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How Apple CEO Tim Cook Convinced Trump to Exempt Apple From Tariffs

mzeb said:
The US won’t find the cheap labor that they have in China (for good reasons I’d argue, although Florida seems cool with removing child labor laws so maybe I’m wrong). So prices will go up if all iPhones sold in the US are built in the US.
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If/when iPhone manufacturing comes to the US, it's going to be massively automated, with a comparative handful of employees to oversee the robotic assembly lines. Leaving aside the labor cost issue (yeah, Florida and some other places would like to put kids to work), the US can't come up with several hundred thousand people who all want to move to one densely packed area to do manufacturing (close tolerance, detailed, skilled, but repetitive work) in a collection of monster-sized production plants, like they have in China.

I heard a bit on a podcast the other day, reporting some survey results, and lots of Americans want to see manufacturing come back to the USA, but when you ask the same people if they would take one of those manufacturing jobs, suddenly it's a different story - none of them do. They want the industry here, but they don't want to be involved (other than buying the products). So, yeah, building a new densely packed city with a quarter million people all working in the iPhone parts factories isn't going to work. (And if it somehow did, it'd take years or decades to set up, and maybe then you'd want to turn on some tariffs temporarily, to give them a boost - not now.)
 
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HouseLannister said:
They buy their food from us. They do not produce enough food to feed their people. That is more essential than our iPhones.
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They're importing less food from us - the last time Trump was in office, his petty trade wars cost a whole lot of the US soybean trade (perhaps other grains too, but that's the one I remember). China simply switched suppliers to other countries, and the US government was stuck paying aid/subsidies to the farmers instead, because Trump destroyed their market - Trump's "this is great for America, trade wars are easy to win" left us with farmers getting essentially welfare from the government to replace what had previously been honest work. He leaves a path of financial ruin in his wake wherever he goes - who else could bankrupt multiple casinos?
 
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coolfactor said:
You're making it sound like the US is the biggest, most important market. It's not, and the world would go along fine if the US ceased to exist tomorrow.

European and Asian countries are 10x older and more mature.
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Longevity and maturity are no match for money and stupidity.
 
fenderbass146 said:
..., but with that said I think for the sake of the USA and the west we need bring back chip mfg to the use and this will help drive that.
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Any idea what the lead time is on a chip fab? From initial concept to rolling out the first useful chips. It's going to be closer to a decade. Do you think that charging exorbitant tariffs (that will ultimately be paid by the American people, not the foreign nations) for that decade is going to be a net good thing? Trump is the embodiment of the Ralph Wiggum "I'm helping" meme.

This is not the way you get chip manufacturing back to the US (an ultimate goal we would both agree would be highly beneficial to the US on a number of levels). Having a goal and grabbing any random proposed solution and saying "well, at least this will get us closer to our goal" - yeah, no. It has to be sound and well thought out plan, not just whatever ended up on the 497,000th page out of the infinite monkey typing machine. And Trump's "plan" is worse than that random page. His M.O. for his entire adult life has been to schmooze people a bit initially and then bully them incessantly to get what he wants. It's not going to work this time.
 
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Aeronauts said:
Trump later clarified that these exemptions were only temporary for a month or two. What happens then will be interesting.
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I think terrifying is a better word than interesting. On a daily basis tariffs can change five times. Next week it will be bombs getting dropped one day and not the next. And nothing like a nuclear weapon every other day.

America hasn't been this unstable since the Civil War. We really need a sane person running the country, not a baby in front of an iPad randomly clicking colors on the screen.

Anyone want to guess what happens to tariffs tomorrow? Yeah... No one has a clue.
 
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The on again off again nature of these tariffs is largely because Trump is in a bind. He (or at least most of his advisers and allies in congress) knows the tariffs are bad. But Trump CAN'T admit to a mistake so what can he do?
 
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DocMultimedia said:
Anyone want to guess what happens to tariffs tomorrow? Yeah... No one has a clue.
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The Idiot in Charge thinks this is a good thing - he thinks he's keeping his opponents off-balance, and by playing all positions, he'll claim credit for any that work (even briefly/partially), and pretend like the others didn't exist. And, unfortunately, his cult followers will lap up everything Dear Leader says, uncritically. But the rest of the world is not going to be so kind.
 
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delsoul said:
Now, I just wish Trump could convince Tim Cook into stepping down. Him and the other higher ups at Apple that can’t seem to get out of their rut of constant mistakes, debacles, terrible software, etc
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Yet Apple's 2+ Billion active and repeat customers have propelled Apple to becoming one of the most successful tech companies in the world. That, and Apple manufacturing and selling roughly 600,000 iPhones per day, every day of the year (on the average) speaks volumes about Apple and Cook.
 
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Skyscraperfan said:
So you come up with a very bad idea and instead of cancelling it, you come up with a lot of delays and exceptions.
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Dear Leader never backs down from anything - he is always correct, if there's a mistake it's always some else's fault, and he'll redirect hurricanes with sharpies if he has to, to ensure that he's always right. You get the feeling that he was (emotionally, at least) abused as a child.
 
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CarlJ said:
Dear Leader never backs down from anything - he is always correct, if there's a mistake it's always some else's fault, and he'll redirect hurricanes with sharpies if he has to, to ensure that he's always right. You get the feeling that he was (emotionally, at least) abused as a child.
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Speaking of that. Today he weighed in on the guy accidentally deported to El Salvador. He said he wasn't involved in that (i.e. someone else's fault). When some past president may have uttered "the buck stops here" he muttered to himself "idiots. deny, deny, deny"
 
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coolfactor said:
Keep believing that. It's just not true.

Give three concrete examples.
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Well, actually, for one, „China“ has basically been moving money from US loans to buy property in the US.
They don’t care about intellectual property, no matter if it’s US or from elsewhere, and copy anything from basic consumer goods to high end military machinery.
Also they dump ship literal tons of low quality waste products to the US (and Europe) every day that are below health standards. Plastics are evil and there are too many products to police what is safe and what isn’t. Either their government is too ignorant to realize this or they are fully aware and don’t care, not to say foster this.
 
macpro2000 said:
They totally need the U.S. to keep their people working and the last thing they want to do is have millions of unhappy citizens wanting to oust their leadership. It's a big deal.
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The CCP can present their own narrative however they want. They don’t even need to put much effort into undermining Trumps character, except for translating him word for word.
For China, Trump is the boo man.
Also, China will be more than willing to flood developing countries with their goods, maybe even in combination with a little naval action in Asian waters…
 
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