TECHNOLOGY

Apple’s US$44bil drop shows growing cost of China reliance

APPLE Inc’s reliance on China is looking increasingly like its biggest handicap.
The world’s most influential consumer electronics company shed US$44bil (RM184.91bil) of market value on Aug 23 after a pair of pronouncements from Beijing and Washington cast a spotlight on its massive Chinese production base, from which almost all of the world’s iPhones are made.
US President Donald Trump this weekend “ordered” American companies to immediately start looking for alternatives to manufacturing in China, which is something Apple is thoroughly unprepared for, according to analyst Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities Inc.
“In a best case scenario,” says Ives, Apple “would be able to move away 5%-7% of iPhone production out of China” over the course of 18 months. The company would require three years to move 20% out, he adds, which is still less than the 25% of iPhone production that Apple needs for its domestic US market. American tariffs on goods from China would therefore directly impact Apple’s biggest moneymaker.
Ives calls Trump’s latest comments on China “a gut punch to Cupertino” in the title of his report.
Apple’s main assembly partner, Foxconn Technology Group, has claimed that it has the capacity to build all of the Cupertino company’s US-bound iPhones outside of China, however all indications are that to deploy it would require a great deal of time and money. Apple’s stock price took two big hits on Friday in the wake of the latest tariffs announcements.
The president’s comments were followed hours later by tweets declaring that the US would increase the rate of existing and impending tariffs on Chinese goods. Trump’s moves were in response to an earlier announcement that China was planning to impose tariffs on US$75bil (RM315.33bil) of US imports.
People familiar with iPhone production have said that it is nearly impossible to relocate manufacturing of Apple’s iconic device in a wholesale manner due to the difficulty of procuring a skilled labour force elsewhere, a point that Apple CEO Tim Cook has hammered away at in public as well. The challenges of replicating the complex production lines and necessary infrastructure are also major hurdles.
There may also be less purely economic reasons for sticking with the world’s No 2 economy. Apple and its army of contract manufacturers, led by Foxconn, are collectively China’s largest private employer, providing work for millions of people. A reduced Apple presence could have significant implications for the local job market and rub Beijing the wrong way at a time Chinese officials see a slowing economy as a significant risk to stability. The government has shown a penchant for clamping down on foreign firms that displease it.
And Apple needs to fend off smartphone market leader Huawei Technologies Co and win back consumers in China, its largest market after the US
While Apple has asked at least some suppliers for proposals on ex-China production, there’s no sign the Cupertino company is preparing for a large-scale migration.
In one case, an assembler proposed a location outside of China, but Apple rejected it and the supplier ended up expanding in China. The recent effort by GoerTek to shift some of its AirPods production to Vietnam was done of its own volition, people familiar with the decision said. But neither of those relates to the iPhone, which remains chiefly made in China, with some assembly of older models happening in India and focused on the domestic market there.
Cook’s ability to lobby Washington for tariff relief will be tested over the coming weeks. He has so far been able to obtain a temporary reprieve for iPhones, iPads and Apple laptops, which won’t be subject to US tariffs until Dec 15. But going forward, unless an unlikely rapid resolution to the trade war is reached, Apple looks like it will have to draw up comprehensive plans for building iPhones outside of China, however costly that may be.
– The Star/Bloomberg

Astronaut accused of space crime

NASA astronaut Anne McClain, who spent 203 days in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) earlier this year, has been accused of identity theft and improperly accessing the private financial records of her estranged spouse, according to a report by the New York Times.
McClain, a lieutenant colonel in the US Army, served as the flight engineer for Expedition 58/59 to the ISS and was set to be part of the first all-female spacewalk. It is during her time aboard the station that it is alleged she accessed the bank account of Summer Worden.
McClain and Worden had been married since 2014. Worden filed for divorce in 2018, months before McClain was set to launch on a six-month mission to the space station. McClain, through her lawyer, acknowledged she did access the bank account from the space station using a password that she had used previously.
Her lawyer told the Times “she strenuously denies that she did anything improper.” The access was used to ensure care for Worden’s son, who the couple had been raising together. Worden filed a complaint alleging identity theft with both the Federal Trade Commission and NASA’s Office of Inspector General.
The Space Station Agreement, signed by the US and 14 other governments involved in the ISS, outlines the legal framework governing activities on the station. Each nation is legally responsible for their elements, equipment and personnel and for applying their own national laws in criminal matters.
The accusations are being investigated by the inspector general’s office. McClain took to Twitter on Aug. 24 to refute the claims, stating there’s “unequivocally no truth” to them and that she has “total confidence” in the inspector general’s investigation.
McClain was scheduled to perform the first all-female spacewalk in March with fellow astronaut Christina Koch, however the walk was scrubbed days before the historic EVA, due to a spacesuit sizing issue. NASA clarified at the time that McClain felt comfortable in a medium size suit, but only one could be made available by the time of the planned walk. The agency stated it would be faster and safer to change the walker, rather than the suit.
A spokeswoman for NASA told the Times the last minute change was not influenced by the allegations made against McClain.
Nasa did not immediately respond to a request for comment. – CNET

Fantasy of being disconnected

An overactive world is hard to break away from

By SCOTT of CNET
IT TAKES a boat ride, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, to get me to finally feel offline. Which makes me feel pretty sad. But it reminds me of the impossible goal I keep failing to attain: staying away from screens. Or, more accurately, the internet.
It feels impossible to disconnect because I work in tech. I review phones. I wear headsets (sometimes on vacation). I have watches on my wrists. What absurdity am I discussing, me being disconnected from tech? It’s more that I’ve realized my attention being sapped away. Or my kid saying to me, hey, spend less time on the screen. Which only proves that I’ve become known as the Person With a Phone on Their Face.
I’ve tried screen-time limitations, cutting off notifications and being in the present moment like Sherry Turkle, who’s studied online behavioral psychology for years, wrote about back in 2015 in her excellent book Reclaiming Conversation. I’ve never found screen timers to work. Not for me. They feel like fitness trackers without the coaching.
What has worked? Spending a week and a half, roughly, where I go as offline as I ever can. It’s become a tradition each summer: I’ve joined my in-laws to go across the Atlantic. I’ve done this, now, six times.
I didn’t expect to be this person who cannot unplug. And you don’t need to be this person, either. But I’ve come to realize, the more I take this trip, that I love being forced to live without the internet.
When I travel to the UK for the summer with my family, I can feel the ties being cut, one by one. My phone doesn’t have roaming. Cellular is lost. I stare out the window and wonder about where I am instead of pinging Google Maps.
The disconnection grows as I board the ship: the Queen Mary 2, headed on an eight-day trans-Atlantic ride from Southampton, England to Brooklyn, New York. No stops. A massive boat, and the endless seas for more than a week.
I feel like I’m stepping off into the forest, and at first it’s uncomfortable. But I used to feel a deeper need to get back online. Now, I love the feeling of disappearing.
Like most cruise ships, the Queen Mary 2 has internet access… but it’s awful, and slow, and expensive. It’s just fast enough to maybe scan Twitter from a cafe. From my room, it doesn’t work at all. So I just stay offline, mostly. I get on for about 10 minutes a day, and get off.
Even then, I was slow to accept being unplugged. I’d wait for my emails and a chunk of Twitter feed to load up. I’d peek at work emails. Then even that was taken away from me a few days in, when my phone had somehow kicked me off my work email certificate. I have to be dragged to a state of internetlessness.
When I’m not online, I read a book on my Kindle, or my no-longer-connected phone when I realized one book wasn’t downloaded to my Kindle, but my phone app had it. This summer, it was How to Read Nature by Tristan Gooley, all about trying to be observant of small details. Then I read All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, a weird dark fairy tale about (among many other things) the clash between magic and tech. Or, I played with a deck of cards. I used to love taking one pack of cards with me as a kid, to practice card magic, play solitaire, imagine I could predict cards with ESP. I just hold onto them now as a meditation, in a way. As if they’ll hold all the answers.
The Queen Mary 2 is a massive ocean liner. It’s filled with activities. But after a while, what kept hitting me were the silences. Living without playing music that’s streaming from somewhere. Not streaming shows. Not getting endless updates on unfolding news. It made me feel irresponsible, or lazy. Or like I was missing out. Then the anxious feelings faded, a little. I started to feel like I felt decades ago, when I spent summers in camp as a kid with no way to connect to anyone at all.
I took bridge classes! Sitting in a card room, on a quiet morning, meeting new people sitting next to me who also weren’t on phones. We had conversations.
I sat down, on a balcony, staring off at the sea.
If I chose to go somewhere, I wouldn’t know what’s happening somewhere else. I couldn’t send a quick tweet about it. I couldn’t text someone. I couldn’t Google something that wasn’t popping up in my head, like I always do now as a memory aid. I didn’t start going down rabbit holes of related links and searches, either.
I still used my phone on the ship — but as a camera. (These photos were taken on the iPhone XS.) Occasionally, a music player. To take notes. Or to play Hold Em Poker, which obsessed me for a few days. It was more of a basic iPod than an always-connected doorway. More like the first iPhone was to me when I went on my honeymoon back in 2007.
Every time I’ve been on this seven-and-a-half-day trip, I’ve tried to spend less and less time online, and more time enjoying the feeling of being in a completely closed-off, at-sea, unique little ocean world. At times, it feels as far off and alien as a starship making an interstellar journey. Even with TV in the staterooms, and headlines in the daily programs each day, I have more moments of staying removed than at any other time in my life. Minute by minute, I’m not checking down at my phone to see what thing I was missing. I get used to it, even. This is what I used to be like. When I was a kid, I didn’t have a phone, and I didn’t go online. I can do this again.
All fantasies have to end. My last night, pulling into Brooklyn, phone service returned.
It felt like turning the fire hose back on. My wrist started pinging. Messages led to other messages. Suddenly I was absorbing a long backlog of conversations upon conversations about the world. I was at breakfast, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. And, then, I realized I was back glued to my phone again. Or, as a friend on Twitter put it, the facehugger returned.
I want to learn a lesson from this. I tell myself this every year. Stay offline. Stay disconnected. Learn to absorb the real world, breathe in the small details, don’t look at the phone. It’s so hard. The world is made for connection. I’ve breathed the internet for so long. I’m steeped in it. A few days after getting back, I’m deep in feeds. My anxiety levels feel like they’ve gone up a bit.
At home, the night after getting back from vacation, my son reminded me to stay offline at dinner, like I always did on the ship. I half-joked that I’m going to call it “Queen Mary 2 mode” from now on. I hope I can keep myself disciplined enough to stay away from the pull of the screen. I need to honor that, and sever the cord.
You don’t need a fancy boat ride or a vacation to do this… you just need to disconnect. It could happen anytime. For me, though, that usually feels impossible. I’ve realised how bad my self-control is. My advice: Find some way to force yourself to be offline. I’ve enjoyed when the decision has been taken out of my hands. I wish I could give better advice. I’d follow it. Less than a week later, I’m buried so deep in my phone and my unending tentacled array of notifications.