China Slaps Apple Again

For those of you who have taken a long nap and have not noticed what China has been doing to Apple, you may not have noticed that Apple is being penalized for not complying with China's new "terrorism laws" which require the giving up of source code and encryption software that allows a user to be secure from monitoring.  Of course the Chinese don't like this, and Carl Ichan withdrew from ownership of Apple stock saying this would have a negative impact on Apple's ability to perform in the Chinese market.  I guess he was right, though in my previous post on this I criticized Ichan for not taking into account all the companies that have complied.  He should think twice about those giving up their life's blood.

At any rate, the other shoe dropped today when Beijing stopped selling Apple iPhone 6 and 6+ phones.  The Wall Street Journal and Fox News have both done stories on this already though Fox was more pointed in its transparent purpose.  This is blatent manipulation of trade for the purpose of gaining embedded technologies that not part of the build in China.  Nobody believes the Chinese story that Apple phones violate a patent by some Chinese company.  We all remember the blatent rip-off of technology and outright copying of US products by China, which Chinese courts are slow at prosecuting unless caught stealing the code outright, and then can manage to drag out for 7 years or more.  In the meantime they continue to use the software and embed it in their own products so it can't be removed.

Now, we are anxious to see if Apple will get any government help in fighting this fight.  Like Google, they have so far done it on their own, at tremendous cost.  It would be difficult for Apple to pull their manufacturing out of China, but that thought must have crossed Tim Cooks' mind a few times lately. There can be no excuse for this kind of behavior and it can be lifted as fast as the ZTE sanctions were when China complained about them.  There needs to be a little back channel negotiation with a country that seems unwilling to negotiate on anything.  Maybe we could support Apple moving its manufacturing to another country, or stop the sale of some of the Chinese cell phone makers who sell in the US.  Wouldn't that be fun?