It's growthism driving this. If you need to grow your revenue 20% year-over-year every year for decades, pretty soon you have to swallow ungodly amounts of new dollars. You can either gobble more of the market (higher market share), grow the market, or find new markets. And growthism will mine out every one of those possibilities.

It seems to be Apple's standard MO to comply with local regulations regardless of market size. They've complied with Russian demands[0,1] and it looks like Apple Rus accounts for something like 2.6% of Apple's revenue, a fraction that Apple could probably do without.

From a recent interview[2] with Tim Cook:

>"World peace through world trade," Cook said, adding that operating in foreign countries means Apple has to "acknowledge that there are different laws in other markets."

0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/apple-and-google...

1: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50573069

2: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-china-tim-cook-respons...

>World peace through world trade

And here I was under the impression that most everyone - everyone important enough at least - understood that Fukuyama was (very) wrong. Perhaps his definition of "world peace" is different.

I'm not sure where Fukuyama and Friedman agree and disagree, but Cook's quote struck me as Friedman-esque. It sounds like he sees Apple as a player in Friedman's Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention: "No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain".

(Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_peace)

Norman Angell thought much the same... in 1909.

>In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[4] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

Wasn’t this the quote from IBM’s CEO in the 1930s…the one who sought world peace through his trade with Hitler?

You are forgetting about manufacturing.

While China is indeed an important and huge market for sales... approximately 100% of Apple's products are manufactured in China (save some tiny fraction that are assembled in India or Texas).

Every iPhone sold everywhere worldwide (except the few assembled in India) comes from China.

Apple cannot exist without China. Full stop.

That's completely wrong. How is it that one of their largest global competitors, Samsung, exists despite having no factories in China for years now? Apple could leave China just fine as far as manufacturing is concerned. The question is would it be able to still sell to the Chinese market if it does.

Foxconn has an iPhone City of hundreds of thousands of people (something like 350k).

They make something like 200 million iPhones per year.

If you think that can be moved "just fine" then we will have to agree to disagree.

Producing something of the iPhone's quality, at the scale of a half million per day, every single day (that's 23,000 per hour, every hour, 24/7, for an entire year) is not something one can just pick up and move, even with Apple's resources.

It would take several years, if indeed it is possible at all. There are dozens or hundreds of managing workers at Foxconn who have been designing and producing iPhone manufacturing lines for a decade+, and I doubt China would give them and their families all exit visas to move to some other country to assist Foxconn and Apple in divesting themselves of the CCP's prerogatives.

This ain't Factorio.

>If you think that can be moved "just fine" then we will have to agree to disagree.

Then let's agree to disagree, as Samsung, with it's 253 million shipments[1] does exactly that having explicitly moved out of China[2]. It is not impossible.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... [2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-elec-china/samsun...

> X could leave China just fine

If something has potential, then it will happen. The higher the potential, the faster it will happen. And laws, contrary to what many believe, only has limited potential.

So if leaving China has potential, then it will happen. Tariffs have already made the potential higher, but unfortunately it doesn't seem like it's breaking even just yet.

China is not the only cheap manufacturing hub. If Apple wanted to, they could be investing their 100's of billions (instead of stock buy backs they have been doing for years) in alternative locations to build their capability in other geographies.

Apple is still doing China because it wants to, not because it has to. At their size they have the time and money to invest in multiple locations and spread their risks.

My M1 Mac mini says "Designed in California Made in Malaysia" on it.

So perhaps it is "approximately 95%"?

It would be really interesting to know the actual number, wouldn't it?

Likely the parts are shipped in from China to Malaysia.

I imagine you mean T and B, respectively?

Those are population figures

It's ironic - China starts beating USA at growth based capitalism, USA starts using central control to try to beat China.