Book review: Apple in China (by Patrick McGee)

I received my copy of Apple in China from the publisher a few weeks ago, but I procrastinated on reading it for a few reasons.

First, I feared that a book about building a supply chain would be boring. I first met and began interfacing with Patrick McGee during the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) saga: I felt that telling him I was too busy to even start the book was more gracious than telling him that I simply couldn’t power through it.

Second, while I’ve been an Apple customer for over a decade, I don’t consider myself an Apple fanboy, and I have no particular reverence for the cast of characters behind the company’s string of commercially successful hardware products. I never owned an iPod, and I acquired my first iPhone in the mid-2010s. While I find the economics of the App Store endlessly fascinating, I have no specific interest in the origin story of Jony Ive or even Steve Jobs. In other words: the aspects of the iPhone that I find most alluring aren’t specific to the iPhone, and I’ve never found Apple’s storied but turbulent history to be all that compelling.

These fears were unfounded. Apple in China doesn’t tell the story of a supply chain; it tells the story of the Faustian bargain that engendered the rapid economic ascent of both a country and a company. The book serves as a fascinating and evocative window into the history of not just Apple but of the complex relationships it developed — and tested — over multiple decades with suppliers like Foxconn and the Chinese Communist Party, starting with the introduction of the iMac.

The central thesis of the book is that, in its quest to build luxury products coveted across the globe as status symbols, Apple concentrated its manufacturing base in China, which was the only country that could offer enough labor at a low enough price to scale its output. The book notes that, by 2015, Apple was investing $55BN per year in China, and in 2018, the company had installed $18BN worth of machinery in its suppliers’ factories. But perhaps the most consequential investment the company made in the country was the training it deployed through its own engineers’ presence on the ground, inside the factories producing Apple’s consumer products. This training allowed those suppliers to apply their newly developed skills to domestic production, giving rise to smartphone brands like Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo. China’s homegrown smartphone brands grew to dominate the local market, capturing 74% in 2014, up from 10% in 2009.

The book does a masterful job of portraying the inevitable trap in which Apple finds itself. From the outset, the reader is struck — certainly, colored by recent events — by how disastrous a strategy it seemed for Apple to concentrate so much of its manufacturing capacity in China. But Apple simply could not have become the company it is today without China: the country offered not just low-cost labor, but a level of flexibility and speed (“China speed”) unavailable anywhere else. The book notes:

China didn’t have plentiful labor just because it was a large country; the state orchestrated second-class migrants into a “floating population” of more than 220 million adult workers — a larger workforce than that of the entire United States. State-backed organizations commissioned companies to drive buses into rural areas to hire unskilled workers — so-called dispatch labor — and move them to Apple’s vast network of suppliers for seasonal production. Internal documents obtained for this book detail how Apple’s need for Chinese labor would fall below 900,000 in the slow months of spring, but then ramp up to more than 1.7 million in the peak season before iPhone launch.

Apple didn’t just need an enormous pool of cheap labor — it needed a dynamic, flexible supply of cheap labor to support its product release cycle. And the breathtaking products that emerged from Apple’s famed Industrial Design group demanded that unprecedented manufacturing techniques be applied at scale for every one of those product releases, requiring not just the specialized machinery that Apple provided to its suppliers (and lorded over them as leverage) but also the tutelage required to use them.

Thus, while Apple engaged in what the book describes as the “Apple Squeeze” — requiring its suppliers to operate on razor-thin margins in producing its products — those suppliers were free, and encouraged, to apply the knowledge they soaked up for the benefit of domestic smartphone brands. Even though the outcome of Apple’s dependency on China is obvious to the reader midway through the book, the necessity of the relationship engenders a tension in the second half that invigorates the story.

The book is illuminated by colorful vignettes depicting the people who actually gave rise to Apple’s success in the country: people like Doug Guthrie, Apple’s cultural demystifier, and John Ford, Apple’s first retail lead in China. What I appreciate most about the book is that its content is sourced principally from these firsthand, on-the-ground voices rather than from the perspectives of executives who are still at the company. For instance, Phil Schiller is referenced just once in the book; Eddie Cue, twice. These people provide an honest, fair account of Apple’s successes and missteps.

While the book begins about a decade too early, in my opinion — all of the history prior to Jobs’ return to the company seemed superfluous — and can go into unnecessary depth at points, Apple in China is perfectly timed for the current moment and adds helpful context for deciphering it.

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company (Amazon)
Patrick McGee
New York: Scribner, 2025. 448 pp. $32.99 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-66805-337-9.