Even if they did, Lake Michigan is estimated to contain one quadrillion gallons of water. Foxconn will have long ceased to exist by the time anyone even notices the water is missing.
An interesting use case is a suburb of Milwaukee called Waukesha which happens to be out of clean drinking water they are reduced to using radon laced wells. The problem pronounces itself when they can’t take water from Lake Michigan because Waukesha is over the Mississippi water basin. Spoiler: they got permission to use the water
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2016/06/21/w...
Somehow this is punishment for the iphone. You can't just casually cause hundreds or thousands of suicides or whatever it was, for your stupid first world luxury toys, and not expect to suffer some kind of karma backlash.
I’ve always thought we Midwesterners should be shipping trains of freshwater tanks to the 40 million lemmings who decided to move to a natural desert on the left coast.
We’ll only charge the same price per gallon as Evian or Pelligrino. It could solve the Illinois budget crisis quickly.
Area of Lake Michigan: 58000 km^2 = 58E9 m^2
Corresponds to 4.6E-7 m/day or about 6 years for one millimeter or about 150 years for the oddly specific 25.4mm you were asking for.
If we take the 39% loss figure from the article, we get 15 years/1mm and 390 years/25.4mm.