Sigh.
After being a New York Times subscriber for decades, last year I finally cut my ties with them and I haven’t regretted it. They just seem to keep getting worse.
Case it point is an article they just ran on whether Apple could actually make their iPhones in America.
John Gruber has the details:
The New York Times ran a really dumb Tripp Mickle piece yesterday under the headline “Is Trump’s ‘Made in America’ iPhone a Fantasy?” The answer should have simply been “Yes, it’s sheer fantasy”, perhaps with explanations why. Instead, Mickle twists the piece into pretzels to make it seem like the answer is maybe, even though there’s not a single fact to back that up. Not one. The only thing that backs up any answer other than “It’s a fantasy, can’t happen, makes no sense” are comments from analysts — named and unnamed — and the bizarre old-school news media practice of treating as fact any nonsense and/or bullshit that comes out of the lips of anyone with the world “analyst” on their business card.
Could Apple make iPhones in the United States?
Yes. Apple could make iPhones in the United States. But doing so would be expensive and difficult and force the company to more than double iPhone prices to $2,000 or more, said Wayne Lam, an analyst with TechInsights, a market research firm. Apple would have to buy new machines and rely on more automation than it uses in China because the U.S. population is so much smaller, Mr. Lam said.
This is nonsense. The problem isn’t that China has a higher population than the US (about 1.4 billion vs. 340 million, about a 4× difference). Foxconn employs somewhere between 300–500,000 engineers in China doing final assembly for Apple products. It’s that the United States doesn’t have anyone with the necessary vocational skills, who would want to work tedious factory jobs at factory-job wages, and China does. That’s part of the fever-dream mad-king fantasy of this entire cockamamie endeavor by Trump: these are difficult, low-paying, long-houred jobs that Americans don’t want. That these jobs are all in China and India is proof that America is far ahead, not that we’ve fallen behind. (There are nuances to the overall dynamics, like the national security ramifications of our being reliant on Taiwan for leading-edge chip fabrication, but Trump’s tariff nonsense doesn’t address those issues.)
Worse: $2,000 is just a made-up number. Lam doesn’t even say which iPhone would cost $2,000. Would it be the iPhone 16 Pro Max (current starting price: $1,200) or the base model iPhone 16e (current price: $600)? Mickle reports that Lam is saying prices “would more than double” so let’s just say he’s talking about the regular no-adjective iPhone models. Today the iPhone 16 starts at $800. If assembling even some of them would result in a retail price of $2,000, Apple would sell none of them. Like, almost literally zero.
Read the whole thing. Unbelievably it gets much worse. How the Times can publish such dreck is beyond me.
Ever since their tech columnist David Pogue left the Times years ago, their tech coverage has suffered. Even when I was still a subscriber I had long stopped reading the clowns who replaced Pogue because they mostly spouted nonsense. The Times has been going downhill in many areas for quite some time.