The Times of India:

Apple transported five planes full of iPhones and other products from India to the US in just three days during the final week of March, a senior Indian official confirmed to The Times of India. The urgent shipments were made to avoid a new 10% reciprocal tariff imposed by US President Donald Trump’s administration that took effect on April 5. Sources said that Apple currently has no plans to increase retail prices in India or other markets despite the tariffs.

To mitigate the impact, the company rapidly moved inventory from manufacturing centres in India and China to the US, even though this period is typically a slow shipping season.

“Factories in India and China and other key locations had been shipping products to the US in anticipation of the higher tariffs,” according to one source.

The stock market made a return to normalcy on Wednesday afternoon after Trump postponed the tariffs for 90 days, but even though Apple is up 15 percent, it’s far from out of the water. Trump only canceled his latest round of reciprocal tariffs, but the Chinese ones don’t count under the same plan. Chinese imports are tariffed at 125 percent as of Wednesday morning. India, by comparison, is only tariffed at a measly 10 percent, which is much more palatable for Apple, which probably couldn’t afford to lose so much on iPhone imports into the United States, a market that accounts for nearly half of its revenue. So the plan makes sense, and Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, is once again flexing his supply chain prowess built up during his time as Apple’s chief operating officer. While smaller companies have been flat-out calling off imports into the United States, Apple just did a clever reroute. Nice.

This plan, however, begins to fall apart in the long term. It’s untenable for Apple to ship all of its iPhones from China to India and then back to the Americas. That’s too expensive at Apple’s scale, even if it’s able to fit 350,000 iPhones on each plane, per Ryan Jones’ math. So Apple has two short-term options: either raise prices on this year’s iPhone 17 models and continue shipping them from China to the United States directly or focus its efforts extensively on ramping up manufacturing in India and Brazil. Both are viable strategies, but one is a lot harder than the other. One thing is for certain, though: If Apple does raise prices, they won’t go back down again. That might be a compelling reason to go with the first option and put on a little display for the Trump people by pretending to bring manufacturing to America for the next four years.

Apple wants to expand supply chain diversity. Its biggest problem historically with China (and Taiwan) has been a possible war between the two nations, which could wreak havoc. What Apple hasn’t accounted for, however, is a trade war between the United States and the rest of the world — a trade war so bad that China and South Korea drafted a plan to deter the Trump administration. The war between China and Taiwan obviously wasn’t imminent, so Apple planned to gradually increase iPhone and Mac manufacturing in Vietnam, Brazil, India, and so on through the decade. But now that plan is worthless because the more pressing issue is the war between China and the United States. The flying-phones-to-India plan is a stopgap solution until Apple can figure out how to navigate the trade war.

For the record, I don’t think Apple will increase any product prices before it announces the next models because that would be an absolute disaster. People are already rushing to Apple stores to purchase current-generation products because they’re afraid prices will go up. If Apple actually comes out and says Macs are going up by x dollars tomorrow, they just won’t have enough Macs for everybody. It would be an unforced error at a time when transcontinental imports are already in jeopardy. I find it incredibly likely, though, that Apple increases iPhone prices by at least $100 across the board in September and Mac prices by some percentage amount per upgrade in October because of what I wrote earlier: Apple wasn’t prepared for this. Apple prepared for an eventual war between China and Taiwan; it did not prepare for the Trump administration to strut in and destroy the economy in three months.

On the topic of exemptions: I find them unlikely. Trump says he’s thinking about them, but if there’s one media lesson to learn from the Trump years, it’s to never trust the White House’s public comments. A more reliable indicator of actual action in the Trump orbit is when something leaks to the media, such as when the news said on Monday that Trump would issue a 90-day relief period. The White House quickly responded by calling the reporting “fake news,” but it certainly wasn’t fake. When an Elon Musk-led group halted all federal grants a few months ago, the White House said it wouldn’t backtrack. It did just days later. I don’t think exceptions will ever come and the nonsense coming from Trump’s public relations side is mostly to stabilize the stock market.

The more likely scenario is that Trump calls off the reciprocal tariffs altogether and they don’t come to light in 90 days. I also think this is unlikely, but it’s more possible than exemptions. Trump, above all else, cares about his public image and wants to look like a genius hero all the time. He still can save face among the Make America Great Again crowd, cancel the tariffs entirely, and stabilize the stock market. That would fix Apple’s problem for now, but I don’t think it would make Cook sweat any less. The markets hate uncertainty, but that’s all they have to contend with currently because there’s no concrete reporting from within the White House on when this is coming to an end. Trump wants everyone to believe he’ll just work out a deal with certain nations and that’ll make trade easier, but no deals have been made.

One deal has already blown up, though: TikTok. The plan before “Liberation Day” was to cut China a deal in exchange for a majority stake in TikTok and a license to its algorithm, which China would still control. (“The Art of the Deal,” it seems.) But once the new tariff plan hit Beijing, it retaliated and threw away the deal. Clearly, de-escalation isn’t happening and the trade war will only intensify between the two nations, which not only places a big question mark over TikTok but also causes trade uncertainty. With this deal-making genius in the Oval Office, I highly doubt deals are actually the end goal and it’s more likely Trump will kill his plan and proclaim himself a winner. Either that, or he’ll go with them in three months and throw the economy into shambles.

As for Cook, it’s $1 million well spent.