The Trump administration on Friday announced a new rule aimed at blocking Huawei from getting the processors it needs to make phones, networking equipment and more. The Chinese government reportedly threatened to retaliate against Apple and other American companies.
Apple reopened all 42 of its retail locations in China on Friday after it was forced to close them last month due to the coronavirus outbreak, that according to Apple’s website.
Many Apple Stores across China are open again, despite the coronavirus that has shut down so much of the country.
The iPhone maker depends on China for a significant percentage of its sales, and Apple being able to reopen so many stores in the midst of this crisis is a positive sign.
Apple will close all its offices, 42 retail stores and contact centers across the Chinese mainland through February 9 as the outbreak of the new coronavirus has sickened more than 14,500 and killed more than 300 people.
Apple is bracing itself against a growing coronavirus outbreak, restricting business travel to China and closing one Apple Store as health officials try to contain the deadly virus.
Apple is also trying to gauge the potential disruption to production. Most of the world’s iPhones, as well as other devices, are assembled in China with components coming from a network of nearly 400 suppliers.
Apple CEO Tim Cook met with China’s chief market regulator Thursday, a trip likely to attract the tech giant more criticism as tensions fester between the mainland and Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.
Cook’s meeting in Beijing comes one week after it removed a live map app from the App Store that was being used by protestors. Cook said the app, HKmap.live, was pulled after Hong Kong officials presented “credible information” the app was used to target individuals and property with violence where no police were present.
The drop in iPhone sales among Chinese consumers that hurt Apple so much last year is now a thing of the past, according to market analysts. The company saw five straight months of growth in that important region.
Apple’s CEO quietly made a visit to the White House today, where Tim Cook met with Pres. Trump to discuss trade and other matters.
The tax Trump is threatening to put on all Apple’s imports from China as part of his ongoing trade war has to have been prominent.
Rising trade tensions have brought calls in China to boycott Apple devices in favor of Huawei handsets, but the iPhone has an unlikely cheerleader: the CEO of Huawei admits he buys iPhones for his family.
“One can’t narrowly think love for Huawei should mean loving Huawei phones,” said CEO and founder Ren Zhengfei.
A pair of GOP congresspeople have strongly criticized the decision to remove songs from artists critical of the Chinese Communist Party from Apple’s streaming music service in that country.
The move highlights the compromises the iPhone maker has to make in order to offer its products in a very lucrative market.
The latest round of iPhone price cuts on China have accomplished their goal, according to an analyst with Wedbush. Demand for Apple handsets has increased in that country.
That’s very good news for the company, as CEO TIm Cook said early this year that slow sales in China were the entire reason Apple saw a revenue decease at the end of 2018.
The Chinese phone market cratered in the final quarter of 2018, but iPhone sales in the country did even worse.
This poor showing is primarily a result of the high prices Apple charges for its handsets, according to an industry analyst.
Sales of iPhones seem to be weaker than in previous years, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve has an explanation: a drop in consumer spending in China.
The implication is that the slowdown in iPhone sales isn’t a result of anything Apple has done.
The tech industry appears to be nice and clean, but it has a long and toxic history of environmental damage. Silicon Valley is home to the most Superfund cleanup sites in the country.
A new film, Death by Design, takes a sobering look at the electronics industry and its toxic environmental legacy — both in the United States and in China. The film offers a behind-the-scenes look at the cost of the devices we consume in some measure of ignorance.
Apple features heavily in the film, though it’s not the only tech company implicated.
This week on Kahney’s Korner, I talk to the documentary’s director, Sue Wiliams, about Apple, pollution and Silicon Valley.
If you own an iPhone, laptop, Kindle, Android device, electric toothbrush, baby monitor or GPS navigator, it was probably put together by a worker in a Chinese factory.
Although Apple is currently juggling the PR hot-potato over working conditions at Foxconn plants in China, a situation made more murky by the factual takedown of Mike Daisey’s monologue, dozens of other global companies make their must-have electronics there.
For a wider perspective, Cult of Mac tracked down one of the world’s leading experts on modern labor in Asia.
This is a guest post by Mike Daisey, who’s latest monologue, The Agony and Ecstacy of Steve Jobs, is at New York’s Public Theater through March 4. We highly recommend you go see it. It made Steve Wozniak cry. The post originally appeared here.
Stephen Fry, brilliant comedian, wonderful actor, and bon vivant just posted this in his Twitter feed:
As a fellow raconteur it’s painful to have to confront Mr. Fry with this fact, but he’s being a total idiot.
He’s in good company—most of the Mac universe is in the midst of a massive propaganda campaign, trying to convince itself and the universe that the cognitive dissonance they are feeling at this moment isn’t real.
So you’re going to see some good people, like Mr. Fry, who happen to love their Apple products very much, say some horrible things because they don’t actually understand how to reconcile the beauty and grace of their wonderful Apple products with the unvarnished, verified truth of how they are produced.