Is 2024 the year Apple’s crippling dependence on China finally blows up?

Is 2024 the year Apple’s crippling dependence on China, a situation engineered by CEO Tim Cook, finally blows up? Every move Apple makes to extricate itself from the corner into which Tim Cook painted it — every assembly plant, desperately and late, that’s opened in India, Vietnam, and anywhere outside of China — increases tensions with Chinese Communist Party-controlled China, a country in which Apple depends on maintaining huge iPhone and other products’ sales, but which can be turned off like a spigot at any time the CCP so desires.
Max Chafkin for Bloomberg Businessweek:
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No American tech company has bet as heavily as Apple Inc. on the economic interdependence of China and the US. Apple needs Chinese workers to make its iPhones and Chinese consumers to buy them. This would seem to make the deteriorating relationship between the two global superpowers uniquely dangerous for the company and its chief executive officer, Tim Cook, who was responsible for Apple’s decision to outsource production to China long before he took over the top position from Steve Jobs in 2011.
While the company has floated above the geopolitical tumult, Apple enters 2024 in danger of getting dragged into it. That would be a poor omen for other US companies that face increased pressure from Beijing, in the form of both regulations and reinvigorated competition from domestic companies that Chinese policymakers have long sought to boost.
In September, Chinese government agencies in some cities told employees they were no longer allowed to bring Apple phones to their jobs, as part of a larger plan to keep the iPhone out of state-run offices. By December multiple state-backed companies and government departments in at least eight provinces had instructed employees to use devices made by local brands, a major step-up in the campaign…
Apple has sought to reiterate its commitment to the country, pointing out that its supply chain employs some 5 million people in China. During a March visit to Beijing, Cook gave a speech touting Apple’s “symbiotic” relationship with China.
Behind the scenes, though, Cook seems to be trying to hedge amid increasingly hostile rhetoric between China and the US, and concerns about the dangers of supply chain concentration… Apple has intensified its efforts to move some manufacturing to India and Southeast Asia… The supply chain diversification looks, at least in part, like a sensible attempt to reduce Apple’s exposure to geopolitical blowback. But it may be having the opposite effect. Apple is a major employer in China, and the government crackdown on iPhones could be seen as a warning about moving jobs out of the country.

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MacDailyNews Take: As our own SteveJack wrote so concisely in April 2019:
Tim Cook is not the best person to be CEO of Apple.
Cook’s so-called achievements, besides betting the company pretty much entirely on China, using cheap Chinese labor to inflate Apple’s margins, are all based on the fumes of Steve Jobs’ innovations, including Apple Watch (a product for which, initially, Cook pitifully tried to take credit, but which began under Steve Jobs).
After what Steve Jobs built, a chimpanzee could run Apple profitably for many years. (Yes, even Steve Ballmer could do it.) — MacDailyNews, April 10, 2017
“Oh,” some might say, “but Tim has taken Apple to the very top!” Did he really? Or did he just ride Steve’s rocket? Imagine a CEO capable of adding his own fuel. How much higher and farther would that rocket be today?
Drew Bledsoe looked like a pretty good quarterback – until Tom Brady took over.
A visionary CEO would have taken the company far further than it is today. A visionary CEO would have recognized the potential of acquiring, say, a Netflix or a Tesla on the cheap. A visionary CEO wouldn’t today be desperately scrambling to come up with some homegrown generative AI, years late, as usual (see HomePod). A visionary CEO would have recognized the threat that China posed to his company and worked to extricate his company far sooner.
Tim Cook is reactive, not proactive.
If you think Tim Cook came up with the idea for the Vision Pro, you haven’t been paying attention.
Tim Cook couldn’t see it then. Tim Cook can’t see it now. Tim Cook won’t be able to see it tomorrow.
Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs
A visionary CEO would generate excitement, anticipation, and wonder. Instead we have all of the thrill of a conveyor belt, slowly moving, sometimes not even, for 12+ years and counting.
Someday, hopefully sooner than later, watching the paint dry will blessedly be over. Steve Jobs painted a masterpiece. Tim Cook stands there fanning it.
Hopefully, 2024 will deliver new energy to the company. – MacDailyNews, December 29, 2023
Imagine live keynotes, multiple times per year, revealing exciting, surprising products, delivered on stage by a CEO capable of sparking wonder and excitement in his own right. Instead, we endured years of sleep-inducing keynotes which have now devolved into canned, pre-recorded, highly edited industrial videos because the CEO couldn’t do them well live.
As we wrote back in November 2022:
Tim Cook painted Apple into this corner. It worked marvelously well, until it didn’t.
A publicly traded company CEO’s job is to act in the best interest of its shareholders.
But, Apple’s operations don’t scream “genius” today. They scream “RISK!” But, you know, the market just loooves risk.
Apple shareholders and, in turn, Apple’s rubber-stamping Board of Lackeys, should hold one person responsible if this spiraling China dilemma continues deteriorate: Timothy D. Cook.
So, what’s Cook’s plan for getting the company out of this boxed-in predicament into which he placed it? Certainly Apple shareholders have a right to know. Hopefully, Cook has a better plan than simply cashing out and dumping this nightmarish quandary into the lap of Apple’s next CEO.
Read more:
• Tim Cook firmly latched Apple onto China’s CCP teat. What’s his plan for weaning it off? – November 2, 2022
• Four U.S. Congressmen: Apple is ‘a pawn in China’s malfeasance’ – May 21, 2021
• Tim Cook’s Apple is built in China; now it has to answer to the Chinese Communist Party – May 17, 2021
• Apple CEO Tim Cook’s continued kowtowing to China is a very bad look – October 10, 2019
• Why Apple CEO Tim Cook capitulates to China: Money and power – August 14, 2017
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