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Google has to deal with some manufacturing issues related to their phones and tablets, but does not entirely depend on China for manufacturing. Apple is overly-dependent upon Chinese manufacturing to have hardware at all. Leaves them beholden to Chinese rules, whereas, if they had manufactured elsewhere, China would have to deal with demand for a needed foreign product. Now, however, if Apple pulled out, they would leave all that manufacturing expertise behind, and would face a lack of skilled labor elsewhere that they largely caused in the first place. So, yes, ethics and money clash yet again, as money was designed to make happen. If they didn't pay people, a lot of dirty work wouldn't happen, and a lot of goods would be unavailable as a result. If you tweet about ethics on a computer, chances are, that computer's hardware makes you complicit. Yes, me too... |
Apple isn't dependent on the Chinese for manufacturing they are dependent on Foxconn, a Taiwanese company. And China wants Foxconn there. They greatly incentivized Foxconn to set up shop there.[1]
There's no reason Apple with its' hundreds of billions in cash reserves couldn't finance an "iPhone City" like China did in Zhengzhou and put it elsewhere.
And seeing how Foxconn is looking towards automation which isn't dependent on human labor, they could set it up an automated iPhone City anywhere, including the US.[2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/technology/apple-iphone-c...
[2] http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal...