Book Review: Apple in China by Patrick McGee

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Articles index Jeff Johnson (My apps, PayPal.Me, Mastodon)

August 1 2025

TL;DR Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company, written by Patrick McGee, published in 2025 by Simon & Schuster, is a must-read for anyone in the tech industry or interested in the tech industry. The book takes an inside look at the history, economics, culture, and politics of Apple, its biggest contractor Foxconn, the electronics manufacturing business in general, and the host country for much of that business, China. Despite the book’s length at 42 chapters and 448 pages (including acknowledgements, endnotes and index), I never felt like I had to slog my way through to the end. On the contrary, I found the book to be a page-turner, intriguing and informative throughout, eye-opening and thought-provoking. I offer my highest recommendation. In other words, it's not too long; do read!

Patrick McGee is a reporter who covered Apple for the Financial Times. The majority of source material for the book derived from interviews with well over 100 former and current Apple employees, many of them longtime. It's not a rehash of previous writings. I think I can safely say that you’ve never heard the notoriously secretive Apple like this before. By necessity, this review will sample only morsels of the feast of details served by Apple in China, otherwise my review would become absurdly long. Allow me to set the stage, though, drawing from the first two chapters that recount the period when Apple was not in China, because I think it’s important to put everything into historical perspective.

For 20 years, from its founding in 1976 until 1996, Apple built most of its computers itself, and none of this manufacturing occurred in China. Apple owned factories in the United States, Ireland, and Singapore. In fact, Apple was one the last holdouts against contract manufacturing in the industry. This may be part of the reason why Apple almost went bankrupt. When the IBM PC was introduced in 1981, Steve Jobs underestimated it, even mocked it, seeing that IBM could not match Apple’s excellence in design and usability. Nonetheless, the IBM PC quickly surpassed the Apple II and came to dominate the market, because the PC was entirely commoditized and thus could achieve economies of scale not available to Apple. Even the PC operating system was licensed from another company, Microsoft. The PC was such a massive success that only 3 years later, IBM became the tyrannical Big Brother figure in Apple’s famous Macintosh Super Bowl ad. Unfortunately for IBM, its dominance was short-lived, because that very commoditization facilitated competition, the seeds of IBM’s demise, in PC clone makers who could also license Microsoft’s OS. Today, IBM is not even a player in personal computers, while Microsoft continues to lead the desktop OS market.

Apple started to outsource manufacturing while Jobs was away at NeXT, before the 1997 acquisition that brought him back to Apple. At first it was just the Newton in the early 1990s, manufactured by a contractor in Taiwan at the instigation of Phil Baker, a manager of the Newton project. Later, Baker persuaded Apple to hire Taiwanese contractors to manufacture laptops too. Ultimately, Apple’s hand was forced by financial desperation: as the 90s wore on, quarterly losses mounted, cash reserves dwindled, and at a certain point the company faced the prospect of missing payroll and loan debt payments. In 1996, Apple reluctantly agreed to sell its Colorado factory to SCI Systems, an American contract manufacturer who originally worked for NASA. Other factory sales soon followed.

When Steve Jobs became CEO of Apple in late 1997, he still preferred that the company manufacture its own computers, despite the fact that outsourcing had already begun. Indeed, Jobs canceled the earlier partnership with SCI Systems in Colorado; the book states that this cost Apple $5 million but doesn’t elaborate on the terms of the original deal. In any case, a return to business as usual was not fully possible, because the cutbacks of the 1990s left Apple without the capacity to produce its own monitors for the new iMac, so Apple turned to South Korea’s LG as a contractor. After the iMac became a hit and consumer demand skyrocketed, Apple had to rely more on LG to ramp up the supply, cutting out steps in the process by allowing LG to assemble the end product, since the monitor was already such a large part of the computer. LG opened additional factories to assemble iMacs in the UK and Mexico as a way to spread production over multiple continents, a strategy employed by Apple in the past. However, LG struggled with various issues in its new factories, and LG itself was culturally incompatible with Apple, unwilling and unable to meet Apple’s overbearing demands, a signature of Steve Jobs.

Tim Cook, whom Jobs recruited to join Apple in 1998, received a momentous phone call in 1999 from Terry Gou, the founder of a Taiwanese contract electronics manufacturer variously known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., Hon Hai Technology Group, or Foxconn. Gou and Cook came to know each other personally during Cook’s short tenure at Compaq, which was Foxconn’s biggest client, and Foxconn had already worked as a minor supplier for Apple. Gou got wind of LG’s manufacturing difficulties with Apple. Sensing an opportunity, Gou directed Foxconn to reverse engineer Apple’s LG-assembled iMac. What he told Cook over the phone was, “I can fix this.”

Terry Gou of Foxconn had huge ambitions. Equally important, Gou, the child of refugees from the Chinese Civil War, had close political connections to local officials in mainland China. After Deng Xiaoping succeeded Mao Zedong as the leader of China, some special regions of the country were given incentives by the central government to attract foreign investment. The local officials provided Taiwan’s Foxconn with anything it wanted—land, machinery, workers—and in turn, Foxconn provided America’s Apple with anything it wanted. This was practically a dream come true for the inveterately dictatorial executives in Cupertino, accustomed to making extravagant demands.

Originally, Foxconn followed Apple’s traditional three continent strategy, opening a factory in the Czech Republic to supplement iMac production from Shenzhen, China, as well as a smaller factory in southern California to manufacturer lower volume Power Macs. However, Apple eventually consolidated manufacturing in China. From chapter 11 of the book:

The experience in the Czech Republic was an important proving ground for Foxconn and its hub model, but what it really demonstrated was that producing hardware in China was cheaper, more efficient, and less subject to media scrutiny. In China, assembly got done at incredible speed and with few complaints. Workers did twelve-hour shifts and lived nearby in dorms. At the Czech site, workers put in fewer hours and were represented by a trade union; they protested conditions and spoke to the press. Plans to build dormitories met local criticism and were abandoned.

As McGee opines in the prologue:

It’s not merely that Apple has exploited Chinese workers, it’s that Beijing has allowed Apple to exploit its workers, so that China can in turn exploit Apple.

The principal argument of the book Apple in China is that Apple is largely responsible for transforming China from a nascent wannabe into a world giant of advanced electronics manufacturing. This transformation was achieved not just with money, though Apple did invest vast amounts of money into China for the purpose of producing iPhones and other Apple products. (McGee compares this in scale to the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe after World War II.) More importantly, indeed crucially, Apple transferred its own industry-leading engineering knowledge, skills, culture, and innovative techniques directly from America to China. Factories in China producing Apple products effectively became schools for Chinese workers at all levels, with large numbers of embedded Apple engineers serving as professors. In a way, it was like Chinese citizens attending American universities, except in this case it was the Americans who had to travel overseas for education. As a result, after years of technology transfer, homegrown electronics brands such as Huawei and Xiaomi have become competitive not only inside but also outside of China, competitive even with Apple. The student has become the master, as it were.

What makes Apple unique is their obsessive attention to detail. When Apple works with a contractor, they don’t simply make an order and wait for the order to be fulfilled. Apple’s relationship to its contractors is reminiscent of Amazon’s relationship to its drivers: technically, legally, Amazon drivers are (for some damn reason) not considered employees of Amazon, yet Amazon still controls every aspect of the work of the drivers, practically every minute of their every day, in Orwellian fashion. They drive Amazon trucks, wear Amazon uniforms, and strictly follow Amazon schedules. Amazon provides their drivers with everything… except of course, you know, the standard benefits of employment. Anyway, I’m getting off track, because Apple in China is not a book about Amazon.

If there’s a weak part of the book, it’s that McGee doesn’t fully connect the dots of the technology transfer from Apple to China. That’s because Apple in China is focused almost exclusively on Apple. There are no interviews with employees of Huawei or Xiaomi, for example. McGee’s evidence, replete with first-hand accounts of what happened over the years inside Apple’s Chinese factories, is extensive and powerful, yet circumstantial. To be clear, I don’t dispute McGee’s conclusion, but neither do I think the argument is an open and shut case. In fairness to the author, though, it’s probably unreasonable to expect hundreds of more pages when the amount of material is already voluminous.

My personal takeaway from Apple in China is that nobody comes out of the book looking good: not Steve Jobs, not Tim Cook, not Terry Gou, not “the Blevinator” Tony Blevins (whom you’ll read about if you haven’t already), and certainly not Chinese government leaders. I intend a double meaning for “good” here. First, I think the book bursts the bubble on the apotheosis of these individuals as prognosticators who could see the future and operated according to a predetermined master plan. Although they were clearly smart and talented enough to capitalize on some (not all) of the opportunities presented to them—opportunities that were often fortuitous—they also made major miscalculations, with deleterious consequences. It’s difficult to say who among them was running the show. Did Apple play Foxconn? Did Foxconn play Apple? Did China play Foxconn and Apple? I suspect the answer is that they all played each other, and each benefited greatly from the game, but nobody in 1999 had the vaguest notion of how it would all turn out in 2025. What’s increasingly clear, however, is that Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who assumed office in 2013, has gained the upper hand in the relationship. Foxconn is getting sidelined in favor of Chinese-owned contractors, and Apple has been forced to bend the knee to the totalitarian regime, showing humiliating deference, causing PR and political blowback for Apple at home in America. In reaction to the change in circumstances, Apple is attempting to diversify its supply chain, but the claim that iPhones are now “made in India” is somewhat misleading, because much of the iPhone supply chain prior to final assembly is still deeply embedded in China, and the Chinese government is understandably making it very difficult for Apple to escape the country.

The second, and in my view the more important meaning of “good,” is moral goodness. I think these powerful individuals exhibit a distinct lack of morality and ethics. They egregiously abused their power, constantly exploiting large numbers of people less powerful than them, for no greater purpose than the insatiable pursuit of power, glory, and wealth. The dreadful working conditions of Apple’s contractors in China have already become infamous through reports in the news media; less known, except perhaps to an extent among my own profession of engineering, is how Apple exploits its employees too, at every level, with no more regard for them than for the Foxconn factory workers they often stood side-by-side with in China. All the people in the supply chain, including Apple engineers, are merely cannon fodder in the war for corporate dominance.

Chapter 16 offers a noteworthy anecdote:

The eighty-hour workweeks and increasing need to be in Asia at inconsistent times, with little warning and often for unknown durations, caused massive stress on the engineers’ mental health and their marriages. They were primarily men, and some of their wives took to calling themselves “Apple widows” because their husbands were around so infrequently.

So many marriages were broken up during the first years of Jobs’s comeback that informal preventive measures were established to contain further damage. Engineers called it the DAP, or Divorce Avoidance Program. In the late 1990s, the acronym referred to when an engineer couldn’t come in to work that day because his marriage was on the line.

Ironically, the Divorce Avoidance Program itself had to be abandoned, or at least transmogrified, due to Apple’s continuing inhumane demands on employees. Instead, those sent overseas were offered cash bonuses, called “Dan bucks” after Apple hardware executive Dan Riccio, in order to placate upset spouses.

I’ll end my review with another quote from the same chapter. This is not the “heart” of the book—which again, I highly recommend that you buy and read—but in my opinion it’s the book’s broken heart:

One engineer says the reason he left Apple after more than a decade is that during a routine medical appointment, his doctor noted his high blood pressure and said, “Okay, I need you to do two things for me: lose weight and quit Apple.” The doctor explained that the stress would basically kill him. Some Apple engineers can even rattle off the names of people who died on the production line or upon their return from yet another trip to Asia. The engineers were often in their forties and fifties, and while it’s not possible to conclude that overwork was their cause of death, many believe it was. One longtime veteran recalls that, during the funeral for one of these people, the number of Apple employees who left the Sunday service to join conference calls was unbelievable. According to Walter Isaacson, Jobs even attributed his own cancer to the volume of work he’d taken on in 1997. That’s when he was running both Apple and Pixar, developing kidney stones, and coming home so exhausted that he had trouble speaking. “That’s probably when this cancer started growing,” Jobs told his biographer, “because my immune system was pretty weak at that time.

Jon Rubinstein, who worked for Steve Jobs on and off for sixteen years, called the long workweeks “shattering,” and it’s what led to his own departure later on. “A lot of people got sick at Apple,” he once said. “The list goes on and on of people who got terminally ill or really ill… and I worried that if I stayed, I’d end up damaging myself, and my health was, frankly, more important.

By the way, Apple announced another record financial quarter yesterday. That makes it all worthwhile, right?

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