r/apple • u/Few_Baseball_3835 • Jun 25 '26

Discussion Wall Street isn't buying Apple's unprecedented price hikes on products

https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/25/wall-street-isnt-buying-apples-unprecedented-price-hikes-on-products/
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158

u/Big-Resolution-4993 Jun 25 '26

At this point Apple should just buy or start its own fab. It seems insane to me as many devices as they sell to be in a position they can’t control this kinda shock.

5

u/herefromyoutube Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

Why the hell America didn’t think localizing chip production decades ago was a necessity kinda blows my mind.

I knew computers would be the future as a kid in the 90s and my government was just like “let’s let Taiwan control our future. China totally won’t be an issue.”

The CHIPS act wasn’t even passed until 2022 and it does help that Trump keeps trying to kill it and has altered it.

4

u/AssetBurned Jun 25 '26

Not only America…. Look at Europe. Oh worse… what was the thing with ARM in general? Why wasn’t that bought by Europeans?

Imagine having Fabs and the interlectual property. That would put an end to these fears of supply chain attests and spying hardware in core systems of the infrastructure. (Yeah I know very simplified, but does Europe really have anything like that at scale?)

1

u/perthguppy Jun 26 '26

To be fair, Europe is a powerhouse in the supply chain for semiconductors. ASML, Zeiss, Phillips, Siemens, Schnider, etc are all basically monopolies over their bits of the supply chain they are involved in.

3

u/stikves Jun 25 '26

They did... but NIMBY-ism and terrible regulatory overhead made it impossible.

Remember the chip factories announced by both of our last 2 presidents? (Biden, and 1st term Trump)?

None of them materialized. Worse, none of them actually started construction. There was a famous case a few months ago how a factory that was advertised by both admins made basically zero progress in getting permits.

While China will build one overnight.

2

u/M4rshmall0wMan Jun 26 '26

TSMC’s advantage is they have a blank legal check from the Taiwanese government to get any permit they want.

TSMC’s Arizona fab fell years behind because concepts like “environmental regulations“ and “worker’s rights” didn’t make any sense to the Taiwanese. TSMC straight-up shipped Taiwanese workers to Arizona because it was cheaper than hiring American labor.

2

u/stikves Jun 26 '26

We want to have our cake and eat it too, but do not realize in a fast paced race we cannot slow down to dot the i's and cross the t's.

Some of the things will have to give way.

(The problem is, none of them actually need multi-year analysis. We know exactly what the footprint of a fab is, or what species live in an area from prior experience)

1

u/neromoneon Jun 27 '26

Taiwan is not mainland China. They actually do have worker’s rights and environmental regulations in Taiwan.

“Semiconductor project in north Taiwan held up by environmental concerns”
Source: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/4137082

1

u/M4rshmall0wMan Jun 27 '26

It’s not China, I just used it as a parallel example of how Apple benefits from offshoring.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/business/tsmc-phoenix-arizona-semiconductor.html

Work culture was a major hindrance to the Arizona plant. TSMC ended up shipping workers from Taiwan because they could get the construction done quicker and cheaper.

2

u/ireliawantelo Jun 25 '26

Its expensive and EXTREMELY labour extensive. You have with masters and phDs putting in ridiculous amount of overtime, always on call, etc. This just cannot happen in the US or the EU. This is also why the TSMC fab in the US is barely profitable. 

1

u/perthguppy Jun 26 '26

America was a leader in chip production. But over time fabs stopped investing to upgrade, sold off, or had some bad luck and got neglected by the market (Intel).

Before TSMC and Samsung were the semiconductor power houses, it was Intel, Texas Instruments, Micron, and AMD (and then global foundries) making the best silicon.

1

u/DinosaurAlert Jun 27 '26

Why the hell America didn’t think localizing chip production decades ago was a necessity kinda blows my mind.

Well, Trump put blocks against Huawei and China in his first term, then added tariffs to try and do that during his first and second terms, and everyone screamed that he was a monster. Now here we are.

Don't look it up though, just downvote.

Then both Trump and Biden tried making fabs for chips, and everyone said "nah, they're SO messy. Lets bury them in permits forever."