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This Washington Post article by Henry Farrell explains the implications of the 2016 EU ruling on Apple asking it to pay 13 billion euros in back taxes. Other countries in the European Union are upset that Ireland is taking away business and siphoning away tax revenues from their country, and giving most of it back to Apple. Normally the European Union Commission does not have authority over taxes in the member states. However considering the social and political implications at a time of deep recession and political upheaval in the EU and the U.S., the European Union Commission under Margarethe Vestager has seen it proper to look at arrangements in which companies come up with tax arrangements that deprive member states unfairly of tax revenues- revenues that could support social welfare and basic education, healthcare services at a time of painful cuts. A tax rate of .005% in 2013 for Apple is cited by Vestager as she points out that Apple's taxable profit does not correspond to economic reality, as most operations are conducted outside Ireland. Ireland is just on paper the tax location for EU operations. Vestager has thus come up with a legal approach based on Ireland's tax arrangements being a form of illegal state subsidy, which is not allowed under EU rules, and gives the EU Commission authority to require that it be reversed by paying the back taxes of 13 billion euros. Farrell answers the question why the U.S. Treasury is saying that Apple should not have to pay these taxes, as the U.S. also hopes to get some of these taxes at some future date with Apple repatriating profits to the U.S. under a still to be set tax arrangement. ...

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How the need for better power management for mobile, PC and Cloud helped ARM  Holdings compete effectively with much larger Intel Corporation. This report tells the story of the rise of ARM as a dominant supplier of chips for mobile phones. Apple is looking at "performance per watt" as a key parameter in selection of chips. This comes at a time when global cloud computing makes up 1% of global electricity use. Cambridge UK based company Arm Holdings licenses its microchips to 500 companies. Arm has 90% of the market for small processors going into smartphones and tablets, laptops. Intel does not license its microchip designs for them to build their own versions except for AMD and Via Technologies. Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm and Nvidia pay Arm for the license and make variants customized for them with their own engineers.  but all compatible with Arm's ecosystem and "instruction set (which is the instructions used for software to talk to hardware). ...

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Issues about how many more jobs are supported by Apple beyond the 47,000 employees in the U.S. Estimates of job creation in China and overseas through supplier networks for iPads, iPhones and other products are as high as 700,000. Apple says it has "created or supported" 514,000 jobs in the U.S. Experts say it is hard to say how many jobs are supported. Of the jobs Apple counted in this number, the consulting group doing the estimate included 257,000 jobs at companies such as Corning that makes the glass for the iPhone, UPS, and a Samsung plant in Texas. The number was generated using a formula of the federal government's Bureau of Economic Analysis and how much money Apple spent on goods and services in the U.S. An additional 210,000 jobs were generated by companies making apps for Apple devices. The consulting company estimated that 45% of the 466,000 app related jobs in the U.S. -using the estimate of such jobs from TechNet- were for Apple apps. Apple released these figures on its website as criticism from the industry and outside mounts about whether Apple is doing enough for jobs in the U.S. Intel's Andy Grove is one of the industry executives who has pointed out that there is much scaling up at home that U.S. companies need to do....

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Apple offers a new way to buy iPhones directly from Apple with financing in September 2015. This will change the way iPhones are sold, giving more control over the sale of iPhones to Apple. It will enable Apple to stabilize core sales for iPhones by encouraging upgrades every year. The monthly payments are $32.41 for 2 years for the cheapest iPhone. Apple is taking aim at the average upgrade time which is increasing- it went up to 26.3 months in 2015 from 18.2 months in 2010, according to a telecom consultant. With the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sales surged for Apple in the first 3 quarters of 2015 by 50% from the prior year period. It will be harder for Apple to generate this kind of sales increase as the new iPhones introduced in September 2015- the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus have better cameras and "3-D Touch," only incrementally different. A 16 gigabyte iPhone 6s would cost $778, about the same as the $649 price and Apple Care coverage of $129. The way iPhones were sold through wireless carriers kept the price hidden with higher wireless service charges- 2 years of a Verizon wireless 3 gigabye data plan ended up costing users twice the amount of the $649 price of the iPhone. Now the competition among wireless carriers will shift to pricing cuts and changing their pricing strategies. The result of the changes is likely to be increasing shifts from one carrier to another as Apple allows direct buyers to choose the carrier they want....

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Andy Grove makes this passionate plea for the dignity of workers in America in 2010. It is worth reading in 2020 what this founder of Intel Corp and pioneering spirit of Silicon Valley has to say. Andy Grove of Intel says there is something seriously wrong when the unemployment rate in the Bay Area is higher than the 9.7% national average for the USA. American companies have added jobs like crazy in Asia, but things are sputtering back home. Hon Hai has 800,000 employees and makes most of the electronic and computer products for American companies. Grove says startups are not the answer, unless they scale up and create jobs the way Intel did starting back in 1968, with a $3 million capital infusion by investors. The move from the first production model to mass production is critical, as companies hire thousands of people. Innovation and scaling up have to go together. He makes his point clearly by pointing out that Apple has 25,000 employees. For every Apple employee there are 10 employees in China working on Apple iMacs, iPods, iPhones. And he adds that the same 10 to 1 relationship applies to other U.S. tech companies. And here Grove asks the tough question by first posing an answer. He says it sounds like- no big deal, we keep the high paying jobs, we keep most of the profits, but what kind of society are we going to have with highly paid professional workers and lots of people unemployed? And he doesn't mention that there are a lot more young people unemployed. He says the US has become very inefficient at creating tech jobs, and it would be a great mistake not to act decisively early on. And adds that the investments in such areas as solar power and electric car batteries have to be made early on to maintain leadership in these areas. Grove faults academics like Alan Blinder and others who say loss of manufacturing jobs and whole industries was no big deal. The U.S. has forgotten the value of manufacturing jobs. He wants to see America focus on jobs and rebuild its industrial base. And less of transferring engineering knowhow and new technologies overseas, technology that can help bring innovation and scaling up of factories at home. In his view individual companies doing their own thing, in a misguided fashion that jobs don't matter, is not the answer to the situation we face. The industrial economies of Asia, China at the present day, have focussed on jobs and technology, and scaled up. Grove reminds readers of the situation in America in 1932, when jobless veterans demonstrating outside the White House in large numbers were dispersed by soldiers with live ammunition and fixed bayonets. This makes him shudder at the very thought of it, and brings back memories of his early years in Hungary, as a young man in 1956. Are we listening? ...

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Of streaming services Netflix, Paramount, Peacock, ESPN, HBO, Hulu, Disney+, and Fox One only Netflix is consistently and hugely profitable since 2023. Netflix made $3 billion a quarter compared to losses of $1 billion a quarter for Comcast Peacock and Disney+. Peacock is offering bundling deals with Apple TV, and other streaming services are also teaming up. For Netflix the fastest growing and profitable segment is the $7.99 with ads per month which has grown from one third of customers to half of Nertfliz customer base. By contrast the general information market is captured by You Tube which gets about $12 billion a quarter from ads and subscriptions with 75% of profits from ads.

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Geopolitical problems and installation of US air defense systems in South Korea led to Chinese restrictions on South Korea. This led Samsung to reduce its labor force in China from 60,000 to 18,000 in 2023. It shifted operations to India and Vietnam. It is Vietnam's largest exporter and makes 20-30% of its global smartphones in India. Apple is only now beginning to shift to India. This is called decoupling or de-risking after an excessive concentration of manufacturing by companies like Apple in China.

Xiaomi took a large share of the local market in China from Samsung, another reason Samsung reduced presence in China. It still gets advanced components from China. In India Samsung has a dominant market presence. Because India is a price conscious market Apple has only a small market share in India.

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Since 2007 Applle has sold 50 million units of the Apple iPhone, making it Apple's largest business. With the New iPhone 4 analysts expect Apple to sell about 37 million phones in the fiscal year to September 2010. This would be a 79% increase over the 20.7 million sets sold in the prior year. And of global sales analysts say about 55% of sales for the iPhone are from outside the US, compared to 25% 2 years ago. There is a lot of excitement among iPhone fans waiting in line at Apple stores in Europe and Japan, long before the stores opened.

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David Segal takes a detailed look inside Apple's retail stores in the U.S. and talks with employees at different stores to find out what its like working as an hourly employee at an Apple store. World wide Apple's 327 global stores sold $16 billion in Apple products. Per employee the sales are about $473,000, but at an hourly rate of about $12 the average employee makes about $25,000 per year. After recent wage raises this could be up to about $36,000. The National Retail Federation says electronics stores have about an average of $206,000 in sales per employee. Contrary to what most people may think most of Apple's employees are not engineers and other professionals, about 30,000 of the 43,000 Apple employees in the U.S. work as hourly employees in the retail stores. Most are young people in the early 20's, single, with health insurance provided by Apple not costing as much for that age group. There is no career path and most leave after a couple of years. Because of the Apple mystique and the drive to create new user friendly products there are many young people looking for this kind of temporary work, especially now with high unemployment. ...

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The different strategies of Apple and Samsung in getting to the point where the two companies now dominate the smartphone market. Whereas Apple makes only one phone, its iPhone, Samsung's strategy is to have multiple phones in each price segment. It has five levels of Android based phones, with 2-3 models in each price segment. Samsung also benefits from doing its own maufacturing. When faced with a number of technologies Samsung's strategy is to bet on all of the technologies until one of them emerges as a winner, and then concentrate resources on that technology. It uses a similiar strategy for televisions. Apple by contrast places more emphasis on original design and profit margins over sales, gaining sales without eroding margins by being the first innovator in the market. It also has its own unique arrangement for manufacturing at lowcost with Foxconn in China that supports its high margins. Apple is secretive about its designs and promotes its brand heavily with its own retail stores. Apple also uses its innovative edge as leverage to steer profits away from carriers. Analyst estimates are that carriers such as AT&T and Verizon pay about $400 per iPhone to subsidize its cost because this is the only way to get customers into their retail stores. IDC estimates are that the smartphone market is $219 billon in 2012. Both companies are very close in volume- IDC estimates Apple shipped 93.2 million smartphones in 2011, compared to Samsung's 94 million units. Apple has market share of 23.5% in the fourth quarter 2012, up from 16% in 2010. Samsung has 22.8%, up from 9.4% in 2010. Apple and Samsung have together taken 91% of operating profits of all cellphone companies in the fourth quarter, an increase of 30% from 2011, according to Strategy Analytics....

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testifies at the US Justice Department's trial of Google that the deal Google made with Apple led to its search engine becoming ubiquitous with monopoly power. Nadella said that the unfettered power of Google made it difficult for Microsoft to compete with Google on the internet. 

"Despite my enthusiasm that there is a new angle with AI, I worry a lot that htis vicious cycle I am trapped in could get even more vicious." Nadella said that Google's deal with Apple made it oligopolistic.

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Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway sold $75 billion in stocks in the second quarter 2024 including half of its Apple shares. It has now sold off most of its Apple shares. The cash level is now $277 billion in August 2024. The market is now recalibrating after tech stocks are going through skepticism. Berkshire is also trimming investmetn in Bank of America its second largest investment. Bufett says it is better to hold on to cash as he cannot find places "with very little risk that can make us a lot of money."

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Surprisingly very little can be found on the internet on how the relationship between Apple's Tim Cook and Foxconn started and how it evolved over the two decades- a key to understanding the two decade rise of Apple since 1998 when Tim Cook, an Alabama engineer, joined Apple's Steve Jobs to rebuild an almost demolished Apple. It is also key to understanding the rise of China in manufacturing to the point of excluding all other countries, including the US, for major investments. It is also key to understanding how the social relations have been disrupted in the US, how the US workers and families suffered from outshoring on this massive scale never before seen in the US for 100 years of the Industrial Revolution since Lincoln in the 1860's. This has not significantly changed to this day as the US goes into the midterms to elect a new Congress. Mr. Trump ruffled sentiment on this issue but had little action or results to show for it to reverse this. Mr. Biden is making some headway as the US elects a new Congress in November 2022 to take up the tasks to restore American leadership in manufacturing and in technologies that support advanced manufacturing from semiconductors to renewable energy. What happens now depends on many things. Mr. Cook talks about intuition as a main driver along with preparation and hard work in his project which has done little for America and the American people, in the sense of how its communities look like, and how its families live, as they are largely excluded from Cook's Apple project. Even as it employs about 3 million workers of contract manufacturers, for the most part in China with Foxconn. Total employees in the US are 37,000 mostly highly paid engineers and technical workers. The 270,000 working in what it calls its ecosystem are mostly workers in retail stores paid much lower wages. Of manufacturing there is little on the scale in China. Not since the days of Lincoln in the 1960's who fought a civil war so that the rights of labour in the US were protected as seen in his message to Congress in the 1860's, and through the Industrial Revolution for 100 years, has something like this happened in the US. It is not about some manufacturing taking place in Asia, it is the sheer scale that excludes America from significant manufacturing, about 300,000 workers in the US mostly in lower paid retail jobs, and 3 million in China with contract manufacturers that is an aberration from history. It is about delegating an entire supply chain in manufacturing that constitutes this huge aberration.     ...

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Battersea Power Station in its heyday in the 1950's processed one mlilion tons of coal from Wales and England to power the UK with one fifth's of its electricity. King Charles pays a Christmas visit to the Power Station buildings that are converted into shops and where Apple has its UK headquarters. The singer Raye performs during the visit. The architecture design was done by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. It resembles an upside down coffee table. The boiler house could fit St Paul's cathedral inside, says the BBC.

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Apple's new privacy rules are reducing the extensive tracking of internet users that took place in an unregulated industry for the last decade. Apple has introduced a long overdue privacy change that restricts how users can be tracked on apps such as Facebook, Instagram and other apps. Users are now asked if they want to be tracked and can opt out. US users opt to allow tracking only 16% of the time they see the Apple privacy prompt. This will be one more needed step to protect the privacy of users that had suffered  in the last 10 years from rampant and unrestricted tracking of users.

 

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European Travel Information and Authorization System  ETIAS fee $24. ETIAS for travel to Europe starts late 2026. Visa free countries will still need visitors to get ETIAS a form of travel clearance. This means US, Japanese, Canadian and UK visitors to Europe will need to apply online before entering European countries. The authorization will be valid for 3 years or until the passport expires whatever comes first. Travelers may not stay more than 90 days in a 180 day period. Children under 18 and adults over 70 years will be exempt from the fee. Once one enters personal details the authorization is digital and received in minutes.

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Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple and its CEO, passed away on September 5, 2011. He helped create the Macintosh, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad, changing the way people work, listen to music, or work and communicate with portable handheld devices. He made significant contributions through the devices he helped create by making them easy to use, look and feel good. By making as he said "the whole widget," both the software, hardware and other design, and a relentless focus on how the products worked in the hands of consumers, Jobs was able to come up with unique products like the Mac, iPod, iphone, and the iPad. The pioneering work of Jobs began early, in 1977 with the first Macintosh computer, and continued through 2010 with the introduction of the iPad. Jobs first first period at Apple lasted from 1976 to 1985, closing when Jobs left the company after differences with then CEO John Sculley. He rejoined the company in 1996 when Apple acquired Next, the company founded by Jobs in the intervening period. The first period saw the emergence of Microsoft in the personal computer world. In 1997 Apple accepted an investment of $150 million from Microsoft and told Mac fans that "we want to let go off this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to loose." Microsofts Office software could be used on Mac computers by this arrangement and helped Apple survive this period. Later in a 2005 address at Stanford University, Jobs told students about the first period: "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." Jobs personal story is of being college dropout from Reed College, Oregon, where he dropped out after one semester in 1972, because of financial issues. He then worked parttime at Atari, and in 1975 associated with the Homebrew Computer Club where he met Apple co-founder Wozniak. He was the son of unwed parents, University of Wisoconsin grad student Joanne Carole Schieble and a Syrian exchange student Abdulfattah Jandali. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs shortly after birth. ...

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Walmart with 2000 H1-B visa offers for the first half odf 2025 halts the process in October 2025. Amazon had 10,000 H1-B offers highest number of H1-B visas offers by June 2025, Microsoft, Apple and Google had 4000 such job offers. India makes up 70% of the H1-B visa program and CHina 12%. It hurts the US workforce by bringing in lower paid IT workers to replace higher paid American workers. Bloomberg has adocumentary on the H1-B visa program that highlights abuse of the program that hurts American workers by the Tech companies. It also hurts India by diverting talented engineers needed for India's rapid modernization and creating a culture in which talented engineers in India look outside the country for jobs.

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Walt Mossberg, who writes the Wall Street Journal's consumer technology review section, watched Steve Jobs up-close over the years since 1997. They met one-on-one for product introductions, long discussions about the industry, and recently after Jobs illness, at his home in Palo Alto. Mossberg describes a long walk to a nearby park after Jobs had undergone a liver transplant. It provided an insight into the man Steve Jobs was. Persistent- he called Mossberg for 4-5 straight weekends during the dark days of 1997-1998 to convey his vision of Apple products or discuss aspects of reviews. Patience and optimism about the future- Jobs always maintained a positive tone and a vision of what could be in the digital revolution, and Apple's role in it in these discussions. There is the opening of the first retail store in the Washington D.C. area, and Jobs patiently handles Mossberg's incredulity about Apple and its inexperience with retail stores. And Jobs saying that he had taken a serious interest in the details- down to the translucency of the glass. There is the meeting with Bill Gates at the fifth All Things Digital Conference, when both made their appearance together for the first time and Jobs hands a cold bottle of water to Gates. By this time Jobs had already come to the conclusion- as he once said after accepting a $150 millon investment from Gates in 1997-1998- that it was no longer true that Microsoft had to lose for Apple to succeed....

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Trade in services is not enough. Services won't build ships for the US Navy. Services don't provide jobs for factory workers. Trade in services won't rebuild the US manufacturing base. It won't rebuild the middle class. Trade in services won't make pharmaceuticals Made in America that are available always, including in times of war, pandemics and disruptions. Bottom line as DJT pointed out in a Cabinet meeting on April 10 is that the US could no longer be a world power without its industrial base, it's manufacturing base. Americans companies doing the outshoring are really the targets of the Tariffs because they are at the heart of the mechanisms causing the destruction of the industrial and manufacturing base of America, vital for it's security and for it's leadership of the free world and western civilization. It started with Apple in 1998 and I witnessed this as a consultant seeing the production line at the Apple Colorado Springs plant in 1997 with rework and defective product before Steve Jobs returned to Apple. By 1998 Apple started shipping it's entire production base to China. DJT told the Cabinet meeting on April 10, 2025, all previous presidents had to tell companies firing all their workers and outshoring their machines was- "there will be a tariff of 50 or 100% on your products imported into the US."  And these companies would never have fired all their workers and sent their factories to China or some other country. Economists and experts who have turned their backs on American workers see the $1 trillion deficit countries have with China and the loss of their industrial and manufcturing base with one excuse or another. Trade in Services in which the USA has an advantage does not do much for American workers, or for the 5 million manufacturing jobs lost and tens of thousands of factories that have been outshored.  National Security and Jobs, the Middle Class, factory communities across all 51 states are all at stake. ...

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This NYT editorial brings up the 14-19% tax proposed by U.S. president Obama for overseas profits of U.S. companies. The 5.25% tax in 2005 under the Bush administration for repatriation of about $300 billion did not result in a positive experience says NYT, as most of the money went into dividend payments, share buybacks, and severance for laid off employees. It led to a new surge in unrepatriated profits in the expectation of another tax holiday of this type. A Senate investigation in 2013 showed Apple has $100 billion in Ireland with no tax paid on much of this amount, as cited here. The NYT says Apple shows arrogance in thinking the EU Commission which has taken up cases on tax avoidance of Fiat, Starbucks, Amazon, BASF, would not look at Apple in Ireland. It calls tax deferral on overseas profits as the root of the problem, as it allowed companies initially to look at investment opportunities, but now simply to stash the money abroad till some better tax arrangement can be achieved with U.S. Treasury. The Obama administration proposal was to immediately tax existing profits at 14%, whether repatriated or not, and thereafter at 19% on profits moved offshore. The NYT is in favor of ending corporate tax deferral altogether, and applying taxes on profits in the same year they are made.  ...

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Apple Music is about to overtake Spotify in the U.S. with its subscriber account base growing at 5% a month compared to 2% for Spotify. Apple Music comes in preloaded on Apple devices giving it an advantage.  Globally Spotify has twice the account subscriber base of Apple Music. Other players in the field are Pandora, Amazon and Google's You Tube for streaming music. Streaming users play a small monthly fee or put up with ads. Yet the industry of streaming music is yet to be profitable this report points out. Apple Music and Spotify both exaggerate the size of their user base. Spotify charges $9.99 a month for streaming music service, yet even after having a large subscriber base in millions it is still not making a profit. Spotify and Apple Music both offer student plans for $4.99 a month, and a family plan for 6 persons at $14.99 a month. In the free tier or initial free subscriptions period Apple Music is way ahead of Spotify, the Home Pod device adds to Apple's advantage. ...

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Norris quotes Senator John McCain who said that when corporations such as Apple and Google do not pay their share of taxes, other companies in the U.S. and ordinary taxpayers have to make up the difference.