Resellers may be sitting on costly pile of regret after US smartphone shopping spree Profiteering resellers stateside filled up on smartphone inventory in calendar Q1 before the scheduled imposition of US tariffs, which have rocked global stock prices and US Treasury bonds since April 2. Preliminary data released by IDC today shows the volume of phones sold into the channel globally between the start of …
"Reports suggest Apple flew 600 tons of iPhones, or as many as 1.5 million, to the United States from India, in a bid to beat the tariffs."
Which turned out to be a waste of effort and money since only days after announcing the tariff phones got exempted from them along with other electronics. For Apple the cost of bringing 600 tons on planes will be just loose change but if you were a smaller company that spent a lot of money trying to beat the tariffs to find out you didn't need to this could seriously hit your bottom line for this year.
Of course a lot of this could be avoided if Trump didn't just announce things on his Twitter clone to then roll back on them a few days later.
"Reports suggest Apple flew 600 tons of iPhones, or as many as 1.5 million, to the United States from India, in a bid to beat the tariffs."
If true, that is quite some carbon footprint. I wonder how many tons of pollutants that put high into the Earth's atmosphere.*. Now, I admit to having IT equipment, which is probably not the best for the planet, so 'mea culpa', but 600 tons!!! of iPhones?
What is the world coming to?
* Yes the climate change deniers will downvote automatically even though they could actually do the experiments themselves to prove the CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Look up Eunice Newton Foote she published in Scientific American in 1856 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_Newton_Foote
(Tl;dr: lazy envelope math says 1400 tons CO2. That’s a whole lot of phones though…)
To choose an uncharitably polluting platform: Looks like maybe 2.5 B747-loads?
https://www.cargolux.com/fleet-equipment/aircraft/747-400f-specifications
Each flying, let’s call it 8000 miles?
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=DEL-SFO
561mph cruise, so let’s call it (2.5 x 8000 / 560) ~= 36 flight hours
https://www.atlasair.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/747-400F-One-Sheet_012418.pdf
3600 gal/hr takes us to ~130Kgal
https://engineerine.com/the-boeing-747s-remarkable-fuel-consumption-a-giant-in-the-sky/
X 21.5 pounds / gal jet fuel = ~2,800,000 lb ~= 1400 tons CO2. Or 100 Americans’ annual emissions (per capita not per household). Or around 2lb per $1000 phone…
https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states#per-capita-how-much-co2-does-the-average-person-emit
Phones have a very high ratio cost / weight. Like $1,000 for a 200g iPhone including packaging or $5,000 per kilogram or $5million per ton or $600 million for an airplane carrying 120 tons of iPhones. If you assume a boat takes 4 weeks, you get iPhones with brand new batteries instead of four week old ones. The interest for four weeks on $600,000,000 alone is a few million. Air freight China to UK is less than $5 per kilogram or $600,000 for these 120 tons, and hiring a complete airplane probably reduces the price.
The thing is, he's displayed multiple symptoms consistent with cognitive and language disorders since the 80's. His record as a businessman points in the same general direction.
His behaviors then and now match strategies people employ to hide the fact that they're missing large swaths of what's actually going on around them.
To beat the tariffs. If there was any big surge of iPhone purchases I'll bet it was people who thought they could sell them for a profit if tariffs caused Apple to raise prices.
But since they would have been purchased in the last couple weeks they can still be returned for a full refund.
"In February, Apple said it would invest in US manufacturing and R&D, announcing plans to spend $500 billion".
I think Apple usually phrase it as "contribute to the US economy" rather than spend. E.g. tax payments, payments to suppliers.
They make a similar announcement at the start of each presidency.
17 Jan 2018 — Contributions will exceed $350 billion over five years, adding US jobs, investments in domestic suppliers and fueling the App Store economy.
26 Apr 2021 — Apple plans to make new contributions of more than $430 billion in the US and add 20,000 jobs across the country over the next five years.
