The Feds Won’t Let You Use These Cheap Chinese Cellphones
Two major announcements this week will shape the future of the smartphone industry, but most Americans have only heard of one of them.
The first is Apple’s September Event, which on Monday introduced the iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, and Apple Intelligence, the tech giant’s latest attempt to make Siri useful. Today, Huawei, the largest domestic Chinese cellphone manufacturer, will unveil the first-ever trifold smartphone: the Mate XT.
As usual, Apple’s announcement was a big hit. More than 8 million people watched the company’s livestream on YouTube. Across the Pacific, the Mate XT has accumulated 3 million pre-orders before the product’s official launch on September 10.
Huawei smartphones are nearly nonexistent in the American market, but they are common around the rest of the world. Huawei claims 19.85 percent of the Chinese market and 3.5 percent of the global market. Apple trounces Huawei, claiming over half of the American smartphone market (52 percent) and 16 percent of the global market. Both Apple’s debut of its artificial intelligence and Huawei’s never-before-seen trifold design are exciting developments, so why will there be very few American orders for the Mate XT? Federal policy is largely to blame. The Trump administration purged Huawei from American telecommunications systems and pressured allies to follow suit. This technonationalism has continued under the Biden administration, as documented by Reason‘s Eric Boehm in a 2021 article.
Opposition to Huawei was motivated by evidence of the company installing “back doors” in its telecom equipment, as well as concerns about its founder’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army. In retaliation, the Trump administration granted the Department of Commerce the power to “determine that particular countries…are foreign adversaries.” Following this order, the department added “Huawei and its 70 affiliates to the so-called ‘Entity List,'” preventing firms from do
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