On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Apple announced on Monday that in less than two months 2 million iPads have been sold. On May 28th the iPad had it's international launch in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Large queues were reported in Australia, Japan and the UK with people waiting for up to 30 hours before they got their hands on their beloved iPads. Steve Jobs had this to say “Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.” When the iPad first launched we had written an article which said that the iPad could be a boon for third world countries and could be used for education in distant and remote areas. Places that are hard to reach for medical aid could also benefit from the iPad it is easy to cart around and comes with great battery life. In addition it does not cost too ...