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White House Advisor Kudlow Says Apple Technology May Have Been 'Picked Off' by China (cnbc.com)
Fred Imbert, writing for CNBC: Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, said Friday that Apple's technology may have been stolen by the Chinese. "I don't want to surmise too much here, but Apple technology may have been picked off by China and now China is becoming very competitive with Apple. You've got to have rule of law," Kudlow said in an interview with Bloomberg. "There are some indications from China that they're looking at that, but we don't know that yet. There's no enforcement; there's nothing concrete." Kudlow's comments came shortly after China's Commerce Ministry said Chinese and U.S. officials will meet next week to discuss trade. Both countries have been engaged in a trade spat for months that has sent ripples through global markets. John Gruber at DaringFireball comments: I think what he's saying here is that the Chinese stole Apple technology, copied it, and are now flooding the Chinese market with phones based on that stolen tech. I'm 99.8 percent certain that hasn't happened -- if there were Chinese phones built with stolen Apple technology we'd know it because we'd see it.
About ten years ago I bought a Prada-labelled shoulder bag in Vietnam for $10 from a street vendor. When I got it back to NY I asked around and it sold for around $400. Not only is it indistinguishable from the real thing, it IS the real thing. It's what I call a "real fake." As described above, the factory gets an order for 5000 of these bags, makes 6000 and sells 1000 out the back door. There is no difference between those 1000 and the other 5000. Did this happen in China with iPhones? Has Apple complained about it? Because they would surely know.
About ten years ago I bought a Prada-labelled shoulder bag in Vietnam for $10 from a street vendor. When I got it back to NY I asked around and it sold for around $400. Not only is it indistinguishable from the real thing, it IS the real thing. It's what I call a "real fake." As described above, the factory gets an order for 5000 of these bags, makes 6000 and sells 1000 out the back door. There is no difference between those 1000 and the other 5000. Did this happen in China with iPhones? Has Apple complained about it? Because they would surely know.
I read a book some years ago on the many pitfalls of doing business in China. Issues raised included:
- Selling unauthorized overproduction runs as you described
- Making unauthorized changes to the product design or materials to make manufacturing cheaper. There were multiple cases cited where the product changes produced unsafe or defective products that cost the product owners dearly
- Duplicating the product under another label and competing with the original
The Chinese government has little incentive to crack down on such practices.
Apple is not making anything at all, especially not any chips. They don't have fabs.
The main chips for i-devices are made by TSMC and Samsung, no one else.
They are designed by PA Semi an Apple subsidiary or maybe it is incorporated fully into Apple now.
PA Semi designs custom ARM chips, they don't use the normal cortex A8 A53 or A73 designs from ARM at all. They start with the ARM v8 ISA and from there on, they do everything in their own way. And generally much much better than ARM itself, of course the chips are also quite huge and therefore expensive to manufacture compared to any ARM design. They are however always faster/better than the ARM ones. A current A12 Bionic chip from Apple is about the same size as a current Intel Quadcore CPU, 122mm^2.
Oh, come on, how bad can it be? I know nothing about they guy but I'm sure he has some talents. Let's check Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Wow! That was hilarious! One ridiculous statement after the other. Best summed up by this paragraph:
In their 2015 book Superforecasting, University of Pennsylvania political scientist Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner refer to Kudlow as a "consistently wrong" pundit, and use Kudlow's long record of failed predictions to clarify common mistakes that poor forecasters make