Michael Acton, Stephen Morris, John Reed, and Kathrin Hille, reporting for the Financial Times:

Apple plans to shift the assembly of all US-sold iPhones to India as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the matter, as President Donald Trump’s trade war forces the tech giant to pivot away from China.

The push builds on Apple’s strategy to diversify its supply chain but goes further and faster than investors appreciate, with a goal to source from India the entirety of the more than 60mn iPhones sold annually in the US by the end of 2026.

The target would mean doubling the iPhone output in India, after almost two decades in which Apple spent heavily in China to create a world-beating production line that powered its rise into a $3tn tech giant.

This is really important news and I’m surprised I haven’t heard much chatter about it online. China is the best place to manufacture iPhones en masse because the country effectively has an entire city dedicated to making them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Replicating that supply chain anywhere else has been extremely difficult for Apple for obvious reasons — it’s nearly impossible to find such a dedicated workforce anywhere else in the world. American commentators usually frame things in terms of five-day work weeks or eight-hour shifts, but in China, they just don’t have limits. This system is so bad that Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturer, resorts to putting anti-suicide nets around the buildings that house these poor workers, but this isn’t an essay on how the marriage between capitalism and communism is used for human exploitation.

Building the iPhone infrastructure in India is a monumental task. Apple has already gotten started, but it isn’t good enough for peak iPhone season, i.e., when the phones first come out in September. Anyone who buys an iPhone in the United States on pre-order day will see a shipping notification from China, not Brazil or India. Apple begins manufacturing phones in other countries months later because they’re not equipped to handle the demand of American consumers leading up to the holidays. I’m not saying Apple hasn’t built up infrastructure to handle this demand in the past few years — it has — but there’s still a lot of work to be done, and I’m not sure how it will do it in a year. Either way, this is perfectly suited for Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, who is one of the few people with the operational prowess to handle complexities like this.

As I said when I wrote about Trump’s tariffs earlier in April, the most alarming danger remains the prospect of a war between China and Taiwan. Apple can pay tariffs by raising prices or playing politics in Washington — it’s simply not as much of a pressing issue as the company’s entire supply chain being put on hold for however many years. Apple still relies on Taiwan’s factories for nearly all of its high-end microprocessors. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s Arizona plant isn’t good enough and won’t be for a while. Apple is still heavily reliant on China for final assembly, and the sooner it can get out of these two countries, the better it is for Apple’s long-term business prospects.

Moving iPhone assembly to India, Mac and AirPods manufacturing to Vietnam, etc., is one large step to shielding Apple’s business from global instability. (With the possibility of a war in India looming, I’m not sure how large of a step it is.) But Apple’s dependence on Taiwan for nearly all of its processors is even more concerning. We can build microprocessors in the United States — we can’t build iPhones here. They’re different kinds of manufacturing. The quicker Apple gets the Trump administration to bless the Chips and Science Act, the better it is for Apple’s war preparedness plan, because I fully believe Apple’s largest manufacturing vulnerability is Taiwan, not China. (China was the biggest concern two years ago, but from this report, it’s not difficult to assume Apple is close to significantly decreasing its reliance on China.)