Patrick McGee

literally just engineering 101 with so many Apple engineers that, you know, among the industries Apple disrupts is the airline industry, right?

United begins flying to places like Hangzhou and Chengdu, places that are as furthest away as is possible in United's entire network.

And they begin flying there three times a week with the understanding that Apple will buy so many first class tickets that it doesn't matter if the rest of the plane is empty.

So they are having an enormous contribution building up the competencies, in fact, purchasing the machinery and installing it on the production line of all these factories.

And so, you know, that's just like sort of the biggest takeaway of the book, that Apple had this massive influence on all of these factories.

So once Apple has built up these competencies, what they experience is that, you know, if you remember the first five, six, seven iPhones, there were pretty major changes to those designs.

And so what would happen basically is if they obviated the need for certain components, ipso facto, they were obviating the need for that entire supplier.

And because Apple is such a secretive company, that supplier would find out sort of at the last possible second.

And again, if you remember going from 5 million iPhones in 2007 to 230 million by 2015, imagine you're on the ground floor of that sort of exponential growth.

And then Apple just cuts you off after you've made all sorts of investment and you've got all sorts of people and real estate and machinery.

I mean, you would just go bankrupt.

I mean, so this was just happening kind of all the time where if Apple made that sort of turn, it was causing all sorts of sort of political problems because they'd be working with, you know,

the likes of Foxconn would be working with who's on the politics and the grounds there.

And so Apple instituted this rule called the 50% rule, which was that they would tell their supplier, however fast you're growing with us, you need to grow that fast with somebody else.

So it was a self-interested reason.

It gave Apple flexibility, right?

They felt like they could pivot without sort of causing such damage.

But if I'm lens technology in Shenzhen, and Apple's been telling me and teaching me and co-creating, to be clear,

you know, facilities and processes to take corning glass that's cut by the meter and then cut it, temper it, you know, help etch it with multi-touch technology.

Well, what am I going to do with those ideas?