Apple plans on buying Cobalt from miners
Feb 23, 2018
The talks show that the tech giant is keen to ensure that cobalt supplies for its iPhone and iPad batteries are sufficient, with the rapid growth in battery demand for electric vehicles threatening to create a shortage of the raw material. About a quarter of global cobalt production is used in smartphones. (via Bloomberg)
Apple buying one key raw material by its own shouldn't come much of a surprise, it's rather a quite strategic move looking forward and a common practice at Apple to bring strategic components in-house. Many world economic powers have being buying key raw materials for years now, from Europe to China itself, who is currently the biggest owner of key raw materials.
Why this is so important, is that there are some key elements in the periodic table that allow the technological advancements we have been seeing for the past couple of decades: Lithium and Cobalt are the key constituents of Lithium-ion batteries, Platinum is the metal that allows NOx and complex hydrocarbons to be broken down to their constituents in catalytic converter, and so on. They can't be substituted with something else, at least for now, and that's why we are so reliant on them.
Update: Nice thought from John Gruber at daringfireball.net about the reason why Apple did this. His link well couples with this very article from The Washington Post dated Sept. 2016
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