You at least gets some value from the Apple Tax: privacy, quality material, the Ecosystem™, etc. Where is the value in the Trump Tax?
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Trump Demands US iPhone Production, Threatens 25% Tariff
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Apple can barely keep the production of the Mac pro in Texas due to the inability of local companies to provide parts in adequate quantity. That's a low volume product compared to an iPhone. if Trump wants companies to make stuff in the US. the US Government should be subsidizing the industries that are needed to support factories. and increase education funding. instead they are cutting funding to education and giving tax breaks to rich people
Because to them trump is a king and without him they will be weaken, they might try after he's long gone but it just wont be the same.
Mostly because cults of personality are rarely passed down directly to other people without structural, usually theocratic, support. No one else has the grip on the republican party trump has or is likely to get it on their own.
I actually suspect that’s why we’re seeing things like Hegseth holding prayer events in the pentagon that praise Trump as divinely selected (no, I’m not kidding, that happened this week), they’re hoping that they can create a “divine right of kings” type justification for his successor, because that’s historically been the way to attempt to pass a cult of personality down - tie it to religion, not the person.
I also doubt it will work, the US is not trending more religious, just the opposite.
To bring this back around to on topic to some extent btw, this is also in a way why it’s sometimes super hard for founders or extremely successful leaders to pass down companies if the company and the founder’s identity are heavily intertwined. Despite folks here often hating on Cook the fact is he’s been one of the most successful successors to a company whose identity was deeply tied to his predecessor, Jobs, that I’ve ever seen, which is also why he’ll probably be able to resist Trump’s bullying better than most - the company, customers, and the shareholders implicitly trust him. He’ll still have to be careful though, whereas Jobs could probably have told Trump to go, well, you know, without worrying too much
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The people screaming the loudest about how nothing is manufactured in the United States anymore are the same people who happily spent 40 to 50 years buying anything they could that was made overseas because it saved them a few dollars at a time.
If Apple made all their phones here and the price was 50% higher, those same hypocrites would immediately start buying phones from Samsung and others, which are not only made overseas but produced by a foreign company. They only care about saving a pile of bucks when the chips are down, and I don’t want to spend extra money to subsidize the subpar efforts of some people from middle America who squandered their opportunities when it mattered.
If Apple made all their phones here and the price was 50% higher, those same hypocrites would immediately start buying phones from Samsung and others, which are not only made overseas but produced by a foreign company. They only care about saving a pile of bucks when the chips are down, and I don’t want to spend extra money to subsidize the subpar efforts of some people from middle America who squandered their opportunities when it mattered.
Because Americans don't want to, or can't, pay $3,000 for a phone, or $100 for a basic pair of sneakers, or $60 for a small Baby Yoda figurine, or $2.50 for a ball point pen. And because American capitalist companies and their investors in the stock market — shocker! — really prefer to make a profit!
Stop with the jingoistic nonsense about how everyone else in this world is a slave.
True. Cori
There was a time when corporations paid more taxes & wage inequality was lower. That was the golden age of American capitalism. Today, tech giants like Amazon & Apple widen the gap. It’s not enough to bring jobs back—corporate profits must be checked & wages raised.
Here's the funny thing: we actually know what the price of the iMac and most Power Macintosh computers would be if they were manufactured in the US. Because they were manufactured in the US.
The iMac G3 (and in fact most PowerPC machines before and after it) were built in the United States. And this is not just "assembly" we're talking about - many major components were American made. In fact, when the PowerPC G5 came out, one of the biggest announcements Steve Jobs made was IBM building a new foundry for that specific processor line in Fishkill N.Y.
There were also many PC manufacturers (IBM being a pretty notable one) who also manufactured plenty of machines in both the United States and Canada. And yet prices still dropped on computer hardware year-over-year pretty steadily since the mid 1980s.
Yep. I've seen the giant server farms that employ 15 people too (amazon specifically)
I watch people doordash 2 meals a day while in the office, 5 days a week. "Americans can't" is a pretty broad term
I just meant that when he talks about golf it sounds like he’s read the dust jacket and the first 3 pages of the book
Apple is a US-based company. They should have built this all out over the last 2 decades.
If production is shifted to the US the it won’t be people putting the phones together. It will be automated and then the entire idea of getting labour back into the US failed.
Unfortunately, about half the US voted him into office, with another 3yr & 7+ months remaining in his term, lots of time to do more damage. 😢
CNN final results: 50% Trump, 48% Harris, the rest either didn’t vote or voted for another.
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Yes, that's why I wrote "don't want to, or can't". Of course some people can afford a $3K phone, Trump is one of them (not that he'd actually pay for it himself anyway), which is why he doesn't care. A lot of people aren't going to go there, and that has devastating domino effects, not just for Apple, not just for the mobile phone industry, but for the whole US economy. Even the current prices are really pushing affordability for a mass device, double or triple it and it'll get real ugly, real fast.
You, like Trump, don't understand how the process works. American workers won't do it, which is why manufacturing takes place in other countries. Even if Americans were willing to do the work, this is a manufacturing process that has been built over decades, sourcing minerals from countries all over the world, and it's not something that Tim Cook can simply decide to move to the U.S. on a whim. Building the manufacturing plants alone would take years.