One of Apple's major projects for the next decade will have to be getting out of China. The antipathy between the US and China isn't too bad now, but it's only going to rise as time goes on, and China may have internal issues as well. Giving up the Chinese market would be a hit to Apple's sales numbers, but disruption of their manufacturing would be catastrophic.
Apple's best bet is to double-down on TSMC and Foxconn, work with them to set up manufacturing elsewhere and lobby for the US to continue to protect Taiwan. I think that if they continue to ship updates to their existing products on schedule while they make the transition, that will be a tremendous accomplishment and a huge market advantage. They may find themselves competing with Samsung and... um, maybe just Samsung? I don't know the Android ecosystem well enough to guess.
Manufacturing decentralisation is happening anyway, in every industry, because of rising Chinese wages compared to other Asian countries, I don’t think that’ll be a competitive advantage except against poorly run companies that don’t read Stratfor.
Well they just built a datacenter in Gui An new area (Guiyang, Guizhou), just like microsoft, ibm etc. But production might move indeed, but only because the wages in China are increasing.
Apple's best bet is to double-down on TSMC and Foxconn, work with them to set up manufacturing elsewhere and lobby for the US to continue to protect Taiwan. I think that if they continue to ship updates to their existing products on schedule while they make the transition, that will be a tremendous accomplishment and a huge market advantage. They may find themselves competing with Samsung and... um, maybe just Samsung? I don't know the Android ecosystem well enough to guess.