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...
The iPad is set to go on sale internationally next week and Apple does not have enough supplies in the US. If you don't have your iPad yet, get in line. A new seat-of-the-pants survey by the research firm Piper Jaffray finds that Apple 's popular tablet computer is in short supply. The analysts called 50 Apple stores and found a "very limited" supply of iPads. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has issued a research note outlining his findings when he called 50 Apple Stores to see which iPads they had in stock. 74% had none available, and 26% had some Wi-Fi models, but no stores had the 3G iPad in stock for immediate purchase. Fortune magazine 's web site reports. Specifically: 37 stores were sold out. 13 stories had only Wi-Fi models . All 50 stores were out of the 3G model . Customers are however able to reserve an iPad and collect it 4-7 days later or order online and receive it 7-10 days later. The sales of the iPad might have even hurt the ...