davidmalcolm

If China did seize control of Taiwan Apple probably has enough connections to be able to secure that they’d still at the very least v be able to sell the best chips they have in China unless the machines are destroyed.

for the rest of the world they’d probably switch over to having Intel or another fab work on whatever their current designs are. Apple probably has assurances that they can take a lot of TSMC’s IP to another fab in this kind of incident. Plus I suspect that if China was going to invade they’d be pulling out a lot of top talent before the fighting began or soon after. 

Don’t get me wrong, it would probably be very bad for absolutely everyone, but Apple would land on their feet faster than most. They already have a fair bit of manufacturing happening out of China. 

I suspect we would see a really rough year where consumer spending on technology would plummet as prices of goods would sky rocket. You might even see the resurgence of the dumb phone as a lot of companies just try to piece together anything they can ship. 

You’d also see a lot of problems in general with inventory that is made in China as I suspect the west would go pretty hard with cutting off China economically. They’d probably be allowed to keep dealing with Russia, India, the Middle East, Africa and South America, but the EU and North America would be pissed and would use it as an excuse to push for more local manufacturing. (Heck so many things could be automated in terms of manufacturing and a lot of the reasons companies don’t use machines is because Chinese peasant hands are cheaper and rich people like having slaves.)

Honestly, I think the most dangerous thing to think of happening when China invaded is the fact that we know they were working on Covid as a bio weapon, and I doubt they learned their lesson so I’d expect to see China invade and that we’d also start seeing some new plague released in a few major western cities as China announces that they’re closing their borders.