That's one possibility. Another is that the companies will offshore the labor. Another is that they will simply shut down that part of their business because it's no longer economical.

That said, some jobs simply must be done and they must be done locally or in-country for an economy to funciton. If you don't grow your own food, someone has to transport it from the farm to your table. Some medical work simply must be done where the patient is. If you have roads, then repair crews must be local. Anything dealing with highly-classified/state-secret material should be done by loyal citizens of that country and, where possible, in the country itself.

You get the idea.

But most other jobs are vulnerable to either offshoring-to-cheaper-labor and/or we-can-do-without-it if local/domestic labor is too expensive.

Buy they can make an 11-inch ipad and sell it for $350. Are you really suggesting that they can't put that into a clamshell form factor for $600?

I live in semi-rural eastern Tennessee and our schools have 1:1 laptop policies with district provided and managed equipment. What school district out there is requiring parents to buy devices like that in this day and age?

I mean, Thunderbolt in phones isn't a thing, but the rest? iPhone 17's SSD is 256GB which is the same size as our standard corporate laptops (and without the 100GB of Windows bloat) so claiming "SSD is too small" is an odd claim to make. If you're docked to external peripherals, "screen too small, shitty on screen keyboard" is similarly a strange complaint. "Wrong OS" is only applicable if you have some specific application stack you need to run. If it's just "I sent email and push spreadsheets around" then ios and android are totally fine.

There is a very large swath of office type workers who "dock your phone" would work fine for.

There's a chain with stores in Idaho, Texas, Tennessee, and most states in between that rents, sells, and buys DVDs, Blu-rays, and more.

With the demands of life being what they are, this is much easier said than done.

If we are both 22, but you spent the last 4 years working on a political science degree and I spent the last 4 years working one or more no-post-high-school-education-required non-IT-related jobs, the answer will probably depend on the "prospects for advancement" in the company and whether those prospects would benefit from someone who had a 4-year non-technical degree.

If we are both 22 but you spent the last 4 years in something related to IT or to something else that gets the hiring manager's attention (say, we are applying for an IT job at a children's camp, and you've been doing children's-camp-ajacent work the last 4 years), you may have the leg up.

Unless you've got something equivalent or better to compensate.

Resume:

Work experience:

2020-2025 Senior Director of Widgets, Fortune 500 Company
2010-2020 Various positions of increasing responsibility in my parent's medium-sized Widget-making company, ending as Junior Vice President

Education:

2006-2010 Local High School, 4.0 GPA

In this case, the person had something unavailable to most: A guaranteed placement in a company that would nurture his career right out of high school. 10 years later he knew he had to leave the family business to broaden his horizons. By then, he was being recruited so finding a senior position with a big-name company wasn't hard.

Situations like these are unicorns, they are the exceptions that prove your rule.

"Working through school" is a good way to do it if you can swing it.

For some majors, undergraduate-research-assistant or industry-university-partnership between-semester jobs can help you graduate without any debt.

There are even some schools that have working during the school year to zero-out tuition as part of their educational model.

For decades until very recently, at degree that combined in-demand-upon-enrollment technical studies with a solid business education would meet this criteria. If your graduate date coincided with a "job bust" of your technical skills, you could fall back to your business education. If it didn't, you were still more valuable that someone with the technical skills but little or no business education.

I say "until very recently" because ChatGPT-style AI is very "disruptive" to the entry-level job market so it's too soon to say whether this is true for people who graduated in the last 2-3 years or who will be graduating in the near future.

The hard part is doing what amounts to a double-major (or more) without extending graduation (and tuition) more than a semester.

If you plan in "eventually" getting that degree, it's going to be easier to "go straight on through college after high school" than it will be to "work for a decade then go back."

Whether it's an apprenticeship, community college, a less-challenging college/major, or a hard-core-brain-buster degree, it's a lot easier to learn new things before mid-life than after. There's some brain science to back this up, but I don't have the references handy, sorry. Look up "fluid intelligence" and "crystallized intelligence" and their relationship to age.

For most people, it's also a lot easier to manage your time before you have a "full time job" or are raising children.

That's not to say you can't go back to school full-time to get your Ph.D. when you are 70, but it's going to be a lot easier if you do it earlier in life.

It won't be cheap for you, but you can file a trademark suit against the fake company then subpoena apple for the company's contact info and enough additional information that it costs Apple enough time and money to be annoying.

When the other company doesn't respond to the suit, or if they are out of the country, get a default judgement and an injunction to force Apple to remove the fake listing, at least in the country you are filing suit in.

If enough victims did this, Apple would find it very annoying financially and reputationally and might start being more pro-active about deleting trademark-infringers.

I ask them to visit the app store, search for Microsoft Authenticator, then I ask them things like "how many ratings does it have?" It's very difficult to match the real Microsoft Authenticator app for the number of ratings.

I think you mean "not used often enough to warrant the price of SSD storage" not "too large for SSD storage."

If you think a multi-petabyte file is too big to fit on SSD storage: combining multiple physical storage devices into one virtual device has been a thing for a long time now.

I like still having one or two USB-A ports on my laptop, but I can't say I've ever been annoyed by having to "lug around" a USB hub (with a gigabit ethernet interface) in my laptop bag. It weighs around an ounce.

I also think the article complaining about shit like mice, keyboards, and headsets is a bit out there, since any of this crap connected to my laptop is connected via bluetooth which has been around over a quarter of a century and has been ubiquitous in laptops for at least 15 years.