Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face
1–10 of 88 posts
Re: Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face
#2China has to play fairly carefully with Apple. On the one hand it's an American company that puts microphones and cameras into the cafes, offices, and bedrooms of many of their citizenry; but on the other hand, with decreasing competitiveness due to rising wages there isn't anything specifically _stopping_ Apple or other American tech companies from moving manufacturing out of China. Foxconn alone employs about 4.3 million people, and while it would be very difficult to move operations to Tiawan, Singapore, Japan, or even the United States; it would also provide a number of benefits since any new hosting country would very incentivized to make the move happen.
Re: Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face
#3China has to play fairly carefully with Apple. On the one hand it's an American company that puts microphones and cameras into the cafes, offices, and bedrooms of many of their citizenry; but on the other hand, with decreasing competitiveness due to rising wages there isn't anything specifically _stopping_ Apple or other American tech companies from moving manufacturing out of China. Foxconn alone employs about 4.3 m…
Manufacturing is slowly moving to be "on demand". That is, a consumer purchases something, then it is built and shipped to them. It doesn't make sense any more for a company to predict market volume and then produce goods to match the prediction, especially since technology turns over so fast.
With that in mind, I could see Apple having simple components being produced in a number of different countries, then shipped out to wherever their products are in demand. Then the components are assembled by robots locally and the final product is picked up or shipped down the street to the consumer. I remember reading that this is where the auto industry is heading. They want to produce interchangeable car parts which get assembled at the dealership when a person purchases the car.
So to your point, China is already done. Instead of huge factories producing consumer ready goods, Apple just needs a handful of smaller factories making much simpler intermediary components. It's much easier to setup and move these smaller factories around, rather than these huge factory cities managing a massive production line.
Re: Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face
#4China has to play fairly carefully with Apple. On the one hand it's an American company that puts microphones and cameras into the cafes, offices, and bedrooms of many of their citizenry; but on the other hand, with decreasing competitiveness due to rising wages there isn't anything specifically _stopping_ Apple or other American tech companies from moving manufacturing out of China. Foxconn alone employs about 4.3 m…
Manufacturing is slowly moving to be "on demand". That is, a consumer purchases something, then it is built and shipped to them. It doesn't make sense any more for a company to predict market volume and then produce goods to match the prediction, especially since technology turns over so fast. With that in mind, I could see Apple having simple components being produced in a number of different countries, then shipped…
I predict that technology is not going to move that fast as it used to (moore's law etc). Instead we will go back to the age of "durable" / "longer lasting goods". A good software will make a difference between scoring a sale or not. Same with services.
Besides most of the companies are trying to move the manufacturing to Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Africa etc or automatizing as much as possible.
Re: Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face
#5It shouldn't be too surprising with China's history of censorship that they would ban iTunes from selling books and movies to their citizens. What's surprising is that they apparently allowed it for several months.
Re: Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face
#6and this is a reason why china with the current government can never truly be a world leader in anything: Your entire enterprise can be distroyed at the whim of a few unrestrained individuals. Sort of like apple's app store, but at a much bigger level.
Re: Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face
#7A key sentence from the BBC article on the topic: "
The strict rules are also seen as a way to foster the success of indigenous net Chinese firms such as Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent."
Re: Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face
#8Apparently there was a movie that China didn't approve available on iTunes that might have triggered the stoppage.
Re: Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face
#9It shouldn't be too surprising with China's history of censorship that they would ban iTunes from selling books and movies to their citizens. What's surprising is that they apparently allowed it for several months.
It would be very likely that Apple was following by "the rules".
Re: Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face
#10China has to play fairly carefully with Apple. On the one hand it's an American company that puts microphones and cameras into the cafes, offices, and bedrooms of many of their citizenry; but on the other hand, with decreasing competitiveness due to rising wages there isn't anything specifically _stopping_ Apple or other American tech companies from moving manufacturing out of China. Foxconn alone employs about 4.3 m…
And Apple has one of the best chances to make real change here because they can afford to spend a hell of a lot of money without their short-term business being hurt.
They could, for instance, speculatively set up entire facilities in new areas, hire staff, and experiment with parallel development of the same products to measure how well the new bring-up is going.