[josteink]

> If you don't bow to their authoritarian edict, you are kicked out of the country.

Apple, of all companies, can probably afford to do that though.

But they keep on doing business there. That’s a bit depressing.

(Written on my iPhone)

[acdha]

I don’t know how current it is, but Bunnie Huang wrote a series of posts in the 2000s about what it was like building things in China. It was more than just being cheap, and non-trivial to replicate elsewhere (one memorable quote: “I hadn’t seen blind dedication like this since I worked with the autonomous underwater robotics team at MIT”).

Here’s the first one:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=183

[falcolas]

The reason is the same one that most electronics companies (and certainly most cell phone brands) do business in China:

It's cheap.

Cheap labor, few/no penalties for pollution, abundant cheap electricity, inexpensive labor safety, etc.

It's the dream of outsourcing realized.