Regarding my earlier post about the cleverness of Tim Cook’s solution to Apple’s dilemma regarding how to apply for, and accept, a potential tariff refund check without drawing the ire of Donald “Tariff Is My Favorite Word” Trump, at least one reader asked why Tim Cook committing to spending the refund check on “U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing” doesn’t mean that Apple would — if they get a tariff refund — be spending more than they had previously committed to. Cook even said yesterday, “These would be new investments and would be in addition to our prior commitments in the U.S.” But there’s never been any precise accounting for these commitments. Apple committed to spend “more than $500 billion”. “More than $500 billion” plus their tariff refund check would still be “more than $500 billion”.

Here’s what I wrote when Apple first made this current commitment in February 2025, just weeks after Trump’s second term started:

Apple announced a similar plan four years ago — $430 billion and 20,000 jobs. In the announcement of that 2021 plan, Apple said, “Over the past three years, Apple’s contributions in the US have significantly outpaced the company’s original five-year goal of $350 billion set in 2018.”

So I don’t think this announcement is bullshit, at all. But I also don’t think what Apple has announced today is much, if any, different from what they’d be doing if Kamala Harris had gotten 1–2 percent more of the vote in a handful of states in November. The difference is that everyone is looking for quid pro quo with President Transactional back in office.

Apple first announced a plan in 2018, during Trump 1.0, to spend $350 billion over the next five years. Then in 2021 — midway through those five years, at the start of the Biden administration — they said spending was above that previously promised pace but they were announcing a new five-year plan to spend $430 billion. That plan would have run through 2026 (this year). But, again, right after Trump was re-inaugurated last year, before the period covered by the 2021 five-year plan was up, they announced the current $500 billion plan. The only difference is that this latest spending commitment is a four-year plan, not a five-year one (probably because they know Trump doesn’t give one shit what they do after he leaves office).

This isn’t a shell game or a scam. I believe Apple really has spent what they’ve said they were going to spend, and really plans to spend what they’ve committed to spend in the coming three years. If anything, as they said in 2021, their actual spending has probably exceeded what they committed to, during each of these periods, and will continue to. It’s very Tim Cook-ian and very Apple-like to underpromise and overdeliver. So I’d say it’s a shoo-in that when Apple announced the current plan to spend “more than $500 billion” in the U.S. from 2026–2030, they actually planned to hit that target with room to spare. So saying that they’ll throw the proceeds from any potential tariff refund check into the same fund doesn’t actually change a damn thing about their plans.

And if the pattern holds, they’ll announce a new four- or five-year plan for $600 billion (give or take) after the 2028 election, regardless who wins. There’s never any sort of accounting where they show that they spent exactly, say, $447 billion between 2021 and 2026, or $389 billion from 2018 to 2023. And there’s never going to be any exact accounting like that for what they’ll spend in this current “more than $500 billion” plan covering 2026 to 2030. There’s also no accounting for how much Apple spent last year on Trump’s invalid tariffs. Presumably, if they eventually get a refund check from the Treasury, we will know the exact number. But given that whatever they spent on Trump’s tariffs had only a negligible effect on their earnings last year, we can presume that the money they’re committed to spending on U.S. manufacturing and job creation from 2026 to 2030 remains about $500 billion, and it’s really all just projects that they would have spent the exact same amount of money on if Kamala Harris were now in the White House — just like how they committed to spending $430 billion when Biden was president.

The whole thing is just presented in such a way to make it look like they’re doing what Donald Trump would like them to do, when in fact it’s just exactly what Apple wants to do anyway. That’s what makes it genius. It’s win-win-win. It’s what Apple wanted to do anyway, it pleases Trump, and it’s actually good for the American economy.

Remember the appalling but utterly-unsurprising story two months ago where a team of investigative reporters in Sweden uncovered a company in Kenya contracted by Meta to review video content captured by Meta’s “smart” glasses? They spoke to some of the workers, who told tales of reviewing footage of Meta glasses users getting undressed, having sex, and taking dumps. This is a rather seedy job, and a big surprise to most of the people wearing Meta’s AI glasses, who are under the impression that “AI” does not involve human beings in Kenya seeing what their glasses capture.

Well, Meta has fixed the problem. Chris Vallance reports for BBC News:

Meta is under pressure to explain why it cancelled a major contract with a company it was using to train AI, shortly after some of its Kenya-based workers alleged they had to view graphic content captured by Meta smart glasses.

In February, workers at the company, Sama, told two Swedish newspapers they had witnessed glasses users going to the toilet, and having sex.

Less than two months later, Meta ended its contract with Sama, which Sama said would result in 1,108 workers being made redundant.

Meta says it’s because Sama did not meet its standards, a criticism Sama rejects. A Kenyan workers’ organisation alleges Meta’s decision was caused by the staff speaking out.

There’s no mystery here. The “standard” that Sama didn’t meet was keeping their mouths shut about the dignity-shredding nature of the entire operation. Like that fact that it even existed, let alone the gross privacy-invasive footage they witnessed. The deal wasn’t just for Sama’s workers to do the work, it was to do the work and keep it on the down-low. Go to Meta’s AI glasses website and try to find the part where they warn you that footage is subject to review by teams of contractors in third-world countries, Mechanical Turk-style. If you look hard enough, you’ll find oblique allusion to “review may be automated or manual (human)” in their legal small print, but their large-scale human review of video footage and recordings isn’t part of the brand or marketing image for their glasses.

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