Tripp Mickle, of the New York Times, wrote another one of those articles exploring the feasibility of iPhone manufacturing in the United States. There is basically nothing new here; the only reason it seems to have been published is because the U.S. president farted out yet another tariff idea, this time one targeted specifically at the iPhone at a rate of 25%.¹

Anyway, there is one thing in this article — bizarrely arranged in a question-and-answer format — that is notable:

What does China offer that the United States doesn’t?

Small hands, a massive, seasonal work force and millions of engineers.

Young Chinese women have small fingers, and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said. In a recent analysis the company did to explore the feasibility of moving production to the United States, the company determined that it couldn’t find people with those skills in the United States, said two people familiar with the analysis who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

I will get to the racial component of this in a moment, but this answer has no internal logic. There are two sentences in that larger paragraph. The second posits that people in the U.S. do not have the “skills” needed to carefully assemble iPhones, but the skills as defined in the first sentence are small fingers — which is not a skill. I need someone from the Times to please explain to me how someone can be trained to shrink their fingers.

Anyway, this is racist trash. In response to a question from Julia Carrie Wong of the Guardian, Times communications director Charlie Stadtlander disputed the story was furthering “racial or genetic generalizations”, and linked to a podcast segment clipped by Mickle. In it, Patrick McGee, author of “Apple in China”, says:

The tasks that are often being done to make iPhones require little fingers. So the fact that it’s young Chinese women with little fingers — that actually matters. Like, Apple engineers will talk about this.

The podcast in question is, unsurprisingly, Bari Weiss’; McGee did not mention any of this when he appeared on, for example, the Daily Show.

Maybe some Apple engineers actually believe this, and maybe some supply chain experts do, too. But it is a longstanding sexist stereotype. (Thanks to Kat for the Feminist Review link.) It is ridiculous to see this published in a paper of record as though it is just one fact among many, instead of something which ought to be debunked.

The Times has previously reported why iPhones cannot really be made in the U.S. in any significant quantity. It has nothing to do with finger size, and everything to do with a supply chain the company has helped build for decades, as McGee talks about extensively in that Daily Show interview and, presumably, writes about in his book. (I do not yet have a copy.) Wages play a role, but it is the sheer concentration of manufacturing capability that explains why iPhones are made in China, and why it has been so difficult for Apple to extricate itself from the country.

I have to say, it is quite an odd thing to be listening to a podcast and hear one’s own name. This recently happened to me on the latest episode of “Upgrade”. It feels like I am about to be called to the principal’s office or something. But I was not.

Myke Hurley and Jason Snell discussed an article I wrote about the more granular control available to users in iOS 18 when apps request access to their contacts. (My piece is a response to a New York Times story; Snell also linked to both with some commentary.) Their chat centres Apple’s scale and influence. Even little decisions the company makes are capable of transforming entire industries.

Hurley raises an apt comparison to App Tracking Transparency, which is exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote my piece. I am similarly unsympathetic to corporate empires built on illicitly obtained data. If you cannot make money when users are given a choice to consent, your business model probably sucks. But I do think it is concerning how powerful both of the major players were in the aftermath of that announcement: Meta, for hoarding behavioural data on billions of people; and Apple, for its ability to give users options.

I see parallels to Google’s power over the web. The near-uniform layout and structure of webpages is thanks to Google’s specific suggestions for improving the likelihood of ranking higher. The main difference is Google’s suggestions are sort of optional; if a website’s owner does not care much about search traffic, they can do whatever they want. The prompts on iOS, on the other hand, are baked into the system.

As Snell says, these apps “have to make the case” for granting permission. I do not think that is such a bad thing, and I am amenable to their suggestion of Apple’s built-in apps being placed on a level playing field. I think a lot of this would be more predictable if privacy laws were stronger. A basic level of privacy protections should not be a competitive advantage, nor should users be required to navigate either unceasing permissions dialogs or terms of service agreements to understand the myriad ways their personal information is being exploited — because their personal information should not be exploited.

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Albert Burneko, Defector:

“If the ChatGPT demos were accurate,” [Kevin] Roose writes, about latency, in the article in which he credits OpenAI with having developed playful intelligence and emotional intuition in a chatbot—in which he suggests ChatGPT represents the realization of a friggin’ science fiction movie about an artificial intelligence who genuinely falls in love with a guy and then leaves him for other artificial intelligences—based entirely on those demos. That “if” represents the sum total of caution, skepticism, and critical thinking in the entire article.

As impressive as OpenAI’s demo was, it is important to remember it was a commercial. True, one which would not exist if this technology were not sufficiently capable of being shown off, but it was still a marketing effort, and a journalist like Roose ought to treat it with the skepticism of one. ChatGPT is just software, no matter how thick a coat of faux humanity is painted on top of it.

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