Tag: Tim Cook

Zuckerberg’s War on the iPhone
Mark Zuckerberg didn’t use Apple’s name the other day when laying out his vision for marrying superintelligent AI and his hardware. He might as well have. The New York Budgets/Getty Images
In a tech world long dominated by Apple, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken aim at a new target: the iPhone as the center of personal computing. In a memo and earnings commentary timed to perfection, Zuckerberg may have fired the first true salvo in what could become the next platform war. His weapon? A sweeping vision of AI-powered smart glasses as the future “primary computing device”.
On July 30, Zuckerberg published a manifesto titled “Personal Superintelligence,” in which he outlined his belief that AI is on the brink of superintelligence—a form of artificial general intelligence tailored to empower individuals. He wrote that future computing will live not in handheld screens, but in devices that see, listen, and respond—smart glasses. These, he declared, would replace smartphones as the dominant interface in daily life.
He further asserted that absent such wearable AI gear, people would be at a “significant cognitive disadvantage.”
Meta isn’t just talking. The company is pouring billions into the infrastructure to make this happen. It owns a 49% stake in Scale AI (~$14.3 billion) and plans AI data centers like Prometheus and Hyperion, each the size of Manhattan blocks. Annual capital expenditures for 2025 now top $66–$72 billion, heavily skewed toward AI infrastructure.
Meta stock rose approximately 9% following the update—investors cheered the clarity of the pivot.
Still, profitability concerns persist. Analysts note slower revenue and profit growth, powered by competitive pressure, TikTok’s ad traction, and uncertain returns on AI investments.
In blunt terms: Zuckerberg is relinquishing reliance on Apple’s iPhone ecosystem. By betting on glasses, Meta seeks to sidestep Apple’s App Store fees, privacy sandbox, and hardware constraints. Previously, Zuckerberg criticized Apple for lacking innovation, limited accessory support, and suppressing wearable integration, particularly with Ray-Ban AI glasses.
If realized, Apple’s dominance over personal computing could erode—substituted by a multimodal AI interface owned by Meta.
Meta’s Llama AI—once open source—now faces tighter licensing, citing safety concerns. Zuckerberg signaled the company may not fully open-source its future models, unlike earlier promises.
Zuckerberg’s announcement wasn’t marketing fluff—it was a fresh chapter in competition. He framed AI as a democratizing force, contrasting with rivals who allegedly envision automation reducing people to passive recipients of machine labor. Instead, he pitched a future of “personal empowerment.”
Expect Apple to accelerate its own AI/AR strategy, possibly unveiling Vision Pro successors or streamlined AI glasses. If smart glasses gain traction, we may see a shift away from swipe-driven wearables toward continuous ambient AI.Regulators may reexamine data collection and privacy standards if Meta’s glasses become ubiquitous.
Zuckerberg’s vision is bold, built on investment muscle and a clear sense of timing. He’s betting that AI and wearables will redefine personal computing—and unseat Apple’s long reign. Whether he succeeds will depend on execution: user trust, device comfort, battery life, AI reliability, and a compelling ecosystem no longer tethered to a screen.
For now, however, it’s safe to say: Meta’s not only challenging the iPhone—but reimagining what a “computer” could be.
August 2, 2025
Trump Threatens 25% Tariff on Apple, Says Samsung and Other Tech Firms Could Be Targeted Next
President Donald Trump on Friday demanded Apple and other smartphone makers like Samsung make their phones in the United States or face a 25% tariff.
“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump posted Friday morning on Truth Social. “If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S.”
Speaking to press in the Oval Office on Friday after signing executive orders, Trump said the tariff would apply to any phone maker selling devices in the US.
“It would be more. It would be also Samsung and anybody that makes that product,” Trump told reporters. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.”
Trump last week during his Middle East trip said he was displeased with Cook, Apple’s CEO, over the company’s plan to manufacture iPhones set to be sold in the United States at newly built plants in India.
Over the past several years, Apple had been working to diversify its production capabilities. Some iPhone production had already moved to India, and Cook on Apple’s earnings call with investors earlier this month said he expected “the majority of iPhones sold in the US will have India as their country of origin.”
On that call, Cook said he expected Apple would face a tariff burden of up to $900 million this quarter. However, it could have been significantly worse: Apple and other US tech companies scored a big win last month when Trump exempted electronics from his massive tariffs on China.
Unlike Apple, Samsung doesn’t rely on China for smartphone production. The South Korea-based tech giant closed its last phone factory in China in 2019 after losing market share to domestic rivals, though it still has operations there. Sources within Samsung previously told CNN that the vast majority of its smartphone manufacturing takes place in South Korea, Vietnam, India and Brazil.
Despite lowering his tariff to at least 30% on most Chinese goods — down from 145% earlier this month — a 10% universal tariff remains on the majority of goods entering the United States. Roughly 90% of Apple’s iPhone production and assembly is based in China, according to Wedbush Securities’ estimates.
Trump met with Cook in Riyadh at the beginning of the president’s Middle East trip last week. In Qatar, he called out Cook for his plan to build US-bound iPhones in India.
“I had a little problem with Tim Cook,” Trump said last week in Qatar. “I said to him, ‘Tim, you’re my friend. I treated you very good. You’re coming in with $500 billion.’ But now I hear you’re building all over India. I don’t want you building in India.’”
Cook met with Trump once again at the White House on Tuesday, an administration official told CNN. The official did not divulge the subject matter of the meeting.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview with Fox News on Friday morning that Trump is trying to “bring back precision manufacturing to the US.”
“I think that one of our greatest vulnerabilities are these, is this external production, especially in semiconductors, and a large part of Apple’s components are in semiconductors,” Bessent said. “So we would like to have Apple help us make the semiconductor supply chain more secure.”
Some of Apple’s chips are already made in the United States, thanks to its partnership with TSMC, which recently opened a chipmaking plant in Arizona. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘Those jobs aren’t coming back’
The world’s most valuable publicly traded company is flush with cash and rakes in tremendous profit — more than any company in history. But Apple has long contended that it cannot manufacture iPhones in America.
Apple has invested billions of dollars training millions of skilled engineers abroad. China and India, with their massive populations, simply have more skilled engineers than the United States does. And it costs Apple significantly less to pay those workers.
Steve Jobs, Apple’s late CEO, famously brought up the issue during an October 2010 meeting with former President Barack Obama. He called America’s lackluster education system an obstacle for Apple, which needed 30,000 industrial engineers to support its on-site factory workers.
“You can’t find that many in America to hire,” Jobs told Obama, according to his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “If you could educate these engineers, we could move more manufacturing plants here.”
In a 2012 interview with tech journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he agreed with Jobs’ assessment. When asked if the day would ever come when an Apple product is made in the United States, he said: “I want there to be … and you can bet that we’ll use the whole of our influence on this.”
The notion Apple can reshore iPhone production is a “fictional tale,” Dan Ives, global head of technology research at financial services firm Wedbush Securities.
US-made iPhones could cost more than three times their current price of around $1,000, he said, because it would be necessary to replicate the highly complex production ecosystem that currently exists in Asia.
“You build that (supply chain) in the US with a fab in West Virginia and New Jersey, they’ll be $3,500 iPhones,” he said, referring to fabrication plants, or high-tech manufacturing facilities where computer chips that power electronic devices are normally made.
And even then, it would cost Apple about $30 billion and three years to move just 10% of its supply chain to the US to begin with, Ives told Burnett.
Ives reiterated that stance in a statement following Trump’s Friday tariff threat, saying, “the concept of Apple producing iPhones in the US is a fairy tale that is not feasible.” He estimated moving all of Apple’s iPhone production to the United States would take five to 10 years.
An additional 25% tariff on Apple products could result in higher prices for US iPhone buyers. Rumors have already been swirling that Apple is considering raising prices when it releases its new lineup of iPhones in the fall — a move that could further irk Trump, although the company will likely avoid directly attributing the increases to tariffs.
Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, estimates it would be difficult for Apple not to raise iPhone prices if it faces tariffs of 30% or higher.
“Anything below 30, they will probably carry the vast majority of that increase,” he said. “But I think at some point they’re going to have to start to share it.”
While moving iPhone production to the United States may not be possible, Apple did announce a $500 billion investment to expand its US facilities earlier this year, in an apparent effort to appease Trump.
The company said the investment would create a new facility to produce servers — previously made outside the United States — in Houston to support Apple Intelligence, its new brand of artificial intelligence products. It will also expand data center capacity in several states, and plans to invest in corporate facilities and production of Apple TV+ shows in 20 states, among other efforts.
May 24, 2025
Trump advocates for Apple to pay a 25% tariff on iPhones manufactured outside the U.S.
President Donald Trump said in a social media post Friday morning that Apple will have to pay a tariff of 25% or more for iPhones made outside the United States.
“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else. If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S.,” Trump said on Truth Social.
Shares of Apple fell about 2% on Friday after the post.
Production of Apple’s flagship phone happens primarily in China, but the company has been shifting manufacturing to India in part because that country has a friendlier trade relationship with the U.S.
Some Wall Street analysts have estimated that moving iPhone production to the U.S. would raise the price of the Apple smartphone by at least 25%. Wedbush’s Dan Ives put the estimated cost of a U.S. iPhone at $3,500. The iPhone 16 Pro currently retails for about $1,000.
This is the latest jab at Apple from Trump, who over the past couple of weeks has ramped up pressure on the company and Cook to increase domestic manufacturing. Trump and Cook met at the White House on Tuesday, according to Politico.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview with Fox News on Friday that he was not part of the meeting at the White House but the Apple situation could be part of the Trump administration’s push to bring “precision manufacturing” back to the U.S.
“A large part of Apple’s components are in semiconductors. So we would like to have Apple help us make the semiconductor supply chain more secure,” Bessent said.
Cook gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and attended the inauguration in January. Apple has announced a $500 billion spend on U.S. development, including AI server production in Houston.
Apple declined to comment for this story.
The company said during its May 1 earnings report that it expects about $900 million in additional costs for tariffs in the current quarter. Cook said on the company’s earnings call that the tariff outlook was “very difficult to predict” past June.
Foxconn, one of Apple’s main iPhone assembly partners, is spending $1.5 billion on expanding its India facilities, the Financial Times reported Thursday.
Trump has made public criticisms of other major U.S. companies, including Walmart, during his trade war push, but the levies on a specific consumer product is a new step. The exact legal mechanism for the tariff is unclear.
Trump followed up his post about Apple with another calling for a 50% tariff on products from the European Union. Taken together, the posts point to trade tensions increasing again after the U.S. had temporarily lowered many of its levies, including in an agreement with China.
Apple also had to navigate tariff threats during Trump’s first term, when a 15% tariff on Chinese imports was being considered in 2019. At that time, Cook had a strong relationship with Trump and the final trade deal excluded core Apple products from the duties.
As Apple is caught in the U.S. president’s crosshairs, the company is also seeing weak demand in China. On Friday the company hiked trade-in incentives for iPhones in China.
May 23, 2025
Washington Resists Apple’s A.I. Plans for China
Apple believes the future success of the iPhone depends on the availability of new artificial intelligence features. But tensions between Washington and Beijing may cripple the tech giant’s plans to deliver A.I. in its second-most-important market, China.
In recent months, the White House and congressional officials have been scrutinizing Apple’s plan to strike a deal with Alibaba to make the Chinese company’s A.I. available on iPhones in China, three people familiar with the deliberations said. They are concerned that the deal would help a Chinese company improve its artificial intelligence abilities, broaden the reach of Chinese chatbots with censorship limits and deepen Apple’s exposure to Beijing laws over censorship and data sharing.
The scrutiny is the latest example of the challenges that Apple has run into as it tries to sustain its businesses in the United States and China at a time of rising geopolitical tensions. Three years ago, the U.S. government succeeded in pressuring the company to abandon a deal to buy memory chips from a Chinese supplier, the Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation, or YMTC. More recently, the company has been challenged by U.S. tariffs on Chinese-made products like the iPhone, threatening to cut into the company’s profits.
Walking away from an Alibaba deal would have far graver consequences for Apple’s business in China, which accounts for almost a fifth of the company’s sales. The partnership with the Chinese tech company is critical to bringing A.I. features to iPhones in one of the world’s most highly regulated and competitive markets. Without the Alibaba partnership, iPhones could fall behind smartphones from Chinese rivals like Huawei and Xiaomi.
Officials at the White House and the House Select Committee on China have raised the deal directly with Apple executives, said the three people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. During meetings in Washington with senior Apple executives and lobbyists, government officials asked about terms of the deal, what data Apple would be sharing with Alibaba and whether it would be signing any legal commitments with Chinese regulators. In the meeting with the House committee in March, Apple executives were unable to answer most of those questions, two of these people said.
Alibaba would help Apple compete with homegrown competitors in China. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)
Washington’s concern about the deal has been heightened by a deepening conviction that A.I. will become a critical military tool. The technology, which can write emails and develop software code, has the potential to coordinate military attacks and control autonomous drones. Worried about a future U.S.-Chinese conflict, Washington officials have tried to limit Beijing’s access to A.I. technology, cutting off its ability to make and buy A.I. chips.
Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement that it “is extremely disturbing that Apple has not been transparent about its agreement.”
“Alibaba is a poster child for the Chinese Communist Party’s military-civil fusion strategy, and why Apple would choose to work with them on A.I. is anyone’s guess,” he said. “There are serious concerns that this partnership will help Alibaba collect data to refine its models, all while allowing Apple to turn a blind eye to the fundamental rights of its Chinese iPhone users.”
Apple, the White House and Alibaba did not provide comment. Apple hasn’t publicly acknowledged the A.I. deal in China, but Alibaba’s chairman, Joe Tsai, confirmed it publicly in February.
There is concern in Washington that an Apple deal with Alibaba would set a problematic precedent. U.S. companies could help Chinese A.I. providers reach more users and use the data they collect from those users to improve their models. The risk would be that Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance and other Chinese companies could then use those improvements to help China’s military.
To limit U.S.-Chinese collaboration, the Trump administration has discussed whether Alibaba and other Chinese A.I. companies should be put on a list prohibiting them from doing business with U.S. companies, the people familiar with the deliberations said. Defense Department and intelligence officials have also been scrutinizing Alibaba’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army.
Greg Allen, the director of the Wadhwani A.I. Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank, said Apple’s partnership ran counter to the bipartisan efforts in Washington to slow China’s A.I. development. Apple could be motivated to help Alibaba improve its artificial intelligence system because its A.I. could make iPhones in China more useful, valuable and easier to sell.
“The United States is in an A.I. race with China, and we just don’t want American companies helping Chinese companies run faster,” Mr. Allen said.
In addition to this scrutiny, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, has faced new criticism from President Trump. During Mr. Trump’s trip across the Middle East this past week, he said he had “a little problem” with Mr. Cook because Apple was beginning to build products in India rather than the United States.
Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, at the China Development Forum in Beijing last year. (Tatan Syuflana/Associated Press)
“We’re not interested in you building in India,” Mr. Trump said he had told Mr. Cook. “India can take care of themselves. They’re doing very well. We want you to build here.”
Last year, Apple revamped the iPhone with new A.I. abilities that it called Apple Intelligence. It said iPhone users would be able to use its A.I. product to summarize notifications and gain access to writing tools that could improve emails and other messages. It also revealed an improved Siri virtual assistant that could combine information on a phone, like a message about someone’s travel itinerary, with information from the web, like a flight arrival time.
Apple struck a partnership with OpenAI to support some of its A.I. abilities. OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is currently answering questions when prompted on iPhones in the United States.
Because OpenAI doesn’t operate in Beijing, Apple needed to find a local partner to give iPhones in China the same performance as those in the United States. The company spoke with several Chinese tech companies before striking a deal with Alibaba. This year, it asked Chinese regulators to approve the A.I. features.
Congressional officials were alarmed that Apple had requested approval from Chinese regulators for the Alibaba partnership, two people familiar with their concerns said. Because A.I. is an emerging field, the committee worried that Apple might make concessions or sign an agreement that would make it subject to Chinese laws.
Apple hasn’t provided an update on when the A.I. features will become available on its iPhones in China. During calls with analysts this year, Mr. Cook said sales of iPhones had been better in markets where Apple Intelligence was available.
If the deal with Alibaba collapses, there is also a potential knock-on effect because Alibaba is a major e-commerce retailer that could sell and market iPhones, said Richard Kramer, a senior analyst at Arete Research, an investment advisory firm. He said that kind of partnership had the potential to boost the iPhone after Apple’s share of smartphone sales in China fell to 15 percent last year from 19 percent in 2023.
Without Alibaba, Chinese iPhone users could download A.I. apps, Mr. Kramer said. It would make for a more difficult experience than rivals might offer.
“People will still buy their phones, but it will make it harder,” he said.
May 17, 2025
Tariffs uncertainty didn’t prevent Apple Services, with contributions from TV+ and Music, from achieving $26.6 billion in quarterly revenue
Tech giant Apple, led by CEO Tim Cook, delivered revenue of $95.36 billion for the second quarter of 2025 overshadowed by sweeping new tariffs imposed on China by the Trump administration.
The iPhone maker’s overall revenues, up 5 percent year-on-year, surpassed analyst expectations after a consensus estimate from FactSet forecast Apple would record $94.4 billion in revenue.
Apple’s services segment, which includes Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade and other products, posted overall revenue of $26.65 billion, up 11.6 percent from a year-earlier $23.8 billion and a slight miss on an analyst consensus estimate for $26.70 billion for Q2 2025.
The iPhone maker reported net income of $24.7 billion, up from $23.6 billion in 2024, and earnings per-share came in at $1.65, up from a year-earlier $1.53, and beating an analyst forecast of $1.63 for the latest quarter.
During an after-market analyst call, Apple execs are expected to discuss a potential impact on demand for its products from the U.S.-China trade war and how the tech giant will deal with fall out from the Trump administration’s global trade war affecting supply chain costs out of China, Vietnam and India.
Tariff exemptions have been allowed for smartphones and other electronics, if only temporarily. But the looming talks on reducing or ending sweeping new tariffs on China has rattled investors for its potential impact on Apple’s global-spanning business.
Other tariffs-induced impacts, including recessionary pressures on a wobbly economy leading to lower consumer spending, could impact subscriber numbers for Apple TV+ and Apple Music and whether iPhone users upgrade to the newer handsets. The tech giant reported “record viewership” for Apple TV+ during the second quarter, without breaking out numbers.
CEO Cook during an analyst call pointed to plans to spend around $500 billion over four years in the U.S. market, and to open a factory for “advanced server manufacturing” in Texas this year for high-performance computing, data centers and other applications. But that was far short of answering calls from U.S. President Donald Trump to move production of the iPhone and other popular electrical products to the U.S., rather than continue to off-shore manufacturing.
Cook said the tariffs impact on Apple during the second quarter to March 29, 2025 was “limited” as the company managed its supply chain costs and product inventory and consumers bought new products before Trump’s tariffs regime kicks in. But making projections for the third quarter and the rest of 2025 has been more problematic.
Cook did forecast the current global tariff rates, absent new ones to come from the Trump administration, would add around $900 million to costs at Apple for its April-to-June quarter. “I don’t want to predict the future, because I’m not sure what will happen with the tariffs,” the Apple CEO added when pressed by an analyst to forecast future tariff-related costs for the tech giant, which so far have mostly hinged on a product’s country of origin.
“As we look ahead, we remain confident that we will continue to build the world’s best products and services, confident in our ability to innovate and enrich our users’ lives and confident that we continue to run our company in a way that has always set Apple apart,” the Apple boss did tell analysts in earlier prepared remarks on the conference call.
Cook spoke against a global market background where Apple is caught between being unable to move the manufacture of electronic products to the U.S. market without years of delay to new American factories, and facing likely consumer pushback for its marquee products in China and elsewhere internationally as Trump imposes fast-shifting tariffs to reshape global trade.
Apple is working hard to move production of its iPhones and other electronic products out of China, which faces the steepest U.S. tariffs globally, based on the country of origin for manufacturing. For the current third quarter to June 2025, Cook predicted India will be where the “majority” of iPhones sold in the U.S. originate, and Vietnam will be where virtually all iPads, Mac computers, Apple Watches and AirPods are made.
“What we learned some time ago was that having everything in one location had too much risk with it, and so we have over time and with certain parts of the supply chain — not the whole thing, but certain parts of it — opened up new sources of supply, and you could see that kind of thing in the future,” Cook said in answer to an analyst question about supply chain risks.
Cook didn’t make predictions on the mix of country of origins to produce iPhones and other Apple electrical products beyond the third quarter. To weigh possible future tariff-related costs, the Cupertino, California-based company and other major U.S. retailers face a Section 232 investigation due to the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, where the U.S. Secretary of Commerce is probing the impact from imports on U.S. national security.
May 4, 2025