I am going to say the unspoken part out loud: it’s rooted in Hitler’s “Creators, Maintainers, Destroyers” view of race.
The fact that this article exists at all shows how deeply rooted the sentiment is, even if 95% of the people regurgitating it don’t see themselves as racist or know that this is what their society has conditioned them to believe.
Asians only get tech by copying and stealing from the West. So when the “free market” West gets bothered by a little bit of competition and enforces protectionist measures, Asians who aren’t willing to whore out their women to Westerners are supposed to come crawling back and accept sanctions as punishment for trying to be uppity. It’s a shock to the system that China was able to keep innovating independently in a different direction, that can’t easily be attributed to IP theft. It’s not about the 7nm process; it’s about the entire SoC.
There are a lot of dogwhistles and things left unspoken in these articles and TikTok videos (where I saw it first) and I’m sure the “well ackshually nobody ever said that” jackasses are ready to pounce on this comment so it’s probably best to just leave it at this:
Unilateral protectionism has been a fucking disaster for consumers. All we got out of it was increased prices. A maxed out iPhone in 2016 cost $949. A maxed out iPhone in 2023 costs seventeen hundred fucking dollars and Samsung has done the same increase over that period. Less choice meant less competition and the duopoly was able to further entrench in their positions. This phone would be competitive with flagships at half the price. Why is that a bad thing?