> Another reason to not get sleep from Apple investments is TSMC. A Chinese blockade or even invasion of Taiwan is not out of the question IMO. That would obliterate stock markets but particularly Apple as it almost completely depends on TSMC (I believe.)
I agree in principle with what you say, but you didn't include the additional knowledge of the middle class now uprising against the government in China –– all the ones locked into their huge condo towers in all the lockdowns going on currently in cities around the country. Read or watch the news, from any source with honest reporting from there! Yunice Yun reported on it today on CNBC in the morning. She's been doing that for years now.
The PRC massively overbuilt those towers and planned poorly for a middle class that didn't exist at the time. It isn't just the students in Beijing now protesting against their government, and that now iconic and brave young man in a white shirt holding a flag to keep a tank from advancing through Tianmen Square and running him over. I'll NEVER get that image out of my mind, can you?
So, President Xi has his hands full on multiple fronts as well now too, both militarily and economically. He's not going to invade Taiwan anytime soon, he'd be an idiot to even try it.
TSMC isn't the only company in Taiwan and it's not the only hardware made there. The best hard drives come from there too, the large capacities ones made with IBM's patents that Western Digital (WDC) now owns, HGST. They're pricey, but well worth it for reliability, some even use helium in them to minimize friction that causes heat. WD also makes their Red, Black, Blue, Gold and drives with their own tech, I own some myself. Check any of Backblaze's drive reliability reports on their blog, they publish them every quarter, or search the Computer Learning thread here at SI. I've linked many of them myself there.
Hard drives are still used my the millions around the world in datacenters for their cloud storage. That includes Apple. That also means AWS (Amazon/Alexa), Microsoft (Azure/Cortana), Alphabet/Google (Home products), and other smaller players... like Backblaze.
Apple also still gets most of their revenue from the iPhone, so today's report of lower shipments of the iPhone 14 Pro will hurt their bottom line at Christmas, of course, but they have so many other products now and and many revenue streams. Reading those tea leaves is still difficult before the quarterly reports come out to confirm the numbers.
I'm still a simple man, so I always go back to what The Fed has done in raising interest rates that affect people wanting to buy homes. That's going to crush our economy next year, but that's a ways off yet, so I'll hunker in my bunker and enjoy the holiday fun until the pain starts to get worse for everyone in the U.S.
I don't want that for anyone. |
