Blake Montgomery

Tough.

China has almost a monopoly on rare earths minerals that are vital for making phones and advanced electronics and stuff.

That's also part of Tim Cook has moved a lot of Apple's manufacturing out of China, partly for fear of copying and intellectual property theft, partly also out of regulatory uncertainty.

We've seen China make big crackdowns on tech companies.

Apple doesn't want that.

It has been surprising to me how easily he's been able to do that without invoking the ire of Beijing and moved it like to India, to Vietnam.

Those countries are thrilled.

They are very excited.

They're like meeting with him, making this more possible, giving the company tax breaks.

But Beijing has not cracked down on Apple and there's big demand for iPhones, which is surprising to me and speak to his kind of political aptitude.

But mining allegedly done in war-torn zones with like fighting over the minerals and bloodshed, that is not a scandal that has dragged Tim Cook down on a global scale for all that long.

It's a great question, and it's the biggest challenge for the new guy.

Where is Apple going to strike on AI?

It is seen as pretty far behind its Silicon Valley competitors.

Siri is a Neanderthal, is just a useless voice assistant in comparison to the Google Assistant, in comparison to ChatGPT.

Despite being one of the first voice assistants to market, it just has not kept up, and Apple has failed to...

make it a useful thing that would want you to stay with your iPhone.

It can barely change the song on Spotify.

That's like a failure of Tim Cook's.

And so Apple is seen as like quite far behind in AI by comparison.