No American tech company has bet as heavily as Apple on the economic interdependence of China and the United States. Apple needs Chinese workers to make its iPhones and Chinese consumers to buy them. This would seem to make the deteriorating relationship between the two global superpowers uniquely dangerous for the company and its chief executive officer Tim Cook, who was responsible for Apple’s decision to outsource production to China long before he took over the top position from Mr Steve Jobs in 2011.

But until recently, the US-China trade war that began during Donald Trump’s presidency and intensified during President Joe Biden’s had barely slowed down the company. Sure, Mr Biden launched an aggressive campaign to keep China from developing advanced semiconductors and called Chinese President Xi Jinping a “dictator”, and Mr Xi pursued a strategy to limit China’s reliance on Western-made technology – but none of that seemed to matter.