badmonk

For the life of me, I don’t understand why the AppleTV franchise isn’t doing this.  It makes no sense that Apple refuses to make content for its own device—gaming, sporting events, TV should all be supporting the device while it gets its wings.

I have seen analysis in the FT that the manufacturing value of final iPhone assembly is about 5% of the total cost of an iPhone.  The idea of jacking this up to 25-40% of the cost of the iPhone for a PR stunt is magical thinking.  Apple makes 500-600K phones per day and people like Navarro and Nutlick don’t understand scale.

These people are clowns.  And if assembly is automated, it won’t give jobs to JD’s relatives or really much to anyone who doesn’t have a college degree.  It will be robotic engineers and technicians.   And there are just not enough of them.

and the tariffs on Russia are?

if the American economy survives another 3 and a half years years with this leadership it will be a miracle.

Actually the absurdity of this is that the final assembly of an iPhone has little value.  I have read analyses that put this at much less than 10% (maybe as low as 5%) of the final value of the phone.  Most of the value of the phone are in the components that can only be sourced by a very few manufacturers, usually located in Asia (it’s called high tech manufacturing for a reason).  iPhone assembly is not going to be a middle class single wage earner job (unless you want to engage in a soviet-style jobs program). And note these phones will not be able to be sold outside the USA because they will be too expensive, so again it will be an expensive jobs program.

The question is whether Americans want to do this work in enough numbers and whether this investment makes sense.  Apple makes 600 thousand phones a day and they are made largely by hand.  Not to mention around a 1/3 of equipment needed to make a factory will need to be imported and hence subjected to tariffs.  Not to mention the personnel needed to get a factory up and running will need to be imported.  The Trump administration is too ideologically blinded to make this happen in a cost effective intelligent fashion.

Tariffing Apple is a tax on an American company that will lead to higher prices, lay-offs and make our country poorer.  And repeat the same for every American company taxed as a result.  Shooting the legs off the American economy is not going to lower our debt.  Honestly, congress should take the power of tariffs out of Trump’s hands.  Or impeach him.

And the fact that the source of the tariff was not some intellectual stance but because Tim Cook didn’t go to the middle east for a circle jerk is galling.

Thanks Mike for the reporting and adding color to the FT article.