Apple has been directly threatened with tariffs by Trump. Currently they are exempt from the India tariffs.

The capex commitment in the US is a transactional agreement to ensure that these exceptions are kept.

> Foxconn will reduce its planned investment to $672 million from $10 billion and cut the number of new jobs to 1,454 from 13,000

Funniest one is Masayoshi Son announcements, in 2016 - $50B for 50k jobs, and in 2024 - $100B for 100k jobs !

2016: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/06/trump-says-softbank-will-inv...

2024: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/16/softbank-ceo-to-announce-100...

Funny thing here is, that he doesn't even have that money. But who cares these days...

But if this even gives us some chance to jolt our manufacturing sector back, will we start to gain some momentum? Even if it's mostly using automation. Will it help to reduce our reliance on China?

I doubt it will in the same way that it's been extremely hard for other countries to replicate the US momentum in R&D.

But one can hope.

Of course Apple didn't do it on their own accord, there was way too much profit to be made from outsourcing to China. Everyone else was doing it, why not also the richest company on earth?

Any amount of returning manufacturing here, returning power to the middle class by increasing the demand for labor and stopping the exploitation of foreign workers is a good thing. I can't stand listening to him talk, but if iPhones aren't reliant on slaves mining cobalt and 13 year olds working 12 hours a days I will consider that a win.

...it gifts authoritarian power to autocrats and fully guarantees more authoritarian behavior.

Ironically, your comment is double-bladed.

This has likely been in the works from when China shook Apple down and the timing has a nice upside that it also pacifies His Orangeness(tm).

They brought a 24k gold trophy for the president. That’s the tangible demonstration here.

> This is not PR fluff. > Critics may argue Apple is acting in self-interest.

This is PR fluff and, as a critic, I don’t think it’s in anyone’s best interest.

> This is a large, measurable, and multi-year commitment. It should be acknowledged as such.

How does this compare to the large measurable multi year commitments from the last few administrations that never materialized? What about the one from a few months ago the ago?

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more...

> This is a large, measurable, and multi-year commitment. It should be acknowledged as such.

We'll see. The multi-year nature can be seen as a feature or a bug. The benefits are delivered today: tariff carve outs. The promises can be scaled back at any time in the future. We're dealing with what is likely to be an incredibly anomalous economic... "policy". It is likely to not stick around once the current administration leaves, and perhaps even during the course of the current administration. If tariffs go away in the future, then the threat (and reward) disappear along with it. We'll see how incentivized Apple is to keep these commitments under those conditions if they come about.

> Of course, Apple’s global tax practices remain a fair target. But criticising every constructive move on that basis alone risks undermining the very kind of behaviour governments should encourage: strategic reinvestment, not financial engineering.

It should always go without saying that there are ways to go about this that don't involve policies that hurt both consumers and small companies alike. The CHIPS act was one example, and the benefits were arguably more evenly distributed (vs. a set of investments that probably disproportionately help the existing market leader). This administration went out of their way to dismantle that. No conversation about this should leave that out.

> Critics may argue Apple is acting in self-interest. So be it.

Neither this administration nor Apple seem to really care much about this. This matters for the reasons above: it doesn't make this deal particularly resilient. Both parties got what they wanted immediately: Apple got to avoid an unexpected roadblock (and perhaps gained an advantage over other companies), and Trump gets to look like he got this great deal. So what's to keep it around? This is why aligning actual long term incentives matters, vs. this short term nonsense. A congressional bill for example at minimum has constituents who will benefit or punish the representative at the polls. But we don't even need to get that technical, if neither party cares or believes in this at all, then it is of course set up to default fail. This is not a trivial undertaking we are talking about. It's not just a matter of getting the right parties to invest. You are asking to dramatically change a set of pipelines that have been established over the course of decades and regularly receive equivalent amounts of investment. If you actually want this to happen, you should care about how it happens, and you should realize it matters if this is made up entirely of cynical players with no real demonstrable upside in the end result.

There is no grand strategy here and I assure you after he is gone nobody will even know if this pledge was followed through.

Why? Especially considering military systems are looking increasingly like masses of consumer electronics (e.g. FPV drones).

So India/ China can supply other markets?

It's not spineless, it's his job to act in the interests of the company