Apple is currently heavily weighted in China for final assembly manufacturing, but if there were any changes in government regulations or tariff rates as stated by President Trump, it could put Apple at a significant disadvantage to getting product to customers in a timely manner and take an enormous hit to margins.
Even with China’s population it is still a challenge to meet the demands of labor when so many companies are competing for the labor. Apple now pays a premium on top of minimum wage to their contract manufacturers to ensure that they receive the labor needed to not delay production. There are also all of the upstream suppliers who are also in need of employees to work on their sub-assemblies and components that go into the finished good. During an iPhone launch contract manufacturers need to hire or re-allocate around 250,000 people to work on finally assembly of the new iPhone.
Companies are competing for moderately “skilled” labor to meet the demands of product launches. (2) Labor is starting to become an issue during peak seasons, usually over the summer due to the large number of manufacturing companies looking for labor. China also has much larger and more nimble factories than in the United States. Many of the upstream components and subassemblies are also manufactured in China and Southeast Asia, so to do final assembly in the United States would create huge logistical challenges. As a consumer would you be willing to pay at least $100 more for an iPhone to know it was designed and manufactured in the United States? (1)Īpple along with other manufacturing companies has taken manufacturing overseas to reduce costs and improve efficiencies. How will personal and business relations between avatars be controlled, and by whom, in an unregulated digital metaverse? Will your avatar be able to suffer from, or inflict upon other avatars, activities such as digital rape, fraud, GBH, paedophilia, slander, discrimination, insurance claims, assault with lethal digital weapons, stalking, and so on? How will the endless controversies about, for instance, gender identity, be resolved in the metaverse? Will furries finally be able to have avatars with the (digital) bodies they desire? The list is endless and as long as no action is taken the Digital Dystopia gets ever nearer.Apple Inc has received a lot of bad publicity for using Chinese manufacturing companies to build most of their products. How will users pay for their digital purchases? Presumably the favoured option will be a cryptocurrency that's easier to use than the current cryptos, perhaps Meta's Diem (formerly Libra). Digital products and services will be created by the new kinds of businesses that will underlie the digital economy. Already digital land in metaverses is being sold for considerable amounts of money so that digital entrepreneurs have somewhere to set up their shops. Your avatar will need to wear the latest digital fashions, have the latest digital cosmetic surgery, own a digital Porsche to drive around the metaverse, furnish their digital house with the most fashionable digital furniture chosen by the best of the digital interior designers, and on and on. Metaverses will contain digital shops selling digital products to your digital avatar and at first there may only be a few such products available but rapidly more digital products will be created and sold in metaverses by new digital businesses.