There's been a lot of talk about how tariffs will affect the cost of the iPhone in the U.S. and Tim Cook has addressed the issue during Apple's latest quarterly earnings call. Sort of.
“Obviously, we’re very engaged on the tariff discussions,” Cook said. “We believe in engagement and will continue to engage. On the pricing piece, we have nothing to announce today.
"I’ll just say that the operational team has done an incredible job around optimizing the supply chain of the inventory, and we’ll obviously continue to do those things to the degree that we can.”
Which is probably about as much as we can expect from a CEO of a publicly-traded company. Cook confirmed that prices are staying as they are right now, but he's not ruling out that things might change.
He did also take some time to defend Siri in light of recent criticism.
What this actually means
If anything, Cook seems to be firmly setting up camp on the fence, which — in fairness — is probably the most sensible thing to do right now.
Implementation of tariffs has been heavily criticised, with the Trump administration imposing tariffs, pausing them, granting exemptions to electronics, then pledging to undo that exemption in the near future.
It would be foolish for Cook to announce any concrete plans, when the law itself is seemingly unsure about what's going on. Apple has to keep consumers and shareholders on board, and that means playing coy until they can't.
Cook did confirm that Apple is suffering a $900 million cost from tariffs this financial quarter. But the good news is that, right now, the company is absorbing that cost rather than passing it onto the consumer.
How long that will last isn't entirely clear, though — especially with threats of a semiconductor tax that will affect smartphones imported from China.
That said, the CEO did tell CNBC that about half of iPhones imported to the U.S. are coming from India — with other products coming from Vietnam. Neither of those countries are free from tariff threats. But at least this means that Donald Trump's vendetta against Chinese imports may not affect iPhone prices as much as we'd feared.
For now, though, only time will tell.
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