Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/26/trump-apple-wont-get-a-tari.html
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Hard to have sympathy. These tariffs are idiotic, but yeah, Apple isn’t going to get any crocodile tears from me. Their profit margins are so wide! It probably will have little effect on their bottom line, especially considering the Mac Pro is a small segment for them.
sent from my iPhone
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Move production to the States and people will still happily pay twice as much for the current iPhone or Mac Pro.
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This is not motivated by any specific animus toward Apple, but I think there should be NO waivers for any tariff, because EVERYONE needs to feel the pain of ⊥rump’s stupid trade war.
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I don’t know obout Apple’s profit margins. I don’t actually care. I really dislike Apple, and I won’t buy their products. Even so, Apple is the only truly American hardware computer company, and the orange idiot is punishing them. By his own words he should be helping these companies, not making life harder for them.
edit: capitalization
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He’s punishing them because he thinks liberals love them.
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Trump: Peter Thiel Gave me Money and Stroked my Ego so I’ll do Something he Wants
There, fixed the headline for you.
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I’m a liberal and I enjoy companies that DON’T censor the Kama Sutra in their store, or decide whether I’m allowed to repair my own machine. I also enjoy companies that pay their fair share of taxes, which Apple doesn’t. Apple uses the Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich tax shelter. I would rather have them pay taxes than not pay taxes and pay extra in tariffs.
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They could always manufacture the parts somewhere else… especially since they’ve been complaining about China ripping off their IP.
What would happen if China passed a $15/hr minimum wage law? Would companies like Apple still set up facilities there? Right now, it varies by district, but the national average min wage there is $0.98/hr in US dollars. Are we doing our workers a favor by setting the floor 7x higher here? If so, wouldn’t we also be doing them a favor by having tariffs to make it more costly for our manufacturers skirt our min wage laws to exploit foreign workers?
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I hate Trump, but I also hate made-in-China products and the Quislings-to-Democracy who outsource manufacturing, so i don’t know who to root for.
If every product had a Carbon tarrif – yes, this table from China is cheap, but the cost of the Co2 needed to get it here is added on – and a slave-labor tariff – this was made by someone making $.98 an hour, so we’re charging you the difference between that and a Federal $15-an-hour wage – we’d fix a lot of stupid, suicidal ‘growth’ in our moronic economy.
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I don’t recall anyone looking at the prior Mac Pro and saying “I’ll totally not complain about the high price because it is made in Texas!!”
I do recall a ton of people complaining that it was very expensive.
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Hard to tell, the cheap labor isn’t the only thing China has going for it.
It is also where most of the things are already made. Make a last minute design change that has to move a screw over 2mm and there isn’t as much space for it there so it is now .1mm narrower and no longer a standard size? 16 factories in China already make that size. In the USA? Zero. Almost everything in the iPhone is made by a multitude of factories in China, and in very few other places (the exceptions are the glass, corning makes that in multiple countries in eluding the USA, and the CPUs…oh never mind TSMC is actually in China (just not the mainland)).
The work force in China is also more willing to turn on a dime. Production plans get there at 2am? Great, the first shift on the production line is up and running at 2:15, maybe 2:30.
China has also continued to invest in factories. It is very possible that if the labor costs were equal here and there, that the parts cost would still be lower because the factories there are more modern. Then again maybe not because they have been designing them with low cost labor in mind. The factories there will tend no to have production lines breaking down as frequently though because they have been keeping up on mantiance while many factories here just can’t afford that so they run a plant until it dies and then the people who worked at it are out of jobs.
We also have many fewer people who know how to set up and run production lines, and do basic engineering tasks. I mean we have some sure, but no where near as many. So if the economics did suddenly shift and having factories here became economically viable we don’t have the capacity to actually staff them! Fixing this sort of problem is a multi year process (I won’t be so pessimistic as to say multi-decade, but in all honesty I don’t think under a decade is really viable, you need a long pipeline of people training, and then they need some on the job training from the few people we have that do it, and that is at least six years, and realistically everything goes a bit long, and I’m sure I left stuff out)
We have been transitioning away from a factory/manufacturing economy for decades. Shifting back isn’t the work of months, or even years.
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What are they spending the Trump Tariff Tax money on? Where does it g?
More interesting. What about all of the Trump merch and products made in China? Did his products get a waiver?
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If only there were some place in America where Apple could find children to work in factories for pennies, making their products.
Wait! Trump has a bunch of them in cages! Win/win!
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Even as an Apple user, I have no sympathy on them for this. They have a ton of cash-on-hand due to their tax-dodging ways (as others have pointed out).
But this highlights the fundamental cluelessness of the whole tariff policy.
@Stripes points out several of the issues. Three additional points:
- Some components are only available from Chinese vendors
- Some US-made products are regulated in such a way that changing component or subassembly vendors is difficult to impossible
- This tariff punishes the last remaining dominant area of US manufacturing: Engineering and assembly of high-value, high-performance specialty electronic hardware. Who gives a fig if you purchase a bunch of components or PCBAs from China, when you put it all together into a high-value, high-profit system designed and built by high-paid people? Tech hardware jobs are way better for employees and the economy (and the environment) than hydrocarbon extraction.
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Trump and his allies didn’t get their payola, therefore the tariffs stay. It’s that simple. Trump doesn’t, and never has, given a rat’s ass about “jobs for Americans”. I still can’t comprehend how anyone can take what he says at face value?!?
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He’s using it to build a wall between the US and China.
Huh, I didn’t realize that Apple had actually just moved production of the Mac Pro to China. They had been assembling their desktop machines in the US, previously. Though there’s the Trump tariff on parts, so they lose either way.
I wonder what the market is for desktop machines that cost as much as a new car…
Apparently a big reason why they moved production to China was because of a supply chain issue related to screws with the previous Mac Pros - it caused them a big headache, and the problem wouldn’t have even existed had they been assembling in China for those reasons.
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