It's too bad startups can't invest $600B in local manufacturing to get a tariff carve out, right? Oh well, not like entrenching one of the largest companies on Earth even further could be damaging for the economy, competitiveness, or consumers.
> This is a large, measurable, and multi-year commitment. It should be acknowledged as such.
We'll see. The multi-year nature can be seen as a feature or a bug. The benefits are delivered today: tariff carve outs. The promises can be scaled back at any time in the future. We're dealing with what is likely to be an incredibly anomalous economic... "policy". It is likely to not stick around once the current administration leaves, and perhaps even during the course of the current administration. If tariffs go away in the future, then the threat (and reward) disappear along with it. We'll see how incentivized Apple is to keep these commitments under those conditions if they come about.
> Of course, Apple’s global tax practices remain a fair target. But criticising every constructive move on that basis alone risks undermining the very kind of behaviour governments should encourage: strategic reinvestment, not financial engineering.
It should always go without saying that there are ways to go about this that don't involve policies that hurt both consumers and small companies alike. The CHIPS act was one example, and the benefits were arguably more evenly distributed (vs. a set of investments that probably disproportionately help the existing market leader). This administration went out of their way to dismantle that. No conversation about this should leave that out.
> Critics may argue Apple is acting in self-interest. So be it.
Neither this administration nor Apple seem to really care much about this. This matters for the reasons above: it doesn't make this deal particularly resilient. Both parties got what they wanted immediately: Apple got to avoid an unexpected roadblock (and perhaps gained an advantage over other companies), and Trump gets to look like he got this great deal. So what's to keep it around? This is why aligning actual long term incentives matters, vs. this short term nonsense. A congressional bill for example at minimum has constituents who will benefit or punish the representative at the polls. But we don't even need to get that technical, if neither party cares or believes in this at all, then it is of course set up to default fail. This is not a trivial undertaking we are talking about. It's not just a matter of getting the right parties to invest. You are asking to dramatically change a set of pipelines that have been established over the course of decades and regularly receive equivalent amounts of investment. If you actually want this to happen, you should care about how it happens, and you should realize it matters if this is made up entirely of cynical players with no real demonstrable upside in the end result.