That's ultimately just some small gesture that nobody cares about when making real decisions. At most it grasped Apple's attention and forced them to give the Chinese supplier fair consideration. I didn't see anything about government subsidies playing a meaningful role in making that supplier the most competitive. The clustering of supporting industries and suppliers, on the other hand, was a real factor.

I'm unsure why you seem to think it should have something to do with it, considering that I was talking about something else.

But if you want me to talk about that, fine. Outsourcing of genuinely low-skilled work is one thing, outsourcing of the iPhone and the like quite another. For one thing, the former is really all about the wage costs, and so some companies move from country to country several times, always looking for the next undeveloped country with low wages - Eastern Europe had such factories for a while, now they're leaving again. The latter is quite a different story and far more difficult to move from one country to another. The article said something about those Chinese workers being paid only USD 17 a day; while that is obviously well below Western minimum wages, it's several times what unskilled easily replaceable workers get. So when they talk about America not having those workers, what they mean is workers who *do* have a not insignificant amount of technical training and knowledge - and large amounts of such workers. I don't think it's so far-fetched to say the US and other European countries have too few of those, for a variety of reasons - people choosing less marketable careers, people being either under-educated or over-educated for it, and the like.