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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

What no one's mentioned here is: this is an International Trade Commission ruling, not a US court or PTO ruling.

So Apple cannot import those watches. They could probably build them in the US (now there's a thought), and injunctions against domestic products are possible but very unusual. Usually there are damages, not injunctions.

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You make a small mistake, which is really the fault of reporters for not explaining the somewhat complex world of Article I tribunals. The "International Trade Commission" is more properly known as "The United States International Trade Commission", a creation of Congress to adjudicate a number of trade-related disputes. As an Article I Tribunal, all appeals are heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. And of course, that gives you a fast track to the Supreme Court if desired. The President may also unilaterally overturn rulings, as has been done by Presidents Reagan and Obama.

Apple can't build a factory to produce Apple Watches before the entire situation would be resolved. And if they could, it would be much more expensive to run compared to making it in Vietnam (where they make it now).

It would just be a stopgap solution.

I don't think anyone is seriously considering that, I think the broader point is that by outsourcing and being a tad greedy they have shot themselves in the foot inadvertently.

Of course, they'll have run the numbers and the cost of this fiasco is likely many-many orders of magnitude below the savings from using cheap labour.

They didn't shoot themselves in the foot, by any measure. If the watches were made in the US, Apple could still be sued in federal court for patent infringement. Masimo likely just filed in the ITC because it (correctly) gave them the most leverage (a sales injunction) for the smallest possible legal cost. Apple is going to appeal, so it's still going to get sorted out in federal court in any case.

it would only be a stopgap if they didn't keep the US plant open.

I'm sure almost every state in the US would offer incentives to locate the plant there.

They are made by Luxshare's China factory, its Vietnam factory probably are trying to ramp up to it. Given how short Luxshare as a company and its capabilities to take shares from Foxconn, ppl may have over estimated the difficulty there.

Doesn't FoxConn already have empty factories up north somewhere? [0]

[0]https://www.theverge.com/c/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-...

But that wouldn't vanish the patent issue?

It is wouldn't, but the ITC ruling is quicker to get than going to court for patent issues.

Which is exactly why Apple uses import bans to screw with competitors importing headphones.

It's that really even that bad of a thing for Apple? The appeal will go to federal court, which means at the end of the day it's just going to get sorted out by the court system more quickly.

Can we still manufacture electronics here, even if we wanted to? I thought all the expertise and machinery was outsourced a long time ago?

We can manufacture electronics here, though the exact details of the Apple Watch are probably not easy to accommodate. (The manufacturing engineers knew it would be built in China, so they chose parts and processes that are mature there. For example, if the requirement was for all the parts to be made in the US, then it would probably use an Intel chip, since those are made in the US. It probably wouldn't get 2 days of battery life if they used one of those, however.)

Actually, there's no need to be all US-only. It's only the finished article that can't be imported.

They may find a way around this - I believe it was only required to do two "manipulations" to have a US-created good. Some people were getting around tariffs that way.

Of course, a US court in West Texas could issue the same injunction as the ITC.

as I said, domestic injunctions are much less common.

> if the requirement was for all the parts to be made in the US, then it would probably use an Intel chip, since those are made in the US

Intel both has overseas fabs and contracts some parts to TSMC, especially for their latest processes.

I'm pretty sure the dies in Meteor Lake are of Irish and Taiwanese origin, and have nothing made in the US.

> Can we still manufacture electronics here, even if we wanted to? I thought all the expertise and machinery was outsourced a long time ago?

Yes. There's a bunch of industries that either can't or don't bother manufacturing in China. The majority of the military industrial complex and much of the biotech/medical equipment industry, among many others. The former for natsec reasons and the latter because even after 20 years QC is still a shitshow.

The problem is how spread out the industrial capacity is. In Shenzhen you can walk from the factory to a giant bazaar with every electronic part you could think of available to buy then and there in reel quantities. You can walk to any of hundreds of other factories and talk to the people on the floor to help design parts for their process. When the part is ready, they can courier it over to you within an hour.

The cost of labor doesn't help either but at Apple scale, US companies would figure it out.

Biotech/medtech is only a shitshow because it's typically small run. If the manufacturers actually committed resource they could achieve any outcome they desire. They are just passing the buck. (Source: Lived in Shenzhen for ages, had US friends managing the manufacturing of US medical devices, visited multiple times large factories producing biomed parts)

That was why I had the parenthetical there.

Yeah, it would cost them a boatload and introduce delays. Boo hoo, I feel so bad for them. /s

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