A class action lawsuit against Apple claims that the company hid news of declining iPhone demand in China, thereby triggering billions of dollars lost on the part of investors.
The case, brought against Apple by a UK pension fund, has been given the go-ahead by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. It concerns comments made by Tim Cook during an investor call back in 2018.
October 30, 2009: Two years after launching in the United States, the iPhone finally goes on sale in China, giving Apple a chance to reach the world’s largest market.
A number of regulatory hurdles previously blocked Apple’s access to China, including restrictions on Wi-Fi functionality. With those problems solved, Apple offers the iPhone 3GS to the country’s 1.3 billion people, most of whom do not yet own smartphones.
It’s not just Apple that’s piling on the pressure when it comes to getting Taiwanese tech companies to move their manufacturing out of China.
According to a report published Thursday, the American Institute in Taiwan, the “de facto U.S. embassy,” is visiting companies and asking why they’re not moving more quickly in exporting their production capacity outside China.
Apple has reportedly removed a pair of RSS reader apps, Reeder and Fiery Feeds, from the App Store in China due to their ability to allow users to access information the country would rather they not see.
It’s not clear exactly what prompted this particular banning, but China has been cracking down on RSS feeds since 2007. That year, it initiated a blanket ban on all web-based RSS feed aggregators. In 2017, Apple removed RSS reader app Inoreader from the App Store in China.
In other words, this may be less a case of “What did Reeder and Fiery Feeds do wrong?” than “how did they manage to survive as long as they did?”
Apple’s division of its supply chain into one part aimed at the China market and the other aimed at the rest of the world continues apace. The goal? Helping Apple get around rumbling trade tensions between the United States and China.
According to a Friday report from Digitimes, Apple is giving more orders to Chinese firms Luxshare Precision and BYD for the Apple Watch Series 6 and Wi-Fi iPad series, respectively.
Apple won’t be forced to boot messaging app WeChat out of the App Store in China, Bloomberg claims in a weekend report.
According to the publication, the Trump administration is “privately seeking to reassure” American companies like Apple that they can still do business with WeChat in China. Two weeks ago, Trump ordered a U.S. ban on WeChat, although the details were not clarified.
A WeChat ban imposed by President Donald Trump could cost Apple more than $25 billion per year, claims a report published Monday.
Those numbers are based on the idea that 75% of iPhone and iPad sales could dry up in China. Apple would lose money not just from the missing device sales, but also from the resulting decline in its subscription services.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps Signal and QQ reportedly spiked following President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting Tencent’s WeChat.
WeChat, while not particularly widely used in the United States, is an essential app in China. Many people who use it in the United States do so to keep in touch with friends and family in China, where WhatsApp has been banned since 2017.
Apple manufacturer Foxconn said Wednesday that it plans to split its supply chain in two. One segment will service the China market, while the other will focus on the United States.
Foxconn chairman Young Liu said the manufacturing giant now operates 30% of its capacity outside China, up from 25% last June. In recent years, the company began moving manufacturing to other regions such as Southeast Asia to avoid possible tariffs on Chinese goods headed to the United States.
A Chinese company facing U.S. sanctions for using forced labor provided clothing or raw materials to Apple, possibly in the form of uniforms for its retail employees, claims The Guardian.
Changji Esquel Textile is one of a group of 11 companies that reportedly violated human rights in China’s western Xinjiang region. The company denies using forced labor “anywhere” in its business and says it will appeal its inclusion on the sanctions list.
