Donald Trump, presumptive Republican Party nominee for the US presidency, announced last January that he would force Apple to return its overseas manufacturing to the United States. While Trump can contradict what he would or would not do even in the same interview, Vivek Wadhwa, a US academic and entrepreneur, in the Washington Post on Tuesday suggested that robotics are changing the labour-cost equation at a time when there is uncertainty about the Chinese economy. Prof Wadhwa used data from Irish-led research on Apple’s supply chain in Asia in his Post piece.