Patrick McGee

And these are the ones we know about.

I'm sure there's a whole book to be written about the things we don't know.

One thing I don't want to do is discount the ingenuity and the hardworking workforce of the Chinese.

It's not that they're just sort of sitting at the beck and call of Apple and then learning from them.

They're learning on their own.

But Apple pushes suppliers beyond good enough all the time.

Famous quotes about Steve Jobs caring more about the back of the computer than another company cares about the front of their computer.

He cares about the insides of the computer, the color of the wiring and all sorts of things.

So there was a certain mentality that was brought to all these relationships, these partnerships in China.

And I spoke to someone that spent many years at Apple, and she said, you know, when we were working with a display manufacturer, it's not that we would know more than the display manufacturer, but we would have higher standards and we would push them to a degree that they wouldn't be able to do on their own.

So there was almost a sense of like a cultural mindset of quality, of perfection that Apple brought, not just an engineering mindset.

So there was a lot of that.

Apple just is enormously powerful and pushes companies in a way that nobody else does.

Well, because the rise of China since 1980 is the biggest thing to have happened on the planet.

I mean, nothing else comes close.

This is the world's most populated country that's been growing around 10% for more than three decades, with some 800 million people coming out of poverty.

That is just the most consequential thing that has happened on the globe.

And if things continue, China will be the world's most dominant country in the 21st century.

Like, that's just a fact.

And the idea that one iconic corporation played an instrumental role helping China achieve that manufacturing dominance and being able to sever its dependence on the West, I think is an absolutely wild narrative.