Patrick McGee

I mean, you know, filling the shoes of the greatest product visionary of the last century is no small feat, and he deserves all sorts of credit.

But the decisions that he made from senior operations person from 1998 onwards, before he even becomes CEO, is just a massive tradeoff in which Apple didn't just go to China because there was tech competence offered to Apple.

Apple really went there to build the tech competence.

And I argue in my book that Apple is the biggest supporter of Made in China 2025, inadvertently, to be clear.

But that's the program that Xi Jinping developed more than 10 years ago for China to become self-sufficient in a range of electronics and other categories to basically sever its dependence on the West.

I mean, when you and I were kids, Made in China was synonymous with poorly made, right?

It was a place where, like, Mattel went to build toys.

It was not really the place of high-end electronics.

Certainly, Apple wasn't early in terms of outsourcing, even within the computer industry.

But the computers that were made there from Dell and HP and Compaq, you know, these were things that really didn't have any design aesthetic to them.

They were really easy to assemble.

Apple really introduced a design aesthetic that redefined how plastic injection molding or metal stamping or all kinds of tooling could actually be implemented at enormous scale.

The impact of that is that Apple sent over thousands upon thousands of engineers to train up hundreds of factories across China to get up to Apple levels of competence.

And then as the iPod, particularly the mini and the nano, and then followed by the iPhone really exploded in global popularity,

They train those factories to scale up in terms of Apple levels of quantity as well.

Barry Naughton, China expert, has said that the most important thing to Xi Jinping is the high-end electronics industry.

And there's been no bigger supporter, no bigger player, no bigger company sort of pursuing that achievement and forcing a whole host of suppliers to get up to those levels of quality than Apple, the world's most iconic company.

As much as Apple wanted to have this sort of like asset-light manufacturing model, inherently, if you're training up these teams to work on the iPhone, they look for something to do to keep their capacity running when they're not working on the Apple iPhone, right?

And so the result of that is that the same factories that Apple trained up sort of turned around and then supported Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and Huawei.

And those companies collectively have about 60% of the global market share.