Apple Moving Production from China; TikTok Eyes Amazon; Microsoft Shows New Surface Laptops; Drivers Wildly Overestimate Hands Free Assistance

Apple continues to reduce its reliance on China. 9to5mac.com reports that noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has released new predictions regarding their moves include shifting more iPhone production to India, and more MacBook production and assembly to Thailand. Kuo thinks the US market might be 100% supplied by non-China locations in the next 3 to 5 years. For years, Apple’s outsized reliance on China has been seen as a major weak spot in its supply chain, especially through all the Chinese shutdowns due to COVID. 

As they move into e-commerce, TikTok is now hiring in not only LA, but also in Amazon’s back yard of Seattle. According to geekwire.com, the social video phenom currently has e-commerce capabilities in the UK and Southeast Asia. Job postings point to the Chinese ByteDance owned platform working to become a major player in online shopping and e-commerce logistics here in the US, too. TikTok has already tried to push back on privacy concerns over their connection to China…this move will certainly add to that. They do seem determined to become a real competitor to Amazon..which owns 37.8% of the US e-commerce market. 

Microsoft is freshening up their Surface 5 laptops after a year and a half on the market. It is a modest update. The 13.5 inch model starts at $1000 and the 15 inch one at $1200. Engadget.com says they get a bump in processing power with 12 generation Intel Evo processors, and add support for Thunderbolt 4 and WiFi 6. A better display has Dolby Vision IQ support, and you can load up with up to 32 Gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage. Both models are available for preorder now, and they go on sale October 25th.

From Cadillac’s Super Cruise to Tesla’s Autopilot, and all the rest, drivers overestimate the abilities of driver assist systems. Arstechnica.com reports that a study just done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety finds that ‘large percentages of users’ of both Super Cruise and Autopilot ‘were comfortable treating their systems as self-driving.’ Most ADAS, or advanced driver assistance systems, are really just safety oriented helpers that provide blind spot monitoring or automatic emergency braking. The SAE calls these systems ‘Level 2,’ and they are a long way from from self driving. Users of such systems are likely to eat while driving (65% of Super Cruise users, 46% of Autopilot). They are also likely to take hands off the wheel while driving ( 40% Autopilot, 44% Super Cruise.)