Patrick McGee

The key eight people call themselves the Gang of Eight.

And they're able to basically come up with their own study to realize that Apple's contributions to Chinese factories is in the realm of $55 billion a year.

And Apple realizes they're sitting on political capital that they hadn't executed before.

It does not make sense to us to be secret.

Maybe we shouldn't be singing this from the hilltops, but we need to get the most senior people in the Chinese government understanding that we are sending America's top engineers.

And actually, I would go further than that.

They're not only just sending America's top engineers, they're sending the best engineers from Korea, from Japan, people that they hire in their display units and their chips units and so forth.

They would send them to the Chinese factories and train up these people.

It's not even a story of transfer of technology from America to China.

It's actually transfer of technology from around the world to China.

There's certainly a sense that the student has become the master.

One has to assume there are diminishing returns in what Apple can teach China.

And China is just very hungry.

And so it's hard to know.

The question is, if you get to that moment, it's not clear to me that Beijing or local governments just kick Apple out of the country.

Because their economy really is dependent on exports to the rest of the world.

If, for whatever reason, Apple all of a sudden had its license to build and export in China canceled, that would just be a real own goal on the part of China.

Because every board member around the world that does anything to do with hardware would say, oh, we need a contingency plan ASAP.

Because if Apple's not safe in China, nobody is.

So China doesn't really get a whole lot from kicking Apple out of the country.