I’m sure many of you know the facts, or at least some of them, about how Apple designs and builds its gear. The conventional impression is that iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, Apple TV, HomePod and all the rest are made in China or some other Asian country, and those who crave “Made in the U.S.A.” labels on the stuff they buy are apt to be disappointed.

But to a large manufacturer, there is not just one country, but one planet, and thus the matter of designing and building a product is far more complicated than many politicians portray to score points with their supporters. So when someone says that there should be huge tariffs on gear made overseas they may be missing the point.

Take your family car, SUV or truck. The vehicle may be assembled in America, but the engine may come from Mexico or Canada. Consider the American version of the VW Passat, a family mid-sized car assembled in Chattanooga, TN. The engine is made in Puebla, Mexico. So is it an American car, or a Mexican car, or is it still a German car, because the company’s main office is located in that country?

You may not realize this, but the cars with the most American-made parts include the Honda Accord and the Toyota Camry. Some American cars are assembled in Canada and Mexico, or maybe even China.

The long and short is that complicated products may have complicated production schemes, with different parts being sourced from some countries, and final assembly being performed in other countries. Things may be simple with pillows made in Minnesota, but I suspect the materials are sourced from different places, and not all of them are located in the U.S.A.

So what about Apple, the presumed classic example of outsourcing? Is that all done by a greedy company seeking maximum profits at all costs, or is it just an example of a multinational corporation trying to set up an efficient supply chain and production capability? Or some combination thereof?

Why can’t they build iPhones in this country, and iPads, and MacBooks and all the rest?

It’s not uncommon to blame Apple, but in a recent interview for Recode and MSNBC, CEO Tim Cook pointed out that “We are building things in the United States,” that “It’s not true that iPhone isn’t built in the United States.”

What he means is that the final assembly may occur in China, but the Gorilla Glass on all iPhones and iPads are made by Corning in Kentucky. The iPhone X’s FaceID module is made in Texas, as is the Mac Pro. Many of the Intel chips used on Macs are made at various plants in America, including one not terribly far from where I’m sitting right now.

During the interview, Cook boasted of the $350 billion investment Apple is making in the U.S., pointing out that “We love this country. We’re patriots. This is our country. Want to create as many jobs in the U.S. as we can.”

Does that mean that no iPhone or any of Apple’s other mobile gear will ever be completely manufactured in the U.S.A.? It’s a question that’s still asked, and I suspect it’s going to be difficult in the near term. Apple, its suppliers and contract manufacturers, have invested tens or hundreds of billions of dollars setting up elaborate supply chains and production facilities in Asia. Parts are sourced in different parts of the world and shipped there for final assembly. To recreate a similar assembly apparatus in this country would also cost hundreds of billions of dollars and involve years of fine-tuning. It couldn’t happen overnight, even if there were tariffs to force the process.

If tariffs were applied to stuff shipped to this country, the price you pay for Apple gear — and for gear from any other country given similar punishment — would increase. It wouldn’t guarantee more American jobs, since fewer people would buy the higher priced product, and thus some of the people who design, sell and service them might lose their jobs.

It doesn’t mean a future iPhone won’t be all American. Salaries continue to increase for the workers at these Asian factories. At some point in time, the costs of shipping parts to the factory and shipping completed products from the factory may, along with higher salaries, no longer be cost effective. Production may shift to countries with even lower wages and, eventually, to where the products are actually sold.

This will be more a matter of market forces, as it should be, rather than being forced to act because of the prevailing political winds in any specific country.

But Apple has always received the brunt of criticism about its assembly practices. When unsafe working conditions are attacked, it’s always all about Apple, forgetting that most major tech companies also assemble their gear in Asia. It’s also true that those other companies rarely tout efforts to improve working conditions. Just Apple.

With cash-starved school systems in the U.S. choosing Google Chromebooks and PC netbooks instead of iPads and Macs, many believe that Apple is losing big time in the educational market. Some of that impression comes, according to AppleInsider’s Daniel Eran Dilger, from deliberately manipulated sales numbers, designed to ignore periods of flat or declining sales growth.

And let’s not forget that those cheap computers are sold for virtually no profit. It’s almost as if they are giving them away to build market share, and what about the reliability of these gadgets? How often do they have to be replaced, since repairs are probably out of the question for a $150 piece of junk, and how many of those sales are due to replacements? Remember, tech gear used in schools will receive a tremendous amount of use and abuse. There will be no on-site repairpeople to fix them.

In passing, I wonder how many years a school system is going to cope with unreliable gear before deciding something has to change. I also wonder how manufacturers can continue to build low-end garbage without the hope of a profit before deciding there has to be a better way. But they’ve been doing that in the PC space for years, and Android smartphone sales continue to follow the same pattern.

Indeed, some of the less savvy tech pundits have, for years, insisted Apple must seek a higher market share at all costs, profits be damned. Macs have held relatively small minority of the PC market for 34 years. But these days, it’s a premium portion of the market, and thus Apple earns high profits, and most PC makers, except for premium gear, make very little. I wonder if the Macs that HP is leasing to subscribers generate higher profits than their own PCs.

Back to the world of education, Apple is clearly ceding nothing. With a huge splash in the media, Apple held a “Field Trip” event in Chicago on March 27 to explain its educational initiative that featured a new 9.7-inch iPad as the focal point. Again listing for $329, with an educational price of $299, the 2018 model is upgraded with the same A10 Fusion chip used in the iPhone 7. To keep with the educational focus, support is added for the Apple Pencil.

And, yes, Apple’s stylus still lists for $99, but students and teachers receive a $10 discount.

There will also be an iOS 11.4 update, due later this year, with special features designed for educators, including the ClassKit framework to deliver opportunities for developers, and an iPad app known as Schoolwork that tracks assignments and work progress for both teachers and students. This is the sort of thing that will help differentiate Apple from the pack.

That said, it doesn’t mean educators will be rushing to place orders for tens of thousands of iPads, even though the purchase price for cartons and cartons of these tablets will no doubt be far less than $299 each. Bear in mind, too, that the iPad doesn’t become any more flexible for lengthy text material. Students will still want to consider an accessory keyboard, or doing a large portion of their work on, say, a Mac, though I’m not altogether certain how they’d integrate with apps designed for the iPad.

Well at least until Apple allows developers to build apps that run on both iOS and Mac, if one assumes recent rumors are true.

It also shows up the flexibility of the cheapest iPad for different purposes. I suspect, too, that the nearly forgotten iPad mini will disappear before long, but you never know.

After several years of flagging sales, the iPad has been recovering, if slowly. The 9.7-inch iPad and the Pro versions have clearly found loyal audiences. No doubt owners of older iPads have also found reason to finally upgrade, though I’m not predicting any specially large upgrade cycles, though that trend could certainly improve over time as Apple comes up with more bright ideas to grow the product.

But it’s also possible some of these iPad users have had enough except perhaps for Netflix watching. I may actually be in that category. My wife is devoted to hers, but I spend scant time on it, because it doesn’t suit my workflow. To me, it’s just a large iPod touch in terms of basic usability. I do not find myself typing particularly faster, and the apps I need to earn my keep are Mac only, at least so far.

As I’ve said before on occasion, I can foresee using an iPad for audio editing chores if there was a way to record my radio shows on such a device. But the technique I use now, which includes Skype and Audio Hijack, requires functions not supported on an iPad.

That doesn’t mean it can’t happen. It would require a number of changes to iOS no doubt, and developers to deliver the goods, but if Apple really wants to continue to expand the iPad’s possibilities as a productivity device, such changes would be essential.

For now, I’ll continue to drive my truck, I guess.

Yes, this article is about Android, but Facebook is a strong part of the picture. It’s not about Cambridge Analytica and that company’s alleged abuse of the personal data of over 50 million American users. That’s bad enough.

Instead, it’s about a published report in Ars Technica that impacts strictly Android users with Facebook accounts. It appears that, if you were using the Facebook app on an Android phone, the social network was evidently capturing your phone call and text messages metadata if your contact list was brought over.

Yes, we know that Facebook built a multinational corporation profiting on its users; yes you and me. It’s all about making your personal data accessible, so it seems only natural the your personal phone calls would be included as part of the process, so they know whom you’ve contacted. The data would include the person you called, when you called them, the duration of the call and when you texted.

It’s clear Google was complicit.

Says the article, “On Android, the door was left open for Facebook to easily pull down your data via Android’s early application programming interface, or API. Before the launch of Android 6.0 in 2015, to use an app you had to agree to all its permission requirements. In Facebook’s case, the company asked for the moon — access to all your data including your phone usage.

“With Android 6.0, Google introduced a permission model for Android app data access. Now when you install an application you must explicitly grant access to specific areas. You can also revoke these permissions.”

Of course, most users don’t read all those microscopic terms and conditions, so it may very well be that most of them wouldn’t notice any of this in setting up Android and Facebook. It’s very normal just to click OK or Agree when presented with some sort of online ingredient, regardless of what you’re agreeing to.

At the end of the day, however, saving one’s contact list to expand your Facebook presence is not the same as syncing calls and text histories. I’m not at all sure how anyone benefits other than some potential marketer for whom this sort of data is important. I dare say very few people knew they were giving Facebook permission to comb their call or SMS logs because they accepted some obscure agreement.

At least iOS users aren’t impacted by this outrageous behavior. Forgetting the platform wars, or the perceived benefits of the open nature of Android, do you really want to submit so much personal data to Facebook just to network?

But when it comes to Android, there’s more, a recent report about a vicious scheme of pushing malware to hundreds of thousands of Android users. Evidently it involved embedding the infection in seven apps available via the Google Play store. Six of the apps were QR readers, a seventh a so-called “smart compass,” and all slipped past Google’s automated security scans.

The specifics of the malware are less important than the fact that it happened. Sure, it was eventually caught, after a bunch of people were infected.

Now one hopes Google has learned its lesson, and that future app submissions will be more carefully checked for the presence of malware, but don’t bet on it. Rather than inserting this malware into high profile apps, they appeared in perfectly ordinary ones, which may be an object lesson. They are simple enough not to attract attention to themselves.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t use an Android smartphone. At the very least, buying a device with the latest version of Android would insure the highest level of security, more so if it’s a Pixel Phone by Google, which will receive the latest upgrades until the manufacturer decides to cast it aside.

All this comes not long after a published report appeared about a claim that Android had finally matched iOS in security. It’s utter nonsense as you might imagine, and not the first time Google executives have made such outrageous claims.

But the real victim here is the Android user. People have made a judgement that they prefer Android to iOS, don’t care about the platform, or just want to save some money. I wouldn’t begin to suggest that governments regulate the minimum amount of security a smartphone should provide, because some governments might decide to demand backdoors for law enforcement or just to monitor their citizens. As it stands, the FTC isn’t going to go after a tech company because its gadgets are less secure than they should be. The agency would only get involved if there was a danger to one’s health, such as those exploding batteries in the Samsung Galaxy Note 7.

Customer pressure might, but did Samsung lose sales because of that Galaxy Note 7 problem? Maybe at first, but such issues often disappear from the public’s memory if newer models are free of such problems.

In any case, the Facebook and embedded malware episodes are just two more examples of why one should be extremely cautious about using Android gear.

When Apple executive Eddie Cue admitted that the company is developing a slate of original TV shows during an interview at the South by Southwest event in Austin, it was merely an admission of something most followers of the company already knew. Apple is spending one billion dollars to launch the project.

This week there’s a published report that the first shows will debut a year from now, March 2019. How they will be distributed is still a matter of speculation, though there are surely strong hints on how it may play out. So Apple’s first efforts at original shows, “Carpool Karaoke” and “Planet of the Apps,” were of modest entertainment value, to put it mildly. But they were certainly proofs of concept.

Apple was clearly convinced, and a launch date a year hence makes sense because quality shows don’t appear magically. There is usually a long gestation process to get even to the first or pilot episode. It’s not just the “Series Bible,” but such chores as script development, set development, costume design and, of course, hiring performers. It can take months or years to complete, so even if the first TV shows debut next year, it probably won’t be all of them.

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