Presidents Day yesterday, so the market was closed, but Apple still managed to spook everybody by putting out a note saying they won't hit their Q2 guidance. Coronavirus, supply chains, factories in China running way under capacity, the whole thing. If you've read any tech outlet in the last 18 hours you already know this. I'm not going to recap the press release line by line because by the time this posts there'll be a dozen other blogs doing exactly that, and honestly a chunk of it is just corporate hedge-speak anyway.
What I actually want to talk about is my battery.
Back in early January I ordered a replacement battery for my old iPhone 6s off AliExpress, one of those $6.50 jobs with the little pull-tab adhesive strips, because the original was swollen enough that the screen had started separating at one corner (that's its own fun story, replacing a battery on a five year old phone with a butter knife and a hair dryer). Seller had good reviews, said ships in 3-5 business days, standard stuff. I paid, got my tracking number, and then... nothing. Checked it last night out of habit and it's still sitting at "processing" in a warehouse somewhere outside Shenzhen.
Turns out this is not a me problem. Lunar New Year usually means factories close for a week or two starting late January and then everybody's back at it. This year a bunch of provinces extended the shutdown well past the holiday because of the outbreak, and some plants that did reopen are running with a fraction of their normal workforce because workers cant get back into the cities they'd normally be commuting from. Multiply my $6.50 battery by every small seller doing this exact same thing and you start to see why Apple, who obviously has vastly more leverage and vastly more inventory buffer than some guy selling phone parts out of a Shenzhen industrial park, is still telling investors they cant promise numbers right now.
Its a weird thing to feel connected to a global supply chain over a six dollar battery, but there you go. I keep refreshing the tracking page like that's going to do anything.
The other story from this same window that I think is getting undersold is Mobile World Congress. GSMA pulled the plug on the whole event a few days back, first time in the show's history they've cancelled it outright, and that means no big on-stage circus for whatever Xiaomi, Sony, and a handful of others were planning to show off in Barcelona this year. Samsung already did their Unpacked event separately a week or so before all this (Galaxy S20 lineup, the Z Flip with the actual folding glass, which I still think is the more interesting phone of the two even though nobody's going to buy it at that price), so they dodged the bullet. Everyone else planning an MWC reveal is now scrambling to figure out what to do with an announcement they'd already built marketing around.
None of this is catastrophic on its own. Phones will still ship eventually, my battery will probably show up in March instead of February, Apple will probably still have a fine quarter overall. But I think this is the first time in a while I've actually felt a supply chain story land somewhere personal instead of just being a paragraph in a quarterly earnings writeup. Usually "supply chain disruption" is the kind of phrase that washes over you. This time I've got a literal tracking number that hasn't moved in three weeks as a physical reminder of it.
Unrelated complaint while I'm here: whoever designs the plastic screen protectors that come bundled with these cheap AliExpress parts orders needs to be stopped. I have never once in my life applied one without trapping a bubble somewhere near the home button, and I have tried every trick the internet has ever suggested, credit card, hairdryer, doing it in the shower for the steam. Doesn't matter. There's always one bubble. It's basically become a personal tradition of failure at this point.
Anyway. Battery's still stuck in a warehouse. I'll update if it ever moves.