Apple in China - by Patrick McGee (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Apple is more than the world's greatest company. It is integral to the whole culture of globalization. Patrick McGee not only narrates the epic history of Apple, but explains how, in effect, it got taken over by China, the world's greatest illiberal power. To call this book a page-turner is almost to diminish its importance. It is a once-in-a-generation read."
--Robert D. Kaplan, author of the New York Times bestseller The Revenge of Geography and the forthcoming Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, and Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute

"Deeply researched, disturbing, and enlightening, Apple in China reveals how Apple enabled China's rise, seemingly at the cost of its own future. In these pages we watch as the world's most profitable company gets outmaneuvered by the world's most powerful dictator. Using an impressively broad palette, McGee paints a picture of Apple CEO Tim Cook resolutely trying to save costs by placing nearly all of the company's advanced manufacturing base in Beijing's grip, only to find it impossible to wriggle free."
--Chris Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Chip War

"There is little doubt that Big Tech companies--like the world's richest and most influential one, Apple--wield as much power as many nation states. But what's less well known is how these companies are themselves manipulated by the Chinese state for its own economic and political ends. In this hugely important new book, Patrick McGee shows us how Apple's quest for wealth and power in China may in the end be the undoing both of the company and of America's quest for technology supremacy."
--Rana Foroohar, Financial Times Global Business Columnist, CNN Global Economic Analyst, and author of Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

About the Author

Patrick McGee has been a journalist with the Financial Times since 2013, reporting from Hong Kong, Germany, and California. He led the FT's Apple coverage from 2019 to 2023 and won a San Francisco Press Club Award for his deep dive into Apple's HR problems. Previously, he was a bond reporter at The Wall Street Journal in New York. He has a Master's in global diplomacy from SOAS, University of London, and a degree in religious studies from the University of Toronto. He resides in the Bay Area with his wife and two daughters.