Chapter 1: What major changes are happening at Apple and why are they significant?
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As President Trump prepares to meet with Xi Jinping this week, technology and trade will be top of mind. American tech giant Apple supercharged the Chinese tech sector over the past two decades. But with a new CEO taking over, it's unclear if the dynamic will continue.
In this episode, we speak with journalist Patrick McGee of The Free Press, who has spent years digging into the complicated relationship between Apple and China and its effect on the world. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley, and this is a weekend episode of Morning Wire.
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Chapter 2: How did Apple influence China's technological rise?
Joining us now is Patrick McGee, columnist at The Free Press and author of Apple in China. Patrick, thanks for coming on.
My pleasure.
Now, Apple recently announced that Tim Cook is going to be stepping down as CEO. We have John Ternes, who's going to be filling in in that role. You wrote the other day that Tim Cook was great for Apple, but he wasn't necessarily great for America. What made you define his legacy in those terms?
I think his legacy is undefined, to be clear. So if you use the metrics that Wall Street uses, then clearly this guy's a rock star. He added three and a half trillion dollars to Apple's value since he became CEO. I mean, that's a remarkable achievement. And even if people say, oh, he wasn't much of a product innovator or whatever.
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.
So what was the state of China's tech industry before Apple went in?
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.
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