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Comment by wtvanhest | Hacker News Reader

Any American jury is going to be biased against a foreign company

I'm not sure if this is true. I don't think most American's see Apple as an Apple Pie type of American company. I could be wrong, but I have never heard anyone say, I bought an iPad because it is an American product.

I say this as someone who is probably more supportive of American companies and not really supportive of Apple at all, so maybe I have my own bias, but I don't think so.

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Mostly on the radio I hear about Apple and Chinese labor, so they seem like a multinational company more than an American company even though they do "command and control" from the US.

Also they don't employ a huge number of Americans compared to other large companies (and excluding retail they remain pretty small, esp. compared to Microsoft). Maybe the valley is different too, because a large proportion of the population are immigrants.

More data: they employ many Americans, and the campus is filled with them (of all sorts of ancestries, not exclusively imigrants from India or China). According to http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=aapl they employ a number of people adequate to sustain a revenue/employee of $2.351 million/year. The factories are not Apple's, but are contracted manufacturers, the same used by many others (Dell, etc).

I agree with you about linking Apple and Chinese. When I think of the Apple labor force I automatically think Foxconn, which leads to thoughts of labour camps and worker suicide, not that that's the whole picture of course.

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