Patrick McGee

And, you know, ideas that they're going to move production and diversified production to the United States, for instance, I think are fanciful.

And we're going to have a whole host of bad policies if we think that's a realistic option.

Apple's products are just really complicated and they're doing so at huge scale.

So if you remember the first iPhone in 2007, they only made about 5 million of them and it was only a US product, right?

It didn't even work outside of AT&T networks in the United States.

By 2015, they were building 230 million of them a year, right?

There are a thousand components within each iPhone.

If you're building up to a million a day in peak season, you're operating with a billion components per day.

I mean, America just doesn't have factories to really make any of those components, let alone all of them.

And China introduces in the early 2000s sort of something called next door manufacturing, where, you know, in the previous years, Apple would be building in Taiwan, but relying on a network that would be in Singapore, Thailand.

You know, Malaysia, China would be part of it and Japan and Korea.

And, you know, when you were prototyping something, you were literally crossing bodies of water, right, to sort of do the assembly and then make things work and then crossing all the way back to California to show it to Steve Jobs.

Right.

This is sort of in the early chapters.

China made that instead of crossing bodies of water and going through customs and all this sort of stuff, it made it a walk down the street.

Right.

Right.

The way that they introduced world-leading ports, eight-lane highways, high-speed rail, the efficiencies in China just aren't seen on a similar scale anywhere else on the planet.

I mean, I've talked to people really senior at Apple in the 2000s who would say, even if we knew Xi Jinping was coming when the iPhone was birthed, where else would you have us go?

There was just no place where you had the sort of what Kyle Chan has called absorption capacity to understand and deploy Apple's lessons.