myopic view towards profit rather than interesting hardware development. The age of apple dropping new product idea after new product idea is long past.
A finance-oriented CEO that is concerned with profits should be more concerned with instability and risk, compared to a product oriented CEO who would be concerned about the next hot thing.
And frankly I don't see Pegatron, Wistron, and Foxconn being too eager to do this. I've heard they're already dragging their feet.
These terms should not be used interchangeably, the meaning is totally different. You expect to see financial returns from investment
If you have deeper pockets, you could subsidise your products to bancrupt competitors, a technique called dumping.
EU subsidised renewables to enable renewable tech development - a worthy goal, but not an investment. UK founded the Green Investment bank, it did actual investment into R&D and construction. Same goal, but one us subsidy, one is investment.
US corn subsidies no longer make any sense - but cannot be removed because it would piss off a major voting block. If you were to su sidise farming from scratch, you would at least pick a variety of plants to make a balanced meal nutritionally
Considering that we’re talking about Apple subsidizing factories to diversify its supply chain, do you think we’re talking about humanitarian and political subsidies at all? I’m sorry but it seems that people are deliberately being obtuse here.
Is COVID still impacting work in China?
https://www.politico.eu/article/china-maintain-zero-covid-po...
Yes. Covid is still impacting work in China.
Are their vaccines as effective? New variants?
Their own vaccine didn't work with the newer variants, RNA stuff worked.
It was too late to undo the lobbying they did in the first place. Now lockdowns are their only option to stop a pandemic. On the other hand the lockdowns are so strict that people are dying because of them (no food, medicine, etc. Doors physically welded shut)
What’s crazy is this idea that just because the rest of the world has given up on stopping Covid, that China should just let it rip. That would be devastating to China, why would they do that? Even if you don’t care about the death and disability, it doesn’t make economic sense. Temporary targeted lockdowns are less damaging to the Chinese economy in both the short and long term than rampant death and disability.
To let people get on with life.
The people of the world overwhelmingly voted to get back to life even though COVID hasn't gone away.
China's people want to do the same, but Xi doesn't care, that's the only reason this policy still exists.
It comes down to not giving a shit about what your citizens want.
But people in China are getting on with life. Lockdowns are the exception, not the rule.
You’re also ignoring the millions of people that would die or become disabled. That’s not “getting on with life”, that’s the opposite.
> The people of the world overwhelmingly voted to get back to life even though COVID hasn't gone away.
No they didn’t. Those were decisions governments made, there was no vote. They were also decisions made after Covid became endemic in those countries. The consequences for China to let it rip when hardly anybody in China has had Covid are entirely different to the consequences for other countries to let it rip when it’s already endemic. China isn’t in that position so why would they make decisions as if they were when the consequences are so different?
> China's people want to do the same
How have you determined that?
These people have a negative impact on the economy.
Do you have a citation for that? There’s a big jump in mortality at age 50+, but that’s not the same thing as “the vast majority are bedridden people on their last legs”.
Also, death is only part of the problem. Long Covid affects people of all ages. A typical twenty-something factory worker might not die of Covid, but that doesn’t mean long Covid can’t make them economically inactive.
So what's the criterion for an exit from Zero COVID?
[1] and China is at around 90% vaccination. They might not be good vaccinations, though. But assume, for the sake of the argument, it had the population vaccinated as well as possible.
Majority are 80+ and will disproportionately by the more sickly of those.
Don't have good enough data on long covid to discuss it.
How much does a life cost? In the rest of the world that basically failed to contain the virus, it wasn't a question to begin with, since lockdowns didn't really work. China was somewhat successful in its lockdowns because it had ways to enforce the admittedly draconian measures -- so, how much does a life cost?
About $3500: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
Used to be about $100 a couple of decades ago, but the low hanging fruit has been mostly picked by good people.
14 day quarantine in a state hotel, you're not allowed to leave the room. A further 7 day quarantine in another hotel though you're allowed to leave for work. Crazy.
COVID doesn't even matter.
I don’t know how they exit their zero COVID policy. Given how draconian they are in other respects I’m surprised it’s so hands off with respect to vaccination.
They're among the oldest populations in the world; using outdated vaccine technology; on a population that's the most dense in the world; and a governmental culture of understating statistics to make the party look good.
There's a patchwork of masking policies, which I've recently read are applied as arbitrarily as "you must apply your mask mid-flight when the airplane crosses over the international border of your destination to adhere to local covid policy" (this was for a large country in Asia).
Even in California there's still Covid Opening Instruction sheets pasted to all the doors. I even saw a new "please maintain 6 feet distance from others" sign in the grocery store today. It feels this modern parallel to abandoned soviet theme parks. Weird covid-era policies just there lurking from some eerie event in the past.
Also your claim that rules are not enforced because of a "leaked photo of a government official" lacks any reasoning and evidence.
Oh and the fact that airplane mask mandates were abandoned after over 2 years, just days after Scholz got his photo leaked? Total coincidence. Yup. Unsubstantiated. https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/ma...
Nobody was talking about horror. This is a very unobtrusive measure that is proven to be effective - not only against covid - that also protects vulnerable people that use public infrastructure. The benefit of masks is so evident, I don't even want to point to singular sources, so here you can see an overview: https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=masks+covid .
And to your second point, the logic of drawing conclusions from correlations is simply conspiracy level, no more.
Here in Germany people still freak out about it
A lot of tragedies happened during massive, brutal lockdown across the whole country. People are not getting paid, facing mental health difficulties, even food shortages when they are forced to stay at home. No COVID deaths, but a lot deceased. Chinese state media will not cover these. It's somewhat saddening that people get to know all these only when Apple cannot supply enough iPhones.
Apple stories get clicks, but there will be virtually no research on how China’s zero covid policy is the root cause, as it will be deemed “negative sentiment” which will get less CPM, or their content may even get demonetized. Modern “tech news” is a joke.
And percentage is most likely under-estimated as they're more likely to miss more asymptomatic cases than symptomatic cases.
So maybe they don't have a choice and that letting COVID run through whilst everyone could be effectively unvaccinated would quickly overwhelm their health care system and lead to mass death.
Xi very much cares about political stability and it would be pretty toxic if China has all of these troubles whilst the rest of the world has moved on.
... and then you get a visitor to Shanghai Disney testing positive and https://youtu.be/yioG7mK01U0
Realizing that I am delving into speculation, this sounds more like the refinement of establishing a police state where one can use "someone you came in contact with tested positive for Covid" and shutting down large segments of a city and sending people to government quarantine camps than a desire for political stability.
That being said it's not really clear what their exit plan is for zero-covid, as it cannot be sustained indefinitely.
Seems like a strawman to suggest that ending zero covid must mean going hands-off like "some western nations".
Also, "tens of millions" sounds like a lot, until you realize they have more than a billion in population.
In a vaccinated population, are you still saving tens of millions of lives? And what's the cost of locking people down? Here in the US lockdowns were much less thorough and I think we'll still be paying the price for decades wrt mental health + child development.
What would've been sensible for Xi is talking to and sharing information with the rest of the world and buying vaccines that work as well as those deployed in other countries.
Also, had he been more transparent about the origins of covid in the first place, we might all be ahead by now.
https://bioethics.georgetown.edu/2016/04/death-rate-is-120-p...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
Or is the idea that since people are going to die anyways there’s no need to try to save them?
Let's say if you shut down the entire economy, you're able to save exactly 1 life. Is this a worthwhile tradeoff? Probably not.
Now the question becomes, where do we draw the line on the number of "acceptable" deaths and the acceptable impact on the economy.
What it cares about is saving face and how it appears on the world stage.
Furthermore if you look at the number of physicians and hospitals, particularly in rural China, it’s clear they wouldn’t be able to effectively vaccinate nor treat the sick anyway.
Again, I do not believe zero Covid is a strategy that can be sustained, but I think for China it made sense for some period of time (though personally I think that time has passed).
But the CCP has a long history of just sweeping stuff under the rug unless it gets too hot to handle and does the bare minimum to make it go away.
I wish China was more open, if it was more willing to share information and accept help they may have a better vaccine, more people vaccinated, and more willing to drop zero covid policy while opening up knowing people will get sick but hospitals wont be overrun.
Here in Taiwan people are more or less going back to business as usual, everyone is vaccinated and while there's alot of covid cases now, hospitals are not overrun.
the economic consequences of covid interventions will lead to many more deaths, easily hundreds of thousands if not millions since globally the most vulnerable depends on other countries for resources, etc
To maybe prime the intuition pump, imagine a society that prohibits non-household interaction for 80 years. Do they save any lives? Nope, everyone dies in the end, aging is a thing. Is this place sufficiently worse to live in that 99% of people would rather lose a year of life than accept it? Yep.
Note that the direct shortening due to unvaccinated COVID is a few months.
Either China is dealing with another strain which doesn't seem super likely or their strategy defies logic. Maybe it's a way of suppressing political dissent. Who knows.
You need to look at the current death rate when comparing with Canada. Which is fairly low. If you're actually looking at the numbers keep in mind the criteria is quite broad in terms of what counts as a Covid19 death (e.g. anyone that had a positive Covid test within 30 days of death even if the cause of death was not related). Nobody knows for sure what's the death rate right now.
That said you do need to have the population vaccinated with a good vaccine. So I do agree China could fare worse than Canada.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Canada pretty ended all and any measures at this point in time. There's a range of responses between lock down an entire city for one case and no restrictions at all.
Another piece of supporting evidence: "Excess mortality fell nationally from the end of February and through the spring of 2022
From the end of February and through the spring of 2022, the weekly number of deaths in Canada fell generally within the range of what was expected had there been no pandemic. This same trend was observed in Ontario and Quebec, despite COVID-19 deaths in Quebec remaining high."
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220908/dq220...
But... If your point is that Canada got here by taking a fairly large number of deaths, ~47k (+/-) for a population of 38M and China avoided most of that (assuming we can trust their data, questionable) ... then I'll concede you have some point, but still - unsustainable. A lot of Canada's deaths happened before we had vaccines and presumably with a higher % amongst unvaccinated populations after.
Yes, TSMC 4nm is more complex from an electronics standpoint. But from a supply chain process standpoint, automotive is way more complex.
All of the best consumer electronic manufacturing sequencing and tooling is in China though, hence the problem we have today.
Tim Cook is a supply chain guy though, so I'm curious how he will approach and solve this problem.
Note that this isn't Ford, or GM that did it.. but rather Ford and GM and hundreds of smaller companies that supplied the raw materials to a company to make the parts that were used by companies that supplied the parts to the auto makers.
And so, yes, you could - but its not something that one company can do - or for that mater even has the competency to do for the same reason that Ford doesn't run steel mills.
The hard problem is economically rerouting the supply chain for the diverse set of parts and materials that go into these devices.
The challenge isn’t just building a factory.
I'm pretty sure that with a large enough investment Apple could make phones in the US for cheaper than they do in China (including the entire supply chain). The problem is big public companies live quarter to quarter.
There's definitely knowledge and IP to do this. I worked for a company that moved some manufacturing to China about 15 years ago. Everything about how to build the thing came from our engineers including redesigns based on materials/components that were more readily available in China. It would be no problem (but wouldn't make economic sense) to move production back here (Canada in this case) just as fast as it was moved to China (years ;) ).
I guess what I am getting at is that it's the only place on earth with such centralized infrastructure for making nearly anything, nothing is hard, nothing is far away, nothing is "not stocked here", it just makes for a much more convenient way to build products.
My experience "being there" was that I don't think you can replicate it easily. It has its own vibe, culture and way of Just Getting Shit Done that just feels unique.
Even today- I'm not in a real tech hub by any means but there are many injection molding places within a drive distance from me. There are also plenty of machine shops with CNCs. In the industrial area near where I live there are some major car parts manufacturers, they build yachts and more. Again, this isn't a major tech hub but you can probably make anything here, it's just gonna be very expensive.
I've heard a lot about Chinese manufacturing and I do get what you're saying. Yes it's pretty amazing today (which isn't just because of China's entrepreneurs, it's also western entrepreneurs helping create this ecosystem). But I think it's not impossible to replicate. It wouldn't be the same, we can move things relatively easily in North America, we don't need one dense city that does everything with workers living in factories. But we do need a lot more automation to replace humans.
I've never seen manufacturing in China in person but I have seen large scale manufacturing in Taiwan. A lot of that was designed/built by western companies.
In terms of costs ofcourse they're lower when you pay people less, when the living conditions are worse, when there's no worker protection, environmental or health and safety requirements...
While I'm rambling ;) another thing that we need to consider is just making better quality goods that last longer. Then "cheap" is less of a factor.
No matter where you live it almost certainly doesn't have anywhere close to the same density and variety of manufacturing hubs in China!
There's also the culture aspect, arguably more important. It can't be overstated. People get shit done in the order of minutes. We are talking as low as 30 minutes to go from factory to factory. There's a hustle and "get shit done" culture that simply isn't replicated in the West.
It's like asking, why does Silicon Valley exist in the Bay Area? Why can't it exist in Kansas, which also has people? - There's a unique culture and concentration of knowledge in the Bay Area. Offices for big tech companies are within minutes of each other, etc.
I recommend you go and see for yourself. It's really something that is very difficult to comprehend until you see it in person.
The irony of automation [1]: "the more sophisticated we make that automation, the more we become dependent on a highly skilled human operator"
A single company can move back but if all companies leave China, how do they get the skilled operators?
I think that's a bit of a myth. Apple should (and probably does) have the longterm view on this, I'd hope. And I'm pretty sure proper accounting would present the requisite massive investments in a light that shareholders do not disapprove of.
> I'm pretty sure that with a large enough investment Apple could make phones in the US for cheaper than they do in China (including the entire supply chain).
That I am not so sure. The infrastructure and resources available in China are tremendous.
A similar order would have taken about a month from Germany, at about twice the cost. Most of the US manufactures don't even take custom orders at our small scale.
Only other option would be a huge surge of immigration into the U.S. and I don’t think even $1 trillion can buy that kind of policy shift.
I think I have a few 4s from years ago someone threw out, I guess useless now and should be discarded before battery burns apartment down, imagine how many millions of other dead devices out there.
Are they going to just keep rolling, someday "iphone 37" like firefox/chrome versions?
Meanwhile still on same i5 PC build from 2012
Unless you are living under a rock, here are some dashboards you will find interesting
https://cea.nic.in/dashboard/?lang=en https://npp.gov.in/dashBoard/cp-map-dashboard
and water
https://ejalshakti.gov.in/jjmreport/JJMIndia.aspx
No place is perfect unless you are living in Utopian LaLa land or one has drunk too much KoolAid. There are problems which are being addressed by state / central governments.
In my home state of Kerala, there is plenty of Water and decent Hydel plants for power.So even the argument that you place is only tangentially accurate.
A combination of isolation of the manufacturing site, lockdown of the surrounding region, and some number of workers gone.
Strange.
Is that really true? Or do you mean endemic?
I guess fewer people I know are dying...
Cost? Logistics? Patents? Willpower?
Why put in place such a severe policy of forced internment, in response to very few cases, when cheap and plentiful vaccines are available?
(Never mind that mRNA vaccines have never been approved for use in China, which is mind-boggling, given that they're proven to be safe and effective for preventing serious illness or death from COVID-19.)
Sinovac may just not be that good over time, or maybe it’s just a pride thing in which we have a political leader staking heroic, superhuman claims on a Zero-COVID strategy.
https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2022/09/28/8-the-great-he...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/10/apple-reports-fourth-...
I was a little sad that the history boilerplate at the end starts off talking about the Macintosh in 1984, as if the Apple ][ never existed.
With the US squeezing China with sanctions it is only a matter of time before China retaliates against Apple. Politically, reducing pressure on China in the US is not tenable in this climate. We’re in a one way ratchet and Apple needs to diversify away from China as quickly as possible. Covid lockdowns in China ultimately provide a fantastic opportunity and official/formal face saving measure for Apple (and all other US manufacturers) to establish alternate supply chains without openly antagonizing China.
That's how the "advantage of low labor cost" works.
They had a choice to accept Pfizer and Moderna early on and chose not to. Now they're paying for it politically, socially, and epidemiologically.
With a $100B in cash sloshing around overseas, he’s had 6 years to be a genius.
It's the 1st time I'm considering a switch from Android to iOS.
It isn't just my perception either, the reviews all pointed out the battery to be lacking. Meanwhile, I charge my iPhone about once every 2 days (or once a day before i go to sleep, in case I am using it very heavily on that particular day).
No idea what the whole "better camera" complaint is either. Pretty much every in-depth technical review (by blogs/people who actually have knowledge of photography and camera tech) of iPhone 14 Pro camera laud it as great, which my personal experience confirms.
also, w.r.t camera, DXOmark rated pixel 7 pro more than iphone 14 pro max. even latest macrumours review (check comments of that review) shows pixel is clear winner for example, go and take moon pictures with your 6 pro and iphone 14 pro. tell me which one has moon vs white blob.
I pretty much don't at all, precisely for that reason. Just checked, and my average active screen time for the past 10 days was a tiny bit over 9hrs on iphone (because traveling, so i need it a lot for navigating around, coordinating stuff with other people, etc), and I was charging it before going to sleep (but it was not empty, it still had a decent amount of charge left). On my Pixel, back when i was using it, it was around 3hrs at the very most, and I would have to charge it midway through the day
If you are genuinely curious, please let me know. I can try using my Pixel as I would my iPhone tomorrow, and then report the results the day after that.
> go and take moon pictures with your 6 pro and iphone 14 pro. tell me which one has moon vs white blob.
Haven't tried that yet, but will do and report back along with the battery. Would heavy light pollution be a problem for taking moon pics? Because I am in theater district in Manhattan rn, and light pollution here is off the charts.
What does this have to do with iPhones?
China can't keep up their zero-COVID policy forever. While they keep trying, COVID is slowly becoming more and more virulent overseas due to our use of leaky vaccines.
Either they give up now, and deal with the fast-but-maybe-manageable wave of infections, or they wait until it evolves to be so infectious that it becomes totally unmanageable.
They're stretching a rubber band further and further while repeatedly mumbling something about a "not letting go policy".
E.g.: by the time a case is detected and a lockdown enforced, it'll have spread too far to contain. Rinse and repeat and there will be "hotspots" everywhere, impossible to contain.
Sure maybe at one time, perhaps early 2000's. Apple you can thank samsung for all the success you've had over the years. lets be frank!