Apple in China

For readers of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs and Chris Miller’s Chip War, a riveting look at how Apple helped build China’s dominance in electronics assembly and manufacturing only to find itself trapped in a relationship with an authoritarian state making ever-increasing demands.

Apple isn’t just a brand; it’s the world’s most valuable company and creator of the 21st century’s defining product. The iPhone has revolutionized the way we live, work, and connect. But Apple is now a victim of its own success, caught in the middle of a new Cold War between two superpowers.

On the brink of bankruptcy in 1996, Apple made a strategic move to offshore its operations. By 2003 it was being lured to China by the promise of affordable labor that allowed the company to churn out premium products at an unprecedented scale. For years, the Silicon Valley giant sent thousands of America’s top engineers to China and spent tens of billions of dollars on equipment, spurring the transformation of a cheap labor country into the world’s most sophisticated electronics manufacturing powerhouse. Fast forward to today: 90% of iPhone assembly happens in China. Despite capturing less than 20% of the global smartphone market, Apple’s operations allow it to rake in 80% of the sector’s profits.

Yet Beijing has tightened its grip, incentivizing Apple to work with more Chinese companies in its production, exerting control over what Chinese users can do on the iPhone, and requiring customer data for its citizens to be stored in state-backed data centers. The visionary company that Steve Jobs dreamed of finds itself in a tight spot. No other nation can match China’s quality, volumes, and flexibility as a producer of nearly half a billion iGadgets yearly, and Apple isn’t keen to abandon a market where it generates more profit than even China’s own tech giants.

Investigative journalist Patrick McGee draws on 200 interviews with former Apple executives and engineers to reveal how Cupertino’s choice to anchor its supply chain in China has increasingly made it vulnerable to the regime’s whims. Both an insider’s historical account and a cautionary tale, Apple in China is the first history of Apple to go beyond the biographies of its top executives and set the iPhone’s global domination within an increasingly fraught geopolitical context.