Apple earnings today in the spotlight. It's complicated relationship with China.

Why what was once Apple's strength has become a liability.

It's Thursday November 2nd. Welcome to the Tech Check podcast.

Hello, Mark Gilbert, I'm Deere DiBosa.

Hello and I'm Mark Gilbert.

Apple earnings come out today in focus, of course,

will be iPhone sales, services revenue, the forecast for the holiday quarter,

and this quarter in particular D we are focusing on China.

Yeah, because it was almost a year ago that the protests sort of broke out in FoxCon and raised all of these questions about Apple's relationship with China, which is very, very important. It's where it has built a supply

chain that allowed it to become the hardware giant today. A lot of that work has

happened under Tim Cook's run of the company and it also, there's another side to this.

It's not important just for supply,

but the other big bucket demand.

It's where millions of Chinese customers buy Apple products.

So last year in focus was the supply side of this, as I said, with the FoxCon protests.

And that led to some very urgent calls from Wall Street for Apple to diversify its supply chain.

Right, and this dependence on China, which was once a strength where Apple built so much of its,

you know, so many of its products, investors are now asking for diversification.

Management is talking about diversification, you know, using India is just one example.

Right, but it's been a slog and it's going to be slow and you know it's not easy to do because we talked about

this in our in-depth weekly piece but it's important also for the US consumer we We don't see it, but there would be no apple without

China. And since those protests at Fox County year ago, the challenges have only intensified.

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