It's time for OP to lay off the human catnip. A "middle class" is an artificially created construct and the poorest have been voting for its destruction for more than 40 years, allowing Cisco's previous CEO's idol Jack "Neutron" Welch to introduce mass layoffs without any chance to return, rank and yank, etc... which have been adopted around the world. The assortment of plans to do this from the Powell Memo in 1971 to Project 2025 and beyond are hidden from most who vote for it by being made widely available in English text so stop acting like it was Cisco who either invented these behaviors or is the only one practicing them.
Apple is moving their manufacturing back on-shore making it cheaper to compete.
You're going to have to explain how moving work to a high wage low skill country with no supply chains nor the talent to develop them is going to be "cheaper to compete." TSMC is just doing a small percentage of chips and even then the weight of the talent is from Taiwan because there aren't Americans who can do the job. It turns out when we were inventing truck nuts and pumpkin spice beer they were creating world class technology and manufacturing.
When I was young we put tariffs on some Japanese vehicles and the US auto companies just jacked their prices for the same unchanged cr-p people didn't want to buy so people kept buying the Japanese product at the same higher price so we're going to need far more than "tariffs will solve everything!"
If IBM and Apple partner, they have the resources and technical mite to win the war.
Did you mean "mite" as a tiny arachnid or a very small amount? IBM had everything to win cloud the first actual search answer showed them at 1.8% market share, and Apple topped out Mac OS X Server on a 1U server. They've got their own captive markets they'll continue to serve and likely grow in but AI is a very diverse field where chips, software and other technologies are going to be integrated by another tier of companies so hopefully NVIDIA will get respectable competition from Broadcom, Intel, AMD and others so prices remain sane while forcing companies to keep advancing.