Apple is still the cleanest machine in consumer tech. The brand. The margins. The logistics. The cult. The only thing it cannot polish away is geopolitics.
The supply chain that made Apple untouchable is also the thing dragging it into the trade war mud. When tariffs can punch an $800 million hole in a single quarter and the next quarter is lining up another $1.1 billion, you stop pretending the factory map is “optimised” and start treating it like a fire exit plan.
So the company is moving production fast enough to annoy politicians on multiple continents. The goal being reported is simple. Build the iPhones for the US in India, then keep the rest of the world on the China pipeline for as long as that pipeline remains usable.
India is not a magical replacement for China. It is a second engine being bolted on mid flight. It runs on government incentives like the PLI scheme, supplier expansion, and a lot of Sunday shifts. Reuters even reported Apple airlifting iPhones out of India to beat tariff timing, which tells you how tense the calendar has become. airlifts
India’s iPhone output is already pushing toward “about a fifth” of global production depending on whose tracker you trust, with Reuters citing Counterpoint at about 18 percent in 2025 and rising. production That is a big shift. It is also still a long way from replacing China’s scale and density.
China knows that. China also has leverage in the form of people. When Foxconn reportedly pulled roughly 300 Chinese engineers and technicians back from India, it was a reminder that “diversify” can be slowed without banning anything outright. engineers
Vietnam is the other pressure valve. Reuters has been explicit that Apple already manufactures products like iPads, AirPods and Apple Watches in Vietnam, with suppliers investing there for MacBooks too. So the US bound device flow becomes India plus Vietnam, and China stays the backbone for a lot of non US demand.
That is the factory side. The product side has its own drift.
Apple does ship real engineering wins. Apple Silicon was a serious move. The problem is the mainstream perception. Phones and laptops feel like they are being sanded and varnished each year rather than reinvented. That is what happens when the centre of gravity shifts toward recurring revenue and ecosystem control.
Services is the clearest signal. Apple itself keeps highlighting record Services results, and the financial press has been tracking the run toward $100 billion plus annual services revenue with margins that make hardware look like hard labour. services
A business that prints money from the App Store, subscriptions, and platform rules also attracts regulators like seagulls at a chip shop. The EU has Apple listed as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act. The UK CMA has already designated Apple with strategic market status. The courts keep circling the payment rails and the commissions.
The uncomfortable part is that Apple’s future risk is no longer only “can we build the thing”. It is “can we build it in the right country, ship it under the right tariff regime, sell it under the right regulatory rules, and still look like the premium brand while doing it”.
Even inside Apple, the tone has shifted. Eddy Cue has openly floated the idea that the iPhone could be obsolete in a decade under the pace of AI change. That is not a fan blog panic line. It came up in testimony and then got picked up broadly. obsolete
Apple’s next era is going to be defined by two jobs at once.
Keep the supply chain flexible enough to survive politics.
Build the next core product before someone else does.
That is a harder problem than making the camera slightly better again.
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