[spacedcowboy]

What's to stop Apple using all this foreign-earned money to buy Chinese chips using their (say) European companies ? Then they'd even pay less tax on all that money sitting out there.

Apple Europe (or however it's set up) is presumably not an American company, and not subject to American law, being based elsewhere...

[inhumantsar]

I'm not a lawyer, so grain of salt, but I'd imagine the courts would still view those purchases to have been made by Apple since they would be for the benefit of Apple, not the hypothetical Apple Europe.

think of it this way: a US company is caught doing business with a company wholly owned by a sanctioned individual. say the us company argued "we weren't doing business with Pavel Sanctionovich, we were doing business with Pavel S. Inc., a UK company that just happens to be owned by Pavel.", would the courts accept that?

[spacedcowboy]

I'm no lawyer either :)

Even if Apple benefits though, I'm not sure American law binds foreign subsidiaries, otherwise I think they'd be taxing them as well :)

You're probably right, and even if not, theres probably a whole slew of regulations they could impose to make it non-useful. Still seems odd that Washington gets to decide what a company in other country B does, forbidding the export of RAM by that company B to other country C.