I honestly don’t know how a government that insists on maintaining an embargo against a mostly harmless speck of an island off Florida can reconcile that with the fact of massive trade – indeed, massive economic indenturement, to be blunt – to the hugest Communist dictatorship in the world. Yes, Communist. Yes, dictatorship. Just because everydamnthing in this country is made in China, because businesses get moist in their special places at the thought of 1.2 billion future customers, we’re willing to overlook the fact that IT’S A GODDAMNED TOTALITARIAN STATE.
Speaking even more of phones, looking at Apple’s situation, it’s hard to argue that they – and the West generally – got played for suckers these last twenty years. The promise of a billion new customers was too good to pass up, so the West signed China onto the WTO with assurances that business would lead to liberalization and that everyone would just go along with this. And then, after we spent two decades thinking this would all work out in the end, these companies find themselves tied in legal knots, aiding and abetting a totalitarian regime and their intellectual property being ripped off wholesale for profit. All so Silly Con Valley could have their widgets assembled for ten cents on the dollar. And now there’s not really a cost-effective alternative solution any longer, so we’re stuck until someone else can spin up modern manufacturing at scale in a different place – assuming, of course, that you have a physical product to sell. If not, you just have to wait and watch as Tencent and Alibaba do the same thing you can’t for those billion customers you assumed would be yours.
It’s time for Tim Cook to start putting some of those massive cash reserves toward figuring out where Apple’s going to move its manufacturing. As the only major tech company in America still dependent on hardware, they’re highly exposed by having the Chinese government having their manufacturing in a professional threat sandwich. Not to mention the fact that the Chinese government is completely unchanged from the era in which they gunned down their own citizens by the thousands.
We tried. It was a useful experiment. We have the results. It’s time to stop handing the family jewels over to butchers. Let them try to invent their own things without using Cupertino for R&D.
Get out, Tim. Start now.