The Trump administration has just announced that smartphones and computers will be exempted from the 145% China tariffs.
This is good news. Tariffs are certainly one way to shoot an otherwise healthy economy in the foot. Trump was about to blow off both feet with a double-barrel shotgun.
As I pointed out in an earlier post: Apple has screwed the pooch, anyway, in a manner of speaking, by placing the majority of its manufacturing in China. I’m not saying that they have to make all their products in Ohio. But making 90% of iPhones in a quasi-hostile state is textbook corporate tomfoolery.
And that’s not all. The iPhone production process (much as I love my new iPhone 16!) is also a textbook example of corporate greed. I recently read The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant. As Merchant details in the book, Apple has become overly reliant on an outdated manual assembly process that literally cannot function without thousands of low-wage workers who are driven to extremes by tyrannical bosses in China-based supplier plants. (Read Merchant’s book for a detailed explanation of all this.)
Nevertheless, there is always a gap between what “should” be, and what is. Apple and other tech companies have been given a reprieve on China tariffs. They should use that reprieve to figure out how to make their products without relying on slave-wage labor. Have these highly paid, genius CEOs ever heard of automation, perchance?
-ET