I obtained my copy of Apple in China from the writer a couple of weeks in the past, however I procrastinated on studying it for a couple of causes.
First, I feared {that a} guide about constructing a provide chain could be boring. I first met and commenced interfacing with Patrick McGee throughout the App Monitoring Transparency (ATT) saga: I felt that telling him I used to be too busy to even begin the guide was extra gracious than telling him that I merely couldn’t energy by means of it.
Second, whereas I’ve been an Apple buyer for over a decade, I don’t think about myself an Apple fanboy, and I’ve no explicit reverence for the forged of characters behind the corporate’s string of commercially profitable {hardware} merchandise. I by no means owned an iPod, and I acquired my first iPhone within the mid-2010s. Whereas I discover the economics of the App Retailer endlessly fascinating, I’ve no particular curiosity within the origin story of Jony Ive and even Steve Jobs. In different phrases: the points of the iPhone that I discover most alluring aren’t particular to the iPhone, and I’ve by no means discovered Apple’s storied however turbulent historical past to be all that compelling.
These fears had been unfounded. Apple in China doesn’t inform the story of a provide chain; it tells the story of the Faustian cut price that engendered the fast financial ascent of each a rustic and an organization. The guide serves as an interesting and evocative window into the historical past of not simply Apple however of the complicated relationships it developed — and examined — over a number of many years with suppliers like Foxconn and the Chinese language Communist Get together, beginning with the introduction of the iMac.
The central thesis of the guide is that, in its quest to construct luxurious merchandise coveted throughout the globe as standing symbols, Apple concentrated its manufacturing base in China, which was the one nation that would supply sufficient labor at a low sufficient worth to scale its output. The guide notes that, by 2015, Apple was investing $55BN per 12 months in China, and in 2018, the corporate had put in $18BN value of equipment in its suppliers’ factories. However maybe probably the most consequential funding the corporate made within the nation was the coaching it deployed by means of its personal engineers’ presence on the bottom, contained in the factories producing Apple’s shopper merchandise. This coaching allowed these suppliers to use their newly developed abilities to home manufacturing, giving rise to smartphone manufacturers like Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo. China’s homegrown smartphone manufacturers grew to dominate the native market, capturing 74% in 2014, up from 10% in 2009.
The guide does a masterful job of portraying the inevitable lure during which Apple finds itself. From the outset, the reader is struck — actually, coloured by latest occasions — by how disastrous a technique it appeared for Apple to pay attention a lot of its manufacturing capability in China. However Apple merely couldn’t have grow to be the corporate it’s immediately with out China: the nation provided not simply low-cost labor, however a stage of flexibility and pace (“China pace”) unavailable anyplace else. The guide notes:
China didn’t have plentiful labor simply because it was a big nation; the state orchestrated second-class migrants right into a “floating inhabitants” of greater than 220 million grownup staff — a bigger workforce than that of the whole United States. State-backed organizations commissioned firms to drive buses into rural areas to rent unskilled staff — so-called dispatch labor — and transfer them to Apple’s huge community of suppliers for seasonal manufacturing. Inner paperwork obtained for this guide element how Apple’s want for Chinese language labor would fall under 900,000 within the gradual months of spring, however then ramp as much as greater than 1.7 million within the peak season earlier than iPhone launch.
Apple didn’t simply want an unlimited pool of low-cost labor — it wanted a dynamic, versatile provide of low-cost labor to assist its product launch cycle. And the breathtaking merchandise that emerged from Apple’s famed Industrial Design group demanded that unprecedented manufacturing strategies be utilized at scale for each a kind of product releases, requiring not simply the specialised equipment that Apple offered to its suppliers (and lorded over them as leverage) but additionally the tutelage required to make use of them.
Thus, whereas Apple engaged in what the guide describes because the “Apple Squeeze” — requiring its suppliers to function on razor-thin margins in producing its merchandise — these suppliers had been free, and inspired, to use the data they soaked up for the good thing about home smartphone manufacturers. Though the end result of Apple’s dependency on China is clear to the reader halfway by means of the guide, the need of the connection engenders a pressure within the second half that invigorates the story.
The guide is illuminated by colourful vignettes depicting the individuals who truly gave rise to Apple’s success within the nation: folks like Doug Guthrie, Apple’s cultural demystifier, and John Ford, Apple’s first retail lead in China. What I admire most concerning the guide is that its content material is sourced principally from these firsthand, on-the-ground voices reasonably than from the views of executives who’re nonetheless on the firm. As an example, Phil Schiller is referenced simply as soon as within the guide; Eddie Cue, twice. These folks present an trustworthy, truthful account of Apple’s successes and missteps.
Whereas the guide begins a couple of decade too early, in my view — all the historical past previous to Jobs’ return to the corporate appeared superfluous — and might go into pointless depth at factors, Apple in China is completely timed for the present second and provides useful context for deciphering it.
Apple in China: The Seize of the World’s Biggest Firm (Amazon)
Patrick McGee
New York: Scribner, 2025. 448 pp. $32.99 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-66805-337-9.