I acquired 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} e-book about constructing a provide chain can be boring. I first met and commenced interfacing with Patrick McGee through the App Monitoring Transparency (ATT) saga: I felt that telling him I used to be too busy to even begin the e-book was extra gracious than telling him that I merely couldn’t energy via 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 specific 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 have been unfounded. Apple in China doesn’t inform the story of a provide chain; it tells the story of the Faustian discount that engendered the speedy financial ascent of each a rustic and an organization. The e-book serves as an enchanting and evocative window into the historical past of not simply Apple however of the advanced relationships it developed — and examined — over a number of a long time with suppliers like Foxconn and the Chinese language Communist Get together, beginning with the introduction of the iMac.
The central thesis of the e-book 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 value to scale its output. The e-book 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 essentially the most consequential funding the corporate made within the nation was the coaching it deployed via its personal engineers’ presence on the bottom, contained in the factories producing Apple’s client 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 e-book does a masterful job of portraying the inevitable lure during which Apple finds itself. From the outset, the reader is struck — actually, coloured by current occasions — by how disastrous a method it appeared for Apple to pay attention a lot of its manufacturing capability in China. However Apple merely couldn’t have turn out to be the corporate it’s right now with out China: the nation supplied not simply low-cost labor, however a degree of flexibility and velocity (“China velocity”) unavailable wherever else. The e-book 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 complete United States. State-backed organizations commissioned corporations 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. Inside paperwork obtained for this e-book element how Apple’s want for Chinese language labor would fall beneath 900,000 within the sluggish 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 methods be utilized at scale for each a type of product releases, requiring not simply the specialised equipment that Apple offered to its suppliers (and lorded over them as leverage) but in addition the tutelage required to make use of them. Thus, whereas Apple engaged in what was generally known as the “Apple Squeeze” — requiring its suppliers to function on razor-thin margins in producing its merchandise — these suppliers have been free, and inspired, to use the data they soaked up for the advantage of home smartphone manufacturers. Despite the fact that the result of Apple’s dependency on China is apparent to the reader halfway via the e-book, the need of the connection engenders a rigidity within the second half that invigorates the story.
The e-book is illuminated by colourful vignettes depicting the individuals who really gave rise to Apple’s success within the nation: folks like Doug Guthrie, Apple’s China “cipher,” and John Ford, Apple’s first retail lead in China. What I respect most in regards to the e-book is that its content material is sourced principally from these firsthand, on-the-ground voices slightly than from the views of executives who’re nonetheless on the firm. For example, Phil Schiller is referenced simply as soon as within the e-book; Eddie Cue, twice. These folks present an trustworthy, truthful account of Apple’s successes and missteps.
Whereas the e-book begins a couple of decade too early, for my part — the entire 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 Best Firm (Amazon)
Patrick McGee
New York: Scribner, 2025. 448 pp. $32.99 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-66805-337-9.
