[snowwrestler]

Kind of, but among the largest tech companies, Apple uniquely runs most of its revenue through the hardware category, and gets a lot of revenue from China.

Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook all use hardware from China, but most of their revenue comes through software interactions. Google does not officially even operate in China. Amazon has a limited corporate footprint in China.

I think it’s reasonable to say that Apple has higher risk related to China than many of its competitors.

[ac29]

> Google does not officially even operate in China

Google lists three offices in mainland China:

https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/locations/?region=asia-paci...

[scarface74]

What happens to their services if they can’t procure hardware?

[fomine3]

Services could be sold to existing customer with existing hardware at a moment.

[scarface74]

Because hardware never fails and needs to be replaced…

You do remember the disruption when the earthquake in Japan caused hard drive failures? Can you imagine what would happen if the entire supply chain gets disrupted?

[fomine3]

Of course finally service companies (or all companies) need hardware but the situation isn't too bad compared to company profited by selling hardware. BTW the HDD disaster was flooding in Thailand

[scarface74]

As Werner Vogels says “everything fails all the time.” How long can Amazon Retail/AWS, Google/GCP/YouTube, or Microsoft survive without continuously replacing hardware? How much degradation of their service can they withstand as they are unable to replace hardware?

If hard drives fail at YouTube and they can’t replace them and keep up with demand, does YouTube start deleting old videos to make room for new ones? Does AWS stop promising 6 way redundancy across three data centers? When a server goes south in us-east-1 and they don’t have a replacement, then what?

[fomine3]

In emergency situation, I can come up with mitigation something like: YouTube could reduce available video quality options only for 144p/480p/1080p/2160p for some rarely watched videos and remove other quality converted videos (but keep original file internally). Such mitigation will work for consumer oriented services, but not work for AWS/GCP. Possibly they can also stop internal analysis/research project that consumes a lot of resources.

They can also delay replacing hardware by accepting higher power usage and failure rate.

Yes it's serious problem but not critical as much as hardware company for immediately.

[disgruntledphd2]

Both Google and Facebook have substantial proportions of their revenue from CN based advertisers.