Apple

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. restricted employee travel to Italy and South Korea, after recently instating a similar policy for China, as the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread.

“We have instituted specific travel restrictions in a few countries including China, South Korea, and Italy,” the company told employees in a memo that outlines its latest response to the Covid-19 outbreak.

As to Apple Stores:

Apple also said “deep cleaning protocols are our top priority” and are in effect across its stores, offices and employee shuttles. It has since put hand sanitizer stations at the front of its stores as well.

Side note, from this Reuters’ article:

Foxconn, however, sought to allay investor concerns about the virus’ impact, saying it expects to resume normal production in China, its top manufacturing base, by the end of the March.

Erin Pearson, The Sydney Morning Herald:

Two men killed during a police chase in Melbourne’s north were being tracked from the air via the ‘Find My’ app after an iPad was stolen in an earlier home invasion.

Driver Vaatoa Chang, 29, from Sunshine West, and his Caroline Springs passenger Jonas Montealegre, 36, carried the iPad with them as they switched stolen cars in a two-hour attempt to flee police on February 4.

Riveting article, riveting video. The embedded video shows the getaway vehicle being tracked from the air, but in what appears to be some form of night-vision. Watch stuff get dumped from the car. Wonder if they figured out that something they stole was pinging, giving away their location.

Ended terribly.

My takeaway from the linked post was the heads up on the Cult of Mac white-labeled buy-back program.

Wall Street Journal:

Some operations executives suggested as early as 2015 that the company relocate assembly of at least one product to Vietnam. That would allow Apple to begin the multiyear process of training workers and creating a new cluster of component providers outside the world’s most populous nation, people familiar with the discussions said.

Senior managers rebuffed the idea. For Apple, weaning itself off China, its second-largest consumer market and the place where most of its products are assembled, has been too challenging to undertake.

And:

China has been a critical factor in Apple’s soaring market value. The country provides a stable, efficient, low-cost manufacturing base with an abundant network of suppliers that have helped cement Apple’s profitability.

And:

A clean break with China is impossible. Apple relies on a workforce of more than three million indirect workers in China. Its top manufacturer, Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, hires hundreds of thousands of seasonal employees in China, many of whom manually insert tiny screws and thin printed circuit boards during the iPhone assembly process, people familiar with the process said. Tens of thousands of experienced manufacturing engineers oversee the process.

China has built a massive manufacturing machine. Massive. Moving elsewhere, starting from scratch, would be painful at the very least. It would also take time. And then there’s the availability of the raw materials, not to mention one of the world’s largest marketplaces.

It’s all a little bit of a perfect storm. Fascinating read.

Reuters:

Oppenheimer upgraded its rating on Apple to “outperform” from “perform”, saying the Cupertino, California, company was more prepared than its competitors to absorb the impact of the global health crisis.

Apple’s stock fell more than 16% from record high on February 12th.

Eryk Bagshaw, The Sydney Morning Herald:

Nike, Apple and a major manufacturer building trains in Australia are among the dozens of global brands implicated in a new report on forced labour in China, amid growing international concern over the treatment of the Uighur people.

The report, by the US State Department-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute, alleges some factories that supply the brands appear to be using Uighur workers sent directly from re-education camps.

The Washington Post ran a more detailed, first-hand account of the said forced-labor in this chilling article.

From The Post:

When their shifts end, the Uighur workers — almost all women in their 20s or younger — use hand gestures and rudimentary Mandarin to buy dried fruit, socks and sanitary pads at the stalls. Then they walk around the corner, past the factory’s police station — adorned with Uighur writing telling them to “stay loyal to the party” and “have clear-cut discipline” — to dormitories where they live under constant supervision.

The Uighur workers are afraid or unable to interact with anyone in this town, north of Qingdao, beyond the most superficial of transactions at the stalls or in local stores, vendors say. But the catalyst for their arrival here is well understood.

“Everyone knows they didn’t come here of their own free will. They were brought here,” said one fruit-seller as she set up her stall. “The Uighurs had to come because they didn’t have an option. The government sent them here,” another vendor told The Washington Post.

And:

The researchers found 27 factories in nine Chinese provinces that have used Uighur workers hired through labor transfer programs from Xinjiang since 2017. The factories are owned by firms that feed into the supply chain of some of the world’s best-known companies, including Apple, Dell and Volkswagen, the report finds.

BOE Technology Group, which supplies screens to Apple, and O-Film, which makes iPhone cameras, both use Uighur labor, either directly or through contractors, the report found. Apple lists both companies on its latest supplier list.

From Apple:

“Apple is dedicated to ensuring that everyone in our supply chain is treated with the dignity and respect they deserve,” said spokesman Josh Rosenstock. “We have not seen this report but we work closely with all our suppliers to ensure our high standards are upheld.”

More on this story sure to follow.

New York Times:

As China encourages people to return to work despite the coronavirus outbreak, it has begun a bold mass experiment in using data to regulate citizens’ lives — by requiring them to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces.

And:

People in China sign up through Ant’s popular wallet app, Alipay, and are assigned a color code — green, yellow or red — that indicates their health status.

And:

The Times’s analysis found that as soon as a user grants the software access to personal data, a piece of the program labeled “reportInfoAndLocationToPolice” sends the person’s location, city name and an identifying code number to a server. The software does not make clear to users its connection to the police. But according to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency and an official police social media account, law enforcement authorities were a crucial partner in the system’s development.

Collision of worlds here. The battle to contain coronavirus. Government requiring its citizens to use software that is said to share personal data with police.

The words iPhone and Apple do not appear in the article. Wondering if this software exists for iPhone and, if so, the route it took to get approved for distribution.

Read the post, then read the comments for more. The level of detail that goes into Apple Store design is astonishing.

This is one of those tips that’s worth going through, just to understand the mechanics of how calendars and reminders are stored in iCloud. Worth tucking away for a day you hope will never come, when your calendars or reminders come up missing or accidentally deleted.