Sorta feels like that's the direction things are headed anyways. China wants to bolster their own tech market and make themselves look strong without any foreign reliance. If you give Apple a choice between China or the rest of the world, they're not going to pick China for manufacturing favors anymore.
It's probably not China's preferred option, but whether they like it or not there's going to come a point where business relationships reach a tipping point and Apple will have to pick sides.
> If you give Apple a choice between China or the rest of the world, they're not going to pick China for manufacturing favors anymore.
> It's probably not China's preferred option, but whether they like it or not there's going to come a point where business relationships reach a tipping point and Apple will have to pick sides.
If you make Apple choose, they're probably going to get fucked, because (at this point) they can't not pick China: they're too invested and too dependent.
I read a long-form article maybe a year ago that talked about how Apple's efforts to reduce their dependence on China haven't been very effective.
But personally, I think forcing them to choose would be the right call. Tanking their share price and forcing them to burn their savings trying to save the company would send a strong message.
They could burn 200% of their savings and not make a dent: there would be no trying to save the company, most likely they'd just close up shop. For example, here's Tim Cook talking about the depth of China's labor pool in tooling engineers[1]. Basically saying that in the US, as an example, you could gather all the tooling engineers in the country and maybe fill a room. In China you could fill multiple football fields. For manufacturers, decoupling from that talent pool would take a multi-generation government-backed effort to train a minimal amount of domestic labor. It's not going to happen in a couple election cycles.
The company could persist, it would just have to look different. Apple's growth was not natural, enabled by high-margin hardware sales and high-volume service revenue. If both of those are going away, they need a pivot towards low-risk products that customers actually want to buy. More iPod and less Vision Pro.
It would be remarkably sad if America's largest tech company was rendered non-functional without Chinese labor to exploit. If Apple's fate is to close up shop without anticompetitive levels of market control, I guess they deserve what's coming to them.
It's probably not China's preferred option, but whether they like it or not there's going to come a point where business relationships reach a tipping point and Apple will have to pick sides.