This just seems like a logical reaction to unknown supply chain attacks. The DoD has restrictions on acquisition of Chinese hardware, for example.
Some HN posters believe that this is a tit-for-tat move regarding the Huawei sales ban, which is hardly comparable, as Huawei hardware cannot be legally distributed or sold by US companies.
The hardware is made in China but not the software. So it probably depends on how much oversight of the software the CCP has, and this decision implies not enough for their comfort.
Opinions like this are largely from new cold war propaganda, but also projection. The US spys on everyone everywhere. PRISM for example. Pegasus being another.
That makes no sense. The Chinese don't need to hack their people, let alone their own government workers, to find out what they are saying. It what world does govt compliance worker A need to literally hack govt busybee 1 to figure out if busybee 1 is work on their govt machine?!
This restriction also comes on top (like July) of the recent kaspersky/Russian govt hack (called operation triangulation by kasp) where it is alleged that kaspersky's enterprise network was hacked after someone hacked their workers' iPhones and they puvoted to the enterprise network after the workers connected their iPhones to the work wifi.
It's not a hard breadcrumb trail to follow and i am also aghast at so many HN posters pontificating so strongly about nonsense
Even if it were the latter thing promoting domestic industry is a pretty logical thing to do in their shoes. Restricting supply of tech to China may make perfect sense from a US perspective but we can hardly expect them to play along.
This is the correct explanation. And that makes sense as well.
I think another insight might be that the Chinese gov doesn’t really like when large companies can influence their decisions. I’d imagine that if everyone in the gov has an iPhone it makes it harder to be tough on Tim Apple.
Considering China's Biggest Export are Consumer Electronics and its adjacent industry, Apple has been the biggest help to that in the past 15 years. Not just on its products, but also the whole Supply Chain from Display to NAND. I warned about BOE and YMTC in 2016 on SemiWiki before both names enter into mainstream media. And it seems only Financial Times [1] ( or arguably Patrick McGee ) is getting it. Almost every comments on HN hate Qualcomm, during the Apple vs Qualcomm trial, the company that sided with Apple most was interestingly ( or not ) Huawei.
So no, there are still no signs they are tough on Apple. If anything Apple are helping Chinese companies to set up base outside of China to continue their operation. Actively funding and directing resources. This trend has only recently stopped some what after India demanded more local company to be used inside supply chains.
Again, if anything Tim Cook is very much Pro China.
I dunno, I think I'd rather a group of people I was trying to hack were using a collection of random devices with vendor-supplied customer Android builds on them than iOS.
> if everyone in the gov has an iPhone it makes it harder to be tough on Tim Apple
Everyone in the government is a party member and will toe the line. It's the middle-class public you need to keep your eye on.
But are the mirrored for the same reasons? If I'm not mistaken Isn't Tiktok famously misusing private data of its users? Which I believe was the reason for the US ban.
Expect more and more of this. The ultimate prize are technology standards, right now the West dominates that and China is actively trying to dethrone them. The world will sort itself in two camps again, Cold War is back functionally.
You mean the US dominates. I don't see any EU, Canadian or Australian designed smart-phones, Office365, Google, Chat-GPT, AWS, I can buy reaching critical mass.
Edit: INB4 the chip hipsters who found out about ASML during the pandemic chip shortage, chime in with "but muh ASML is European!". Yes, it is European(Dutch), it's also based on EUV tech licensed from the US, and has EUV light sources at it's core secret sauce, made by Cymer, a US company, but I was talking about software products and services which are the big money makers.
EU, Canada, and the rest of the west are lacking in world dominating SW companies and rely exclusively on the US, which the US can always use as leverage.
Ironically, China's detachment form the US SW companies and the need to develop it's own giants, will give it a major advantage long term, versus US's allies which will keep relying on it.
> I don't see any EU, Canadian or Australian designed smart-phones, Office365, Google, Chat-GPT, AWS, I can buy reaching critical mass. ... EU, Canada, and the rest of the west are lacking in world dominating SW companies and rely exclusively on the US, which the US can always use as leverage.
Reached critical mass, or even world-dominating: Nokia, RIM, Figma, Skype, Spotify, Hetzner
> the US dominates
... by buying them.
// Of these, RIM lost critical mass, Spotify is on uncertain ground, and Hetzner seems fine.
No but it’s a symbiotic system with EU companies being key parts of the system. Or am I missing some way I can buy a top-of-the-line cell phone not created with Taiwan-manufactured chips built using Dutch equipment? This is on purpose: the system is designed to create an important role for partners albeit a subordinate one. Though one might argue that they let Taiwan become too important. Either way, the recent book a Chip War is illuminating.
Most big US HW/SW companies do have a significant presence in Europe and some other places like Israel, it's not like Europe has a lack of engineers and scientists capable of building this stuff, they are just mostly working for US companies
Ahh yes, good point it is mostly the US, but US allies do own a lot of IP and supply chain capability, particularly Japan and SK.
I don’t agree China will have the advantage though, it will certainly develop its own standards and mandate it internally but it remains to be seen if it will be able to export those standards, it tried with BRI and that did not work, but that was more manufacturing oriented. It’ll try to tech again but it will be a tough sell. It simply does not have the goodwill required. Will see gains in Russia, Pakistan and Cambodia, some countries in Africa but that’s about it.
They’ve banned Teslas from government compounds and big state-owned companies for a few years. There are even occasional reports of Tesla cars being diverted from certain roads for reasons the police wouldn’t disclose.
Edit: It could be retaliations against US sanctions. But there’s a difference: All these kinds of orders are made without any written documents. These are just part of the general decline of the rule of law in China, which there weren’t much to begin with.
Tesla concern is autopilot cameras shipping images back to Tesla, which is valid; Tesla does ship stills back for training if enabled in the data sharing configuration.
Could the US government slip Tesla one of those nifty national security letters and get themselves a closet off some server room at Tesla HQ? It's not like they'd be spying on US citizens in China.
>"But there’s a difference: All these kinds of orders are made without any written documents."
And you know this how? Maybe the document do exist but are classified. As for rule of law - try civil forfeiture for example. It is but a pure theft that goes unpunished.
The question is, how many mutually disjoint digital domains will the planet eventually split into?
Countries have their own everything (laws, regulations, money, taxes etc) given that this is how the world's political power is managed.
Digital tech and information flow spread like if it is a universal something, but that is not how the worlds political power is managed.
At most you might have coalitions of allies that trust each other enough to have a joint info-space. But there isnt much trust even between EU and US, and ultimately its every truly sovereign entity for itself.
Humans are tribal by nature. Countries and borders exist precisely because we can't agree on the same set of laws, forms of government, and how society is structured.
In that sense, an open and universal internet is an anomaly. It was a great thought experiment by hippie technophiles, and "connecting the world" is a commonly parroted platitude by social media executives, but humans are far from ready to interact with millions of strangers from their own country, let alone from around the world.
If anything, all this technology that was supposed to bring us together, has instead driven us further apart. The internet is our main source of information, yet it's been corrupted by advertising, corporations and governments to spread disinformation and propaganda on an unprecedented scale, and influence the masses towards their own agenda.
We're still in the early stages of the technological revolution, but it's clear that a universal communication medium cannot exist yet. We're not ready for it. China and Russia already have isolated alternatives, and it's only a matter of time before other countries or coalitions follow suit. In any case, we can safely assume that all of it will be heavily censored and controlled by each government. Cryptography will exist in some form, but there will be backdoors for any government to exploit as needed.
Is this too pessimistic? :) I'd really like to be wrong about all this, but I can't picture a scenario where billions of us happily sing kumbaya together around a virtual campfire.
No, I don't think its too pessimistic. In fact the illusion of a global digital village lasts longer than what one might expect, probably because of tech illiteracy and the capture of various local elites.
But I also dont think that the hippy technofiles were all wrong.
Ironically, when you combine the finite Earth with extreme levels of digital information gathering and the zero cost of replication and transmission it is very hard to keep silos. E.g., pretty soon automated translation is a thing (and I am not an AI bro :-). Also you cant do much about joint dependencies on environmental deterioration without global coordination.
How its going to play out is unclear but the scenario of the same old clans fighting it out in the same old ways is not a given in the longer term. There are centripetal and centrifugal forces. For now the pattern seems to be tearing apart.
Just a thought, but could they be worried about privacy features of the iPhone? Whistle blowers, dissidents, etc., would benefit from iOS Security relative to Android. Then again, I don’t know the export laws of China, for all I know, they require weak security to sell the iPhone in China.
Readit News
Some HN posters believe that this is a tit-for-tat move regarding the Huawei sales ban, which is hardly comparable, as Huawei hardware cannot be legally distributed or sold by US companies.
There are bans on Huawei telecom equipment, but their phones, tablets, smartwatches, etc are not banned and are readily available:
https://www.newegg.com/Huawei/BrandStore/ID-15388
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Huawei/page/34F6034C-1D34-4913...
That T3 10 is now over 6 years old, for example.
edit: It's of course not Huawei, it's a totally new and different company which bought Huawei's server business a week after being founded, silly me.
Is that the case given that iPhones are manufactured in China?
My tinfoil hat theory is that they find it harder to hack iPhones to monitor their government officials.
It is a fact that certain US agencies required Blackberry or Android, rather than iOS on iPhone, for this reason.
It's not a hard breadcrumb trail to follow and i am also aghast at so many HN posters pontificating so strongly about nonsense
Banning iPhones because of Kaspersky incompetence protecting their corporate network? That is nonsense.
or to Pegasus ? When the OS runs everything it gets as a stream of bytes...
I think another insight might be that the Chinese gov doesn’t really like when large companies can influence their decisions. I’d imagine that if everyone in the gov has an iPhone it makes it harder to be tough on Tim Apple.
In the age of AI and model training, data is more than ever precious
The US spying on EU leaders and their industry is perhaps what China is worried about
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...
https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/290615/revealed-m...
https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/russia-s...
Considering China's Biggest Export are Consumer Electronics and its adjacent industry, Apple has been the biggest help to that in the past 15 years. Not just on its products, but also the whole Supply Chain from Display to NAND. I warned about BOE and YMTC in 2016 on SemiWiki before both names enter into mainstream media. And it seems only Financial Times [1] ( or arguably Patrick McGee ) is getting it. Almost every comments on HN hate Qualcomm, during the Apple vs Qualcomm trial, the company that sided with Apple most was interestingly ( or not ) Huawei.
So no, there are still no signs they are tough on Apple. If anything Apple are helping Chinese companies to set up base outside of China to continue their operation. Actively funding and directing resources. This trend has only recently stopped some what after India demanded more local company to be used inside supply chains.
Again, if anything Tim Cook is very much Pro China.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/bf8e3846-2421-4f91-becf-2dfe39ec9...
I dunno, I think I'd rather a group of people I was trying to hack were using a collection of random devices with vendor-supplied customer Android builds on them than iOS.
> if everyone in the gov has an iPhone it makes it harder to be tough on Tim Apple
Everyone in the government is a party member and will toe the line. It's the middle-class public you need to keep your eye on.
You mean the US dominates. I don't see any EU, Canadian or Australian designed smart-phones, Office365, Google, Chat-GPT, AWS, I can buy reaching critical mass.
Edit: INB4 the chip hipsters who found out about ASML during the pandemic chip shortage, chime in with "but muh ASML is European!". Yes, it is European(Dutch), it's also based on EUV tech licensed from the US, and has EUV light sources at it's core secret sauce, made by Cymer, a US company, but I was talking about software products and services which are the big money makers.
EU, Canada, and the rest of the west are lacking in world dominating SW companies and rely exclusively on the US, which the US can always use as leverage.
Ironically, China's detachment form the US SW companies and the need to develop it's own giants, will give it a major advantage long term, versus US's allies which will keep relying on it.
Reached critical mass, or even world-dominating: Nokia, RIM, Figma, Skype, Spotify, Hetzner
> the US dominates
... by buying them.
// Of these, RIM lost critical mass, Spotify is on uncertain ground, and Hetzner seems fine.
I don’t agree China will have the advantage though, it will certainly develop its own standards and mandate it internally but it remains to be seen if it will be able to export those standards, it tried with BRI and that did not work, but that was more manufacturing oriented. It’ll try to tech again but it will be a tough sell. It simply does not have the goodwill required. Will see gains in Russia, Pakistan and Cambodia, some countries in Africa but that’s about it.
Edit: It could be retaliations against US sanctions. But there’s a difference: All these kinds of orders are made without any written documents. These are just part of the general decline of the rule of law in China, which there weren’t much to begin with.
And you know this how? Maybe the document do exist but are classified. As for rule of law - try civil forfeiture for example. It is but a pure theft that goes unpunished.
Countries have their own everything (laws, regulations, money, taxes etc) given that this is how the world's political power is managed.
Digital tech and information flow spread like if it is a universal something, but that is not how the worlds political power is managed.
At most you might have coalitions of allies that trust each other enough to have a joint info-space. But there isnt much trust even between EU and US, and ultimately its every truly sovereign entity for itself.
In that sense, an open and universal internet is an anomaly. It was a great thought experiment by hippie technophiles, and "connecting the world" is a commonly parroted platitude by social media executives, but humans are far from ready to interact with millions of strangers from their own country, let alone from around the world.
If anything, all this technology that was supposed to bring us together, has instead driven us further apart. The internet is our main source of information, yet it's been corrupted by advertising, corporations and governments to spread disinformation and propaganda on an unprecedented scale, and influence the masses towards their own agenda.
We're still in the early stages of the technological revolution, but it's clear that a universal communication medium cannot exist yet. We're not ready for it. China and Russia already have isolated alternatives, and it's only a matter of time before other countries or coalitions follow suit. In any case, we can safely assume that all of it will be heavily censored and controlled by each government. Cryptography will exist in some form, but there will be backdoors for any government to exploit as needed.
Is this too pessimistic? :) I'd really like to be wrong about all this, but I can't picture a scenario where billions of us happily sing kumbaya together around a virtual campfire.
But I also dont think that the hippy technofiles were all wrong.
Ironically, when you combine the finite Earth with extreme levels of digital information gathering and the zero cost of replication and transmission it is very hard to keep silos. E.g., pretty soon automated translation is a thing (and I am not an AI bro :-). Also you cant do much about joint dependencies on environmental deterioration without global coordination.
How its going to play out is unclear but the scenario of the same old clans fighting it out in the same old ways is not a given in the longer term. There are centripetal and centrifugal forces. For now the pattern seems to be tearing apart.
The link should be changed.